Chaos Monkeys - Revised Edition: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley

Chaos Monkeys must have something to it because, after all, it was a New York Times bestseller. It took a week to plow through. The reason for the purchase was two fold: (1) To hear about the life of a Big Digital insider; and (2) Learn the art of the deal. In all probability, a pertinent reason for high sales was because of the catchy title and (2) this new digital era makes people curious. The book is essentially Antonio Garcia Martinez’s memoir.It seems as though he failed in some job expectations, but he certainly was successful with making money on this book. His adventure into the world of digital employment touches the progeny that resulted from the mother of usury’s gestation. Antonio’s journey takes us from Goldman Sachs to Big Digital. So, let's go.Martinez digs into his background. He skips his early life, other than stating he wasn’t too fond of his dad. He’s no dummy. Antonio’s story begins by stressing that he got into Berkeley. He was in a Ph.D. program, but had five “flailing” years. Part of his life seems obsessed with plastic and he wants readers to know that his stipend was $19,000.He informs readers what kind of cars he drove, emphasizing one was a high end German model. I've had to drop out of school and return to secure a Ph.D. I've also driven high-end autos. Yet, there was never a need to accentuate this, as we've all had our ups and downs. His 533 pages is filled with details about ups and downs, failed relationships and job turmoil.Antonio mentions what’s a central part of men, the mother of children. Instead of giving his gal a first name, he calls her “British Trader.” He had two kids by the “British Trader” and then had to abandon his progeny.The book portrays his existence in the environments of earning bread. He was able to get a position at Goldman Sachs. No one can deny that that's impressive. Unfortunately, it was very stressful and he didn't like his surroundings. He lets us know that in 2005 the average salary at Goldman Sachs was $521,000.From the start Antonio’s book has some big names. It's certainly a good draw for pulling in curiosity. We read about Elisha Wiesel. Martinez writes that Elisha was none other than the only son of one of the world’s most famous individuals, Here, we get our insider’s glance at the pit falls within the high finance/loan industry. Even Big Guys get burnt. It's written that “when the Madoff scandal, the largest Ponzi scheme in American history, erupted in late 2008, it would turn out that the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity had invested all of its assets with Madoff…” (p. 16)It seems like the old-fashioned field of usury had a progeny called derivatives. The author notes that “the derivative holds no intrinsic worth…” He echoes about the credit default swap. The CDS are “like a pile of money that someone has lent. It works this way. ”You lend somebody money in the form of a bond.” The author has a good way of elucidating. He says “your wife might cheat on you, but you hope otherwise.” We read that, “The credit derivative is not even some theoretical value of a tangible good.” It's a “perceived value” and oscillates around the “probabilities” of future obligations.Here, let's see what our author has to say. We’ll quote him verbatim. “The traders were crafty and quick witted, but with little technical sophistication and the intention span of an ADHD kid hopped up on energy drinks and Jolly Ranchers.” (p. 17) Martinez deems that the sales guys were complete “fools, with collective IQs safely in the double digits.” He certainly didn't enjoy his cut throat place of employment. He believed that giving “fast computers to traders was like giving handguns and tequila to teenage boys.” (p. 19)Reading this book makes one wonder if today's individuals in the above industry are as sharp as those in the age of usury. He indicates that micro chips labour fast and computers talk to each other. He believes in the future people will tell computers what to do and, in turn, “be told by computers what to do.”Goldman Sachs made opulent riches “by simply passing paper from its left hand to its right,” from the seller to the buyer. We are now at the point where the author indicates he had enough; jumped into his convertible BMW and drove to California. One of the interesting quotes in this book pertains to information flow. He tells us that money is merely expendable ammunition; data is power. Now we return to the intrinsic life time of the author.Martinez’ tells his readership that one of the women that he was with was a former city of London derivatives Trader. He had known her for 39 weeks and she became pregnant. He would label her as “British Traitor.” Antonio refers to a intimate fest, lasting for several weeks. She was quite a gal. Her family were into money in Czarist Russia. They saw the writing on the wall and relocated to England. She was well educated in the University of Vermont. A banking internship led to a Deutsche Bank job. She certainly was intelligent.He indicates that she was too “self regarding” in the field of “entitlement.” His relationship was rocky. (p. 57) However, when the baby arrived he moved into her home. He then moves out. It was difficult to understand why he related to such matters. Perhaps it's a good selling point.Antonio gets himself a job and one of his acquaintances is a smart Greek national. The Greek’s algorithmic expertise saved the author’s new environment, that was