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). Boland

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.

an incumbent in a market dominated by a few, with total information asymmetry, and the ability to make prices on the market rather than just take them, has little incentive to increase transparency.

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.

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. And indeed in this case, Murthy wasn’t a mere survivor, but rather an author of said massacre.

Don’t work for the survivors or architects of massacres. You’ll live just long enough to regret it.

Incidentally, the fastest way you can indicate your level of startup naïveté to a VC (or to anybody in tech), is either by claiming you’re in “stealth”—that is, with an idea so secretly valuable you can’t disclose it—or by forcing someone to sign a nondisclosure agreement before you even discuss it. You may as well tattoo LOSER on your forehead instead, to save everyone the trouble. To quote one Valley sage, if your idea is any good, it won’t get stolen, you’ll have to jam it down people’s throats instead.

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

The classic sign of a shitty startup idea is that it requires at least two (or more!) miracles to succeed.

anarchist subversive mixed with cold-blooded execution mixed with irreverent whimsy, a sort of technology-enabled twelve-year-old boy, was precisely the YC entrepreneur profile.

Figure out a point of overlooked business or technical leverage, interpose some piece of cleverness, and gleefully marvel at the resulting disruption (or destruction).

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.

The reality is, Silicon Valley capitalism is very simple: Investors are people with more money than time. Employees are people with more time than money. Entrepreneurs are simply the seductive go-betweens. Startups are business experiments performed with other people’s money. Marketing is like sex: only losers pay for it. Company culture is what goes without saying. There are no real rules, only laws. Success forgives all sins. People who leak to you, leak about you. Meritocracy is the propaganda we use to bless the charade. Greed and vanity are the twin engines of bourgeois society. Most managers are incompetent and maintain their jobs via inertia and politics. Lawsuits are merely expensive feints in a well-scripted conflict narrative between corporate entities. Capitalism is an amoral farce in which every player—investor, employee, entrepreneur, consumer—is complicit.

people don’t really change, they just become better actors.

If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough.

In VC, as often in life, it’s the incompetent and insecure who are generally the assholes; the masterful and successful—not to mention those universally perceived as the best in their field—are playing the long game.

One quick way to cut through the shit: ask your pretender-to-influence, “Do you have decision-making power?” If he or she even remotely hesitates or hedges, you’re speaking to a lackey (whether he or she acts like one or not). His or her only utility is to get you to the person who does have that power; everything else is so much pig swill. So route around such people if a real investment check is your goal. Arguably (and this is the canonical YC advice) don’t even accept a meeting from someone who can’t answer yes honestly to the above question. You’re wasting your time.

Any hustler who can make superficial friends of the California variety and publish a few blog thought pieces, while collecting the echo of confirmatory social media approval, is as much part of the elite as any member of a Harvard Final Club. Of course, you can lose your place just as easily, something an East Coast elite need never fear. But such is the greased pole of Silicon Valley fame and power; anyone can try to ascend, but nothing will arrest your fall.

We spin in an ever-turning circle, and it is our delight to change the bottom for the top and the top for the bottom. You may climb up if you wish, but on this condition: don’t think it an injustice when the rules of the game require you to go back down.

Men with nothing to lose will stop at nothing to win.

Briefly: Bill Gates came from wealthy Seattle aristocracy. During the early eighties, his mother served on the executive committee of the United Way, along with IBM’s then CEO John Opel. This allowed William Henry Gates III (her son) to score a meeting with IBM about providing a code compiler for IBM’s new, epoch-making product, the IBM PC. What IBM really wanted, though, was an operating system, the core code that manages memory and runs programs. Gates, whose nascent company, Microsoft, didn’t have anything like an entire operating system, honestly referred IBM to a company run by Gary Kildall, a pioneer in operating systems when the real money in computers was still in the hardware. In a story couched in legend, Kildall was off flying his personal plane when IBM representatives physically came knocking at his company’s office. His wife (the company’s business manager) refused to sign IBM’s aggressive nondisclosure agreement and sent them packing, and so IBM grudgingly went back to Gates asking about operating systems. Gates, smelling an opportunity, offered to provide one, hiring a local Seattle programmer to clone Kildall’s operating system, calling it QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System), and which eventually shipped in the IBM PC as DOS (Disk Operating System). Gates, correctly suspecting that other hardware companies would copy IBM’s approach of bundling software separately from hardware, retained copyright over this hacked and copied DOS. As a result, the procee...

