Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley

by Antonio García Martínez

As I observed more than once at Facebook, and as I imagine is the case in all organizations from business to government, high-level decisions that affected thousands of people and billions in revenue would be made on gut feel, the residue of whatever historical politics were in play, and the ability to cater persuasive messages to people either busy, impatient, or uninterested (or all three).

In the future, anywhere nontrivial decisions took place, it would be computers talking to one another, with humans involved only in the writing of the logic itself. Finance saw the innovation first, because the stakes were high, and the value of an incremental computational advantage was very large. To paraphrase the very quotable Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, in the future there will be two types of jobs: people who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do.

In all my experience in both startups and large companies, including and especially at Facebook, I would always prefer—a hundred times prefer—being subject to the rigors of the market, the fickleness of luck, and the whims of users than to navigate the popularity-contest politics of a large company, surrounded by the mediocre duffers who’ve succeeded in life through nothing more than guile and appearances. Scott Weinstein’s unfortunate example was the best advice he (or anyone else) has ever given me, and one that I ignored to my extreme peril.

The first sign of trouble was an externally visible one, a symptom that any suitably experienced startup practitioner could have detected: nobody from the early days of the company was still around other than Murthy. Every other single cofounder or early employee had left. As Vonnegut wrote in Bluebeard, never trust the survivor of a massacre until you know what he did to survive.

When confronted with any startup idea, ask yourself one simple question: How many miracles have to happen for this to succeed?

One of Mark Twain’s more uplifting quotes maintains that small people always belittle your ambitions, while the great make you feel that you too can be great.

As Geoff Ralston, a YC partner, told us: people don’t really change, they just become better actors.

headed by its suave CEO, Rahul Vohra. He was a bit stuffily pretentious, in that way only Indians with British accents can be. The

Oh lol

To a startup, media attention is like sex. There are only two types: good . . . and better.

Written by a man

Incidentally, it helps to have enemies. While love is a beautiful emotion, far more empires have been built, books written, wrongs righted, fights won, and ambitions realized out of vengeful desire to prove some critic wrong, or existential dread of some perceived enemy, than all the love in the world. Love is grand, but hate and fear last longer.

It occurred to me that perhaps this most recent experiment in fertility—and the first—had been planned on British Trader’s part, her back up against the menopause wall, a professional woman with every means at her disposal except a willing male partner—in which case I had been snookered into fatherhood via warm smiles and pliant thighs, the oldest tricks in the book. Whether swindler or dupe, we’re all either subjects or objects of one or another conspiracy in this world.

Wow. What a dick

What a company builds (SVP, Product), how it builds it (SVP, Engineering), how that eventual product is operationally run (COO), and what other companies it buys (Corp Dev): those are the core functions of any large tech company,

If you can only be good at one thing, be good at lying . . . because if you’re good at lying, you’re good at everything. —@gselevator, July 25, 2013

Like knowing when to stop editing and finally publish a book, knowing when to launch is a subtle art at best, and a drunken coin toss at worst. Sometimes you don’t finish a product, you merely abandon any hope of presently improving it, and out the door it goes. Product managers must either apply the brakes to impatient engineers who want their creations to see the light of day, or conversely, whip and drive to get perfectionist engineers to stop mucking with the code and procure some real users already. In general, be it at startups or aggressive companies like Facebook, there should be a cultural bias for launching. The perfect is very often the enemy of the good, and as the Facebook poster screamed from every wall: DONE IS BETTER THAN PERFECT. Very few companies have died due to launching early; at worst, you’ll have a onetime product embarrassment (as Apple did with the first version of its iPhone Maps app). However, countless companies have died by losing the nerve to ship, and freezing into a coma of second-guessing, hesitation, and internal indecision. As in life, so in business: maintain a bias for action over inaction.

And the Interwebs are rife with more sarcasm, lies, bad puns, and double-entendres than a high school cheerleaders’ convention.

Why make this analogy? Sexist

Here’s the great lesson for you, aspiring product manager: The principal reason for you to be technical is not to help technically design the system under development; if you’re doing that, then you’re PMing wrong. No, you’re technical so you can tell when engineers are bullshitting you, which will be often. At times it’s accidental (as it was with Rong), due to either miscommunication, bad memory, or wishful thinking (engineers are as inclined to it as anybody). Sometimes it’s more stealthy, their passive-aggressive way to disagree with the product direction (“That’ll eat up all our servers”), or laziness (“It’s impossible to build that”). The PM is there to give a sniff test to any such product-killing assertion.

You’re a product manager: all of the responsibility, none of the power. Fix it.

If we don’t create the thing that kills Facebook, someone else will. “Embracing change” isn’t enough. It has to be so hardwired into who we are that even talking about it seems redundant. The Internet is not a friendly place. Things that don’t stay relevant don’t even get the luxury of leaving ruins. They disappear.

in the meantime I got down to the serious business, as some product managers do, of trying to bang my product marketing manager. PMMess, as we’ll call her, was composed of alternating Bézier curves from top to bottom: convex, then concave, and then convex again, in a vertical undulation you couldn’t take your eyes off of.

Wow. Did the publishing house have zero women ?

The Battle of the Bra Clasp was going on behind her back, a vicious, winner-take-all contest, a two-person Siege of Leningrad. PMMess wasn’t resisting, but Victoria’s Secret was. My one-handed bra opening skills were decidedly rusty. It didn’t help that I felt something wrapped around my foot, like an extension cord, or perhaps a cardboard box. She tasted sweet, with a bit of biscuitiness from the happy-hour beer (she was a beer hound too). One . . . more . . . wire . . . loop . . . sticking . . . get . . . off . . . now.

Jesus. This Hurts to read

The fastest way to cheapen anything—be it a woman, a favor, or a work of art—is to put a price tag on it.

I cannot believe the sexism and misogyny. He talks about women as if they are just objects. Things!