not the largest of firms. He refers to the Greek and emphasizes that, “Every Jobs has his Wozniak.”We also learn that every start up enterprise is an experiment with the $$$ of other folks. We now see reference to a different company. It had an all-star cast. It even raised $32 million. It's now dead. Antonio’s point: There’s a lot of risk and gambling is phenomenal when starting a digital company. The most important thing is picking a partner. That’s everything. It’s also pertinent to know that it's nearly impossible to have a vital large company in the Monopoly Age. For example, a large part of NY's economy is based on information monopolies.Martinez quotes an Arthur Miller by stating, “The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell.” (p. 104) If an investor gives you $100,000 to create a start up and if you raise a million it can be noted as a $10 million evaluation. This was a time in Antonio's life in which he was intertwined with two companies. Selling and dealing seems to be a key part of the Antonio’s soul. It's possible that with his mentality he could sell a freezer to an Eskimo.He returns to British Trader’s desire to be “captain of the ship” and the only reason he had been in her house was because of a baby. He’s then informs that she’s pregnant -again, and his thoughts were, “Well, so what? I was already neck deep in risk.” Out of the blue Martinez echos that marketing is like sex; only losers pay for it. He was a schemer and if he pulled off a digital selling caper, he’d have a bundle.He again digs deep into the world of money. He wants us to know that modern banking originated in the Italian City States by those who had fled a 1492 expulsion from Spain. (p. 120) Here, we return to the two firms in his life. One is engaged in his pretext of legalities. He philosophizes by noting the old adage of “the wise combatant always allows his opponent a way out.” He wants us to know about men with nothing to lose. They have everything to win.Antonio had instigated a litigation process that would cost half a million just to set up a trial. There can be no questioning that in the digital field the author was a high stakes gambler, a wheeler and dealer. He got investors to stay in tune, despite lawsuit drama that he was plotting.Page after page goes into the aspect of scheming and, for some reason, Antonio goes on by noting that in 1975 Steve Jobs was nothing but a smelly hippie. Jobs had been working as a low level technician at Atari. He was arrogant and destructive.Here we go into Antonio’s psych. Jobs was able to convince the Apple cofounder Wozniak to create for him. He had lied and hoodwinked his close friend Woz. Wozniak created the product and Jobs made riches by selling it. He wants us to know that the truly dangerous people are the ones who live on food subsidies, “the guerrilla fighters, the sailers at sea eating sh-tty food and those living in cheap dumpy crash pads.” We read that “Those are the people you have to fear.” (p. 178) At times Antonio seems like he is either picking up Info from others or trying to be a philosopher. He tells us total commitment, like unconditional love, is the only thing that matters.It’s here that Antonio connects with Twitter. We read about visiting the neighboring headquarters of that giant. Readers see his description of Twitter, the long shared desks, the guards.At that time Twitter had less than 500 employees. He was adventuring to sell a firm to Twitter. This would be the big break in his life. Martinez met a Twitter key. He, like Antonio, had something in common. Both had not finished a Ph.D. program. (p. 185)Antonio goes off subject and takes us back into his psych. There are lots of pages about the ad sector of Facebook and Twitter. He played Twitter and FaceBook off against one another about buying a firm. Those big boys bought upstarts with great ideas.His first big FaceBook interviewer, regarding his saga, was with a guy who had a Ph.D. from Jerusalem. He had an unemotional face. (p. 217) Antonio’s life was getting interesting. Both Twitter and Facebook seemed captivated by his company’s potential deal. the author had big dreams. Could he, Antonio, become the next Jobs?He’s into environment and (thus) gives us his perception about part of California, “a society in which all men and women live in their own self contained bubble, unattached to traditional anchors like family or religion, and largely unperturbed by outside social factors like income inequality…” (p. 232) He wondered what those in his environment would think if they knew about his betrayal pertaining to businesses and his “deal,” for surely Twitter wanted to make a purchase. At the same time he told Twitter that he thought his future lay with FaceBook. (p. 239) He reiterated that FaceBook wanted to hire him along with his sale. (p. 247)While all his wheeling and dealing was turning he was hiding out on his tiny boat, “given I had nowhere else to live or go, a penniless millionaire-on-paper.” (p.271) Seems he skipped over pertinent parts in his saga to return to his working at FB, a place he would soon detest, as he had hated his other places of stressful employment.It was discovered that employees were like slaves, laboring 14 hours a day, eating three meals at that facility and sometimes sleeping there. All they did was write code and review code. (p. 284) As for the boss, Zuckerberg, we read he was a poor speaker. Now that Antonio was again part of the digital world, working at a steady job, he paid off the mother of his progeny, British