“The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a forgotten crime, as the crime was properly done.”

In 1975 Steven Jobs was a (literally) smelly hippie, fresh from a religious pilgrimage to India, working as a low-level technician at Atari. He was an arrogant, destructive presence who pissed off everyone except Atari’s CEO, Nolan Bushnell, who was impressed with Jobs’s wide-ranging intellect and saved him from being fired. Bushnell wanted to turn Pong, the legendary two-player game that launched the video game revolution, into a single-player version that would eventually be called Breakout (older readers will surely remember). Back in the day, a new game required hardware as well as software, with the former being more important. Bushnell announced a $700 prize for anyone who could design a hardware-software combo that would power the game, with a $1,000 bonus for every chip that was saved in manufacturing the circuit (chips used to be expensive). Jobs convinced his eventual Apple cofounder, Steve “Woz” Wozniak, to take on the project, stipulating it had to be done in four days to fit his social schedule (he had to go pick apples at a utopian commune). Woz worked like hell, with Jobs doing the manual labor of testing the designed circuits, and they made the deadline. Jobs, however, never told Woz about the bonuses, having mentioned only the base prize. He gave Woz $350, shortchanging his collaborator, who had made the entire thing possible, and used the stolen cash to finance his lifestyle. Steve Jobs was all smoldering ambition, ruthless will to power, and narcissistic...

the story of just about every early-stage startup is peppered with tales such as mine. Backroom deals negotiated via phone calls to leave no legal trace, behind-the-back betrayals of investors or cofounders, seductive duping of credulous employees so they work for essentially nothing (e.g., Adchemy itself). The picture I’ve painted of AdGrok—and there’s more sordidness where this came from, not to worry—is not some weird exception; it is the absolute rule. The tech startup scene, for all its pretensions of transparency, principled innovation, and a counterculture renouncement of pressed shirts and staid social convention, is actually a surprisingly reactionary crowd. Its members preen and puff and protect

The harsh reality is this: to have influence in the world, you need to be willing and able to reward your friends and punish your enemies.

Whenever you face some stressful, time-consuming, and risky challenge, firewall the rest of the company away from the mess. They’ll likely add no value, and the attendant uncertainty will corrode their productivity when you likely need it most. No matter what happens in the outside world—lawsuit, money issues, the fucking zombie apocalypse—do not let it infect the company’s headspace and become the top item in the internal narrative.

But in the passive-aggressive popularity contest that is Silicon Valley, someone actually going to bat for you—really going to bat, like telling important people to go fuck themselves—that’s rarer and more short-lived than a snowflake in a bonfire. I

First, the ability to monomaniacally and obsessively focus on one thing and one thing only, at the expense of everything else in life.

Second, the ability to take and endure endless amounts of shit.

You’ve spent months and gambled your career on a product, and then after a bit of excitement, you realize what a misshapen and misbegotten piece of shit it really is. This is the crisis that kills 90 percent or more of startups that manage to survive the initial plagues of founder disagreements, failure to ship code, and failure to raise money.

Walking into any meeting, you should know every goddamn thing there is to know about the other person; if you don’t, you’re failing.

Total commitment, like unconditional love, is the only type that matters. The bike-riding, date-night-going types will never give everything to a company or an idea, and are nothing more than complacent bourgeois, whatever trappings of the “disruptive innovator” they may sport, often in the form of ponderous blog posts or a bookshelf of bound B-school-level bloviation. The ones who could pass for a homeless person, though, those are the startup kamikazes who will give everything for the entrepreneurial cause, and are stopped only by death or jail.

Half the friends I have on Facebook, the ones dating from some long-ago period like high school or a former employer, I keep around only in order to see if my initial suppositions about them and how their lives would develop were right.