And Once Again in My Life I Had Nothing to Do Chaos Monkeys

Nonfiction

What It Is Actually Like to Exist in the Engine Room of the Outset-Upwardly Economy

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• July 5, 2016

Chaos MONKEYS
Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley
By Antonio García Martínez
515 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $29.99.

The literature of Silicon Valley is exceedingly thin. The tech overlords go along clear of writers who are not on their payrolls or at least in their thrall. Many in the valley experience that bringing the digital future to the masses is God's work. Question this, and they tend to get touchy. Anger them, and they might seek revenge. The billionaire investor Peter Thiel, outed past the local arm of the Gawker media empire, secretly financed a lawsuit to destroy information technology. Silicon Valley did not rise en masse and say this was seriously beyond the stake. No surprise, then, that at that place are so few books investigating what it really takes to succeed in tech (duplicity often trumps innovation) or that critically examine such omnipresent, comforting fables as "We're not in it for the coin."

In that location are other barriers to literature. A outset-upwardly is less a physical reality than the hype that surrounds it. (It's not lying if you believe information technology.) Boasts, threats, secret deals, betrayals are the money of the realm, but lawsuits and news releases are the only things put in writing. Nailing this glace culture would take an unholy combination of David Mamet and Tom Wolfe in their primes, simply they would too have to exist lucky enough to discover a subject who did not realize he was a great bailiwick and start censoring himself for fear he would never be hired again. Expert luck with that.

In the meantime, we have the next best matter: Antonio García Martínez'southward "Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley," a book whose bland all-purpose title belies the fact that this is a valley account like no other. The first hint that something is different here comes with the dedication: "To all my enemies: I could not take done it without y'all." This is autobiography as revenge, naming names and sparing few, certainly not the author. "I was wholly devoid of most human boundaries or morality," he notes in passing. In other words, he was a start-up chief executive.

García Martínez came to the valley in 2008 from Goldman Sachs, where he was a pricing quant who modeled credit derivatives. In the valley, he tried to do the same with chunks of homo attention, which meant inventing digital advertisement systems. He started at a flailing firm named ­Adchemy; quit with ii engineers to establish a start-up; sold the start-upwardly to Twitter but went himself to work for Facebook, where he lasted two years.

Flatly summarized, information technology is not a very interesting career. The start-upward, named AdGrok, was a company mostly in name; it was three guys in a dumpy room trying to hustle themselves in a world full of hustlers. The respond to the trouble plaguing Facebook during García Martínez'southward stint there — how can we employ digital advertising to make some serious coin? — was not solved by the writer.

No thing. Michael Lewis was never a top Wall Street bond salesman, but in "Liar'southward Poker" he captured an era. "Chaos Monkeys" aims to practise the same for Silicon Valley, and bracingly succeeds. Nothing I've e'er read conveys amend what it actually is like to be in the engine room of the start-up economic system. There were moments I laughed out loud, something I never think doing while reading almost Steve Jobs. García Martínez shows how a first-up is less near making a product that actually does something than badly demonstrating you are worthy of beingness hired past Google, Twitter or Facebook. He describes the way the big companies resemble life in Republic of cuba or Communist Red china circa 1965, with "countless toil motivated by lapidary ideals handed down by a revered and unquestioned leader," not to mention the posters on the wall proclaiming, "Proceed and Be Bold!" This is a identify, he points out, where people accept their laptops into a toilet stall and keep typing as they exercise what they came to practise. If that strikes you equally unseemly or unnecessary, you'll never make information technology in Palo Alto.

The heart of the volume is the period García Martínez spent at his starting time-upwardly, which was intended to allow small-scale businesses to efficiently annunciate on Google. It was an auspicious moment. While the balance of the world was struggling to recover from the recession, the office parks of the valley were total of aggressive young men who had made pots of money by being early on employees of Google. To prove they were non merely lucky, they needed to score again. Everyone was terrified of missing the adjacent Facebook or, a footling subsequently, the side by side Airbnb or Uber. Smart entrepreneurs capitalized on these fears.

García Martínez'south big suspension was hyping his way into Y Combinator, in result the valley's finishing school for innovators. He labels the YC entrepreneur profile as "bomb-throwing anarchist destructive mixed with coldblooded execution mixed with irreverent whimsy, a sort of ­technology-enabled 12-yr-old boy." He fit right in.

Graduation from Y Combinator conveys the same prestige that a degree from Harvard does back E, and comes complete with an old boy — well, young men — network that is handy in all sorts of ways. "Anyone who claims the valley is meritocratic is someone who has profited vastly from it via nonmeritocratic means similar happenstance, membership in a privileged accomplice or some concealed human activity of absolute skulduggery," García Martínez observes. All three helped AdGrok; at i point the author manipulated the numbers for his investors, "cooking the books in the worst form. But it was either that or surrender at present, and give up was unthinkable."

There are a few bug with "Chaos Monkeys." García Martínez likes footnotes way also much (on one folio in that location are 4) and the epigraphs to each affiliate are numbingly heavy-handed, although the Latin American maxim almost how for every cute adult female there's a homo tired of making dear to her sums upwardly nicely his feelings near leaving the Kingdom of Facebook. More problematically, there is much more well-nigh digital ad technology here than about readers could possibly desire. The implications of the engineering, on the other hand, are somewhat scanted.

"Imagine that every time you get to CNN.com, it'due south equally though a new sell lodge for 1 share in your encephalon is transmitted to a stock exchange," he writes. "Picture show it: Private quanta of homo attending sold, flake past fleck, similar so many 1000000 shares of General Motors stock, billions of times a day." That was the globe García Martínez was doing his best to create. For all his criticism of the valley'southward mode of doing things, he never stops to wonder nearly ethics.

But so, he's got a full plate. Early in the narrative García Martínez conceives a daughter with a woman a mere two weeks after they meet. "If you spring into the completeness, jump headlong," he observes. 18 months or so later, during breakup sex, a son is conceived. AdGrok officially opens for business on his daughter's get-go birthday, which he skipped. "Success," he writes, "forgives all sins."

In the stop, though, his success as an entrepreneur was just middling. "Such is the greased pole of Silicon Valley fame and power; anyone can try to ascend, but nothing will arrest your autumn," he writes. First prize in Silicon Valley is enough money and then your family and descendants will never have to work once again until the sun goes cold. Second prize is a whole heaping pile of money. Third prize is you're fired, which is often pretty sweet as well. Three years later being escorted out of Facebook, García Martínez is living on a 40-foot sailboat on San Francisco Bay.

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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/10/books/review/chaos-monkeys-by-antonio-garcia-martinez.html

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