Trader. We read, “I paid my way out of fatherhood, mostly for the compromise to freedom it represented.” (p. 306)Next he bought himself a 37 foot sailboat. He would live on his sailboat. He mentions those who essentially lived at Facebook. They had books, photos of girlfriends, stuffed animals, mugs, mouse pads, skateboards and other things.Several pages go to his digital world of employment. We read about other employees. He tells his readership that one guy was an interesting character. he was the child of Soviet Jews, “he was part of the bumper crop that the US harvested from the Brezhnev era. He was a rising engineering star in Facebook ads.” (p. 389)As for FaceBook, what was it? Well, it served the entire world, with data centers in several locations. Martinez mentions the resemblance between Facebook and Goldman Sachs.Next we read about life. He had two children, whose mother worked a 9 to 5 at a cooperate job to provide for his progeny, “just barely.” (p. 437) We see that it wasn't that he was a bad guy. After all, being in digital his Facebook stock would potentially provide for his progeny’s future education. Unfortunately, Martinez was also unhappy with his fellow employees at Facebook.According to Martinez, those who worked at Facebook made a big show in believing in truth. Yet, they were attached to whatever “well groomed pack of lies they held.” He indicates that if Facebook played with the outside world it would play with loaded dice. Seems like, as with all his other jobs, he didn't fair well at stressful FB.His last year at Facebook was spent living with a photographer in her Palo Alto studio. Like other relationships it buckled. He tells his readers it was because of stress. He refers to a Latin proverb, “for every beautiful woman, there's a man tired of screwing her.” Seems Antonio didn't have real friends at FB.On day he decided he had enough of the digital world. He packed all his stuff without the Facebook staff knowing. When it came time for his departure, he basically had all his personal products moved. Next thing readers know, Martinez, after about 2 years at Facebook, was working for Twitter. That (also) didn't last long. He notes his mother died and he withdrew from digital and obligations. Antonio sold just about everything he owned.His next adventure was committed to finishing the book that’s being described. He retreated to Orcas Island to write this memoir. We read that he fell in love with the hippie and part redneck community of the island. This story reminds one of a famous Joseph Conrad's reiteration about “no man being an island.” Parts of Conrad’s Echo are true. Whatever, you now have the digital world as seen by the author.Antonio

The book: “Chaos Monkeys …” is a fascinating look into Facebook and the world of forming and selling start-up companies. It should be on the must read list of those considering a start up endeavor or interested in Facebook or other social media companies and how they operate in order to make money and stay in business.This reviewer found the book to have two minor shortcomings (some might call features) of the Kindle version of the book. Several portions of the book came pre-highlighted, which shared what the author or publisher fond important but might be problematic for some readers. The author, while writing in a colorful and entertaining manner, more often than not used language “that would make a sailor blush”. Be forewarned. Nonetheless the book is worth purchasing and reading.Illustrative of the material in the book and the author’s style, language aside, Martinez writes: “The events described in this work, with the exception of one scene in New York, occurred between roughly March 2010 and October 2014, in and around the San Francisco Bay Area… I’ve done my level best to capture the spirit and significance of every scene depicted… I invite you to write your own competing account. Together we may arrive at the set of mutually agreed-upon lies called history… Note: Some names have been omitted to protect the truly guilty… Dedication To all my enemies: I could not have done it without you.”Martinez writes: “As the debate about the future of Facebook monetization grew more polarized and heated… and the IPO was imminent… The company’s senior leadership had called on the Ads team to dream up something fast to revive the lagging fortunes of the enterprise.”Martinez writes: “When you load a page in your browser, everything you see (and most of the things you don’t) is not from the company whose “. com” address you’ve entered. The way the modern Web works, different elements come from different places. Every element you load, whether you like it or not, touches your browser, and is allowed to read data in the form of what’s known as cookies… As you browse the Web far and wide, from shoe shopping on zappos.com to news reading on nytimes.com… Facebook sees you everywhere… Facebook’s terms of service had so far prohibited the use of the resulting data for commercial purposes, but this bold proposal suggested lifting that self-imposed restriction. [But] it was not guaranteed to succeed, as the actual value of that data was unknown… I had been hired as Facebook’s first product manager for ads targeting, charged with converting Facebook’s user data into money by whatever legal means available. This task [was]… difficult … The… conclusion was that Facebook… did not in fact have much commercially useful data at all.” About transparency and the markets, Martinez writes: “many markets were and are