Book of the Week: Chaos Monkey

13 Aug 2016

This week I read Chaos Monkey by Antonio García Martínez. As I read the book, it seemed so candid that it could have only been written by someone with FU money. The book was 500 page long, but it was an enjoyable read as a window into what Silicon Valley is really like. The author dropped out of a PhD in physics at UC Berkeley to work as a quant at Goldman Sachs. Afterwards he moved west to join Adchemy, a tech company. He left Adchemy to start AdGrok through the YCombinator incubator program. AdGrok was acquired by Twitter and Martínez joined Facebook pre-IPO to product manage their ads. Things happen in a flash of the eye. Startups

At the end of the day. AdGrok was simply a long, stressful job interview for Facebook(and ditto for the boys at Twitter). We all claim we “sold” AdGrok, but in reality, AdGrok was merely leverage to the job offers that actually made us the real financial upside, job offers we would not have been able to score otherwise.

There are two traits of successful startup founders are being obsessively focused and the ability to take endure endless amounts of shit. Startups are hard, but having an excellent network gives you a soft landing. Being successful is just as much as having the network as being able to technically execute. Silicon Valley Capitalism

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 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 immoral face in which every player—investor, employee, entrepreneur, consumer—is complicit.

I don’t like being called a loser, this is what Silicon Valley is.