inefficient, because that inefficiency is very profitable to those running the market, even if only in the short-term” About advertising, Martinez writes: “Internet advertising [resembles] newspaper advertising that preceded it. The first such ads were run in… a Parisian paper, in 1836. Advertisement was originally a scheme to lower the paper’s selling price… it was soon copied by all newspapers… During the early days of Internet advertising, the publisher played a critical and powerful role. In the aughts, websites like Yahoo had an entire sales force (as newspapers still do) that sold those little squares of characters and images directly to advertisers.” And goes on to write: “[what] companies like Amazon know… about you—is more valuable than most any publisher data...” Martinez writes: “… every time you go to Facebook or ESPN.com or wherever, you’re unleashing a mad scramble of money, data, and pixels that involves… everything that is known about you by greedy strangers. Every. Single. Time… The magic of how this happens is called “real-time bidding” (RTB) exchanges...” Martinez writes: “Real-life experience is instructive, but the tuition is high.” And goes on to write: “Here’s the lesson: when the company’s employee retention strategy is cultivating Stockholm syndrome, you’re in the wrong company… That very afternoon, I pulled the classic move you too should use to seduce a potential cofounder into leaving his or her steady-paycheck job. I gave Argyris a physical copy of “How to Start a Startup,” a blog post by Paul Graham, which is the crack-like gateway drug to the startup addiction.” And continues to write: “But man invented language in order to better deceive, not inform… Thus the best deceivers are called articulate, as they make listeners and readers fall in love with the thoughts projected into their heads… 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.” Martinez writes: “Skilled immigrant tech workers in the United States have effectively one method of entry: the famous H-1B visa. Capped at a small yearly number, it’s the ticket to the American Dream for a few tens of thousands of foreigners per year. Lasting anywhere from three to six years, the H-1B allows foreigners to prove themselves and eventually apply for permanent residency, the colloquial “green card.”” Martinez writes: “How does Google manage to generate yearly revenues of $ 70 billion… Google invites you to click on an ad. Its cash register rings every time you click... It simply holds an auction… at the moment the query occurs. The net result is that billions of times a day, Google runs an auction of keywords and accompanying bids. By looking at the bid…, Google … picks the highest…” Martinez writes: “technology entrepreneurs are society’s chaos monkeys, pulling the plug on everything from taxi medallions (Uber) to traditional hotels (Airbnb)… Silicon Valley is the zoo where the chaos monkeys are kept… there is no shortage of bananas to feed them. The question for society is whether it can survive these entrepreneurial chaos monkeys intact, and at what human cost.” Martinez writes: “most everything we know as modern banking originated in the northern Italian city-states of the early and mid-Renaissance. The bankers of the day were Jews; many were… fleeing the 1492 expulsion order from Spain’s Reyes Católicos. The church disallowed Christians from practicing usury, granting Jews an unexpected windfall in the form of a religiously ordained monopoly on moneylending. They were otherwise persecuted and oppressed… and barred from living inside the city walls. By 1516 the Jews… were granted living rights in a dirty, gritty part of the city named the Ghetto Nuovo… Locked behind the ghetto’s walls at night, the Jews plied their moneylending trade during the day, with Christians traveling to the otherwise rancid part of the city to borrow cash.” Martinez writes: “The lifelong Machiavelli fan in me remembered that memorable line from The Prince: war is never avoided; it’s only postponed to someone’s advantage… As Sun Tzu informs us, no matter how cowardly by nature, anyone fights to the death when his back is against the wall. A wise combatant always allows his opponent a way out… There was still the little issue of payment, though. Ted liked us, but… billed out at something like… $ 700 per hour.” Martinez writes: “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 proceeds from the new computing world where hardware was interchangeable, but software was not (rather than the reverse… ), accrued to Gates and Microsoft rather than IBM… To quote Balzac, “The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a forgotten crime, as the crime was properly done.”… If I were to even attempt a brief account of Jobs’s crimes, based on his well-documented biographies, it would fill the rest of the book… and Zuckerberg?... the Facebook idea… was stolen from a pack of entitled Ivy League brats… who had contracted him to implement it. He implemented, but then decided he rather liked the idea and ran with it. Eventually, Facebook would pay tens of millions in damages to the aforementioned Ivy Leaguers… ” You’ll have to trust me on this: 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… In the startup game, there are no real rules.... In the end, success would forgive any sins, as it did for Gates and Jobs, and continues to do for countless startup entrepreneurs.” Martinez writes: “Never ignore people who can write really big checks… Walking into any meeting, you should know every… 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 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… Before you sit down with people on whom your entire financial future… will depend, you should know them better than their mothers do. Know what they want—…—and you can predict 90 percent of what they eventually do.” About lawyers, Martinez writes: “we needed a lawyer… skilled in the polite work of corporate governance… Like the best Valley law firms, they played the long game, and were big believers in the “first dose is free” business model. They knew that down the line there’d be expensive legal work in the offing… Here’s another lesson for the aspiring startupista: don’t skimp on lawyers. An error at the hour of signing a big contract, or negotiating an acquisition, could easily cost you millions... Get the best legal guns you can pay for, [or] convince them to accept something other than money in exchange… Trust, but verify—and keep a loaded shotgun under your bed.” About agreements between two parties, Martinez writes: “…Turkish artillery was using Vienna for target practice as late as 1683, and only last-minute alliances kept the Islamic world from extending clear to Bavaria… More than a mere interpreter, the dragoman was a cultural matchmaker who selectively (mis) translated missives in order to achieve a desired diplomatic result (often unknown to either communicating party)… The Silicon Valley world is an almost perfect analogue, and we have deal dragomans of our own.” Martinez writes: “Twitter owed us an answer of some sort, either yea or nay, preferably with a dollar sign attached… The day before, Facebook had emailed, proposing we come in and meet some of the Ads team… Five million dollars!” Martinez writes: “Want to know what it’s like getting bought by a company like Facebook? Here’s how it works: Since this sort of early-stage “acqui-hire” is more “hire” than “acqui,” every employee Facebook cares about must go through the usual hiring screen you’d experience if you had simply applied individually. The fact that you come bundled just changes the economics… What if some of you do well in the interviews, but some do not? … a candidate’s alignment with that culture is overwhelmingly important. Being handy with the C + + programming language isn’t good enough—you also have to be one of us in… spirit.” Martinez writes: “Ten million dollars. Twitter… had finally come back with a real offer… [At the same time] We want you to come and join the Facebook Ads team… everyone really felt you were an extremely strong candidate.”… As part of our push to woo Facebook, I had been getting Google Alerts on the company for months. One in particular had caught my attention. In October 2010, a mother in Florida had shaken her baby to death, as the baby would interrupt her FarmVille games with crying… Products that cause mothers to murder their infants in order to use them more, assuming they’re legal, simply cannot fail in the world. Facebook was legalized crack, and at Internet scale. Such a company could certainly figure out a way to sell shoes… Facebook it was. But Twitter had come up with the solid offer” About the author and his two partners: “I looked from one to the other: they seemed tired and worried and done with the startup went to Facebook and the boys to Twitter was absolutely the best possible outcome for AdGrok… You pay a pittance for the company, engineering it such that investors get little, and then pack the real value into the hiring offers for the employees… I needed to accept Facebook’s offer immediately, but before that, an employment lawyer needed to look it over… Silicon Valley job offers can be so complex— that there was an entire class of lawyer who just helped you negotiate the sale of yourself… An hour went by, and finally my lawyer emailed back. “You need to accept the Facebook offer immediately. You also need to resign beforehand, or you’ll break [non-competes] in both contracts.” On joining Facebook, Martinez writes: ““What is Facebook? Define it for me,” “It’s your personal newspaper.” “Exactly! It’s what I should be reading and thinking about, delivered personally to me every day.”… Facebook was the New York Times of You… Delicately, but unambiguously, our HR Man stated that we could ask a coworker out once, but no meant no, and you had no more lets after that… Next was a warning to the womenfolk. Our male HR authority, with occasional backup from his female counterpart, launched into a speech about avoiding clothing that “distracted” coworkers.” Martinez writes: “And as with most employees, my equity compensation vested over four years, with one-fourth coming after exactly one year, and then 1/ 16th coming every financial quarter after that….” Martinez writes: “In 1956, the sociologist Leon Festinger published a landmark study of a cult formed around a Chicago housewife named Dorothy Martin. Martin channeled messages from extraterrestrial beings… Her messages predicted a catastrophic flood that would destroy the United States on December 21, 1954… When the flying saucers and ensuing apocalypse failed to appear on the appointed date, the cult’s believers did not lose faith… This study would lay the groundwork for Festinger’s theory of “cognitive dissonance”: the mental stress people suffer when presented with realities contrary to their deeply held beliefs. The key takeaway is that humans naturally avoid this discomfort, skirting situations that aggravate it, or ignoring data that make their mental contradiction more apparent.Every large company has languished in the delirious trance of some product folly, waking with an urgent start only when reality finally catches up with delusion.” Martinez writes: “personal information is stored in a database, along with the browser cookie that corresponds to it, forming a bridge from real-world you to the browser version of you… That join, between a cookie and personal information, is then sold and resold a bazillion times a day to whoever is willing to pay for it… In our mediated age, we’ve gotten to the point that a Facebook or Google user ID is a better way of reaching you than a name or physical address… The advantage that Facebook and Google have over the regular data on-boarders is twofold: they have much more of your personal data, and they see you online all the time… Facebook, Google, and others have achieved the holy grail of all marketers: a high-fidelity, persistent, and immutable pseudonym for every consumer online… Incidentally, this is all public, and fully documented... ” Martinez writes: “Churchill once noted in a parliamentary speech, “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”… Similarly, capitalism is the worst form of managing the means of production, except for yet worse ways… That’s the smoldering ambition of every entrepreneur: to one day create an organization that society deems worthy of a price tag.” Martinez writes: “Facebook would always aim to create monopoly pricing power and maintain information asymmetry, rather than drive true innovation. If Facebook played with the outside world, it always played with loaded dice.” Martinez writes: “Any idea who Malcom McLean was?... I bet not. But that one man changed our economy more than practically anyone else in the twentieth century. McLean was the inventor of the intermodal container, those metal boxes piled into immense heaps on the cargo ships coming from China. The genius of the container is that the entire workflow around transporting physical goods is standardized on the same 8 × 8 × 40 box. Manufacturers load goods onto eight-foot-wide palettes straight into the box. The box becomes a freight car when loaded onto railroad wheels, and once it arrives at a ship, it is directly hefted aboard via those immense cranes that dot every modern port… It’s universal: whether the ship docks in Singapore or Oakland, its cargo will be swiftly loaded and unloaded via the magic of containerization. Intermodal containers make our global supply chain possible… What’s that got to do with ads? Modern digital advertising has also settled on a containerized box—or, rather, a set of them. They’re known as Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) ad units for desktop ads, and Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) ad units for mobile. They come in the standard sizes, measured in pixels—the standard sizing means the ad that runs today on time.com can also run on Yahoo Finance or the New York Times site tomorrow… It’s containerization applied to paid media, and in general, it works.” Martinez writes: “Why do ad servers matter?... Look: the advertiser doesn’t trust its agency… The only thing that keeps this dishonest world honest is the existence of an agreed-upon source of truth… the ad server… The ad server [is] also the accounting system that decides what gets delivered when, to whom, how often, and where on the Internet….” Martinez writes: “So what became of it all?... The Great Facebook Ads Debate of 2013 ended up being moot... Facebook’s ever-addictive News Feed and ads inventory on the Facebook mobile app, instead of the desktop site. That’s it: ads in News Feed, while the user was on his or her mobile device—that’s what saved Facebook… easy to say all this now, retrospectively. It certainly was not clear in the spring of 2013…” Martinez summarizes by writing: “That’s the nature of Valley success, however: you try ten things, based mostly on random hunches, a few key product insights, and whatever internal mythologies your culture reveres. Seven of them fail miserably, are discontinued, and are soon quietly swept under the rug of “forever today” forgetfulness. Two do OK, for more or less the reasons you thought, but they don’t blow the doors off your success metric. And one, for reasons you discover only after the fact, becomes a huge, transformational success.”

I really enjoyed this book which falls into two sections: before the author’s employment with Facebook and afterwards until he is fired. Mr Martinez comes across as a very self centred but brilliant techy geek and whilst unappealing as a friend his frank discussions of his thoughts give an unusual degree of insight into his character; and of those like him. He actually manages to explain how Facebook makes its money which is something I have never understood before. His assertion they wouldn’t share your data is charmingly Niaive in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal (2019) - the book was written some years before. Ultimately it takes bravery to write frankly about one’s own failures and this makes it distinct from the hagiographies and self congratulatory books which characterise most business books. An interesting aside is his obvious erudition with well chosen classical quotations at the head of each chapter. Recommended highly.

There were parts of this book I enjoyed. The insight into tech start-ups, a brief window into Facebook and the life in San Francisco were all interesting.Sadly, these sections were marred by having to 'listen' to Martinez's overblown prose and sense of self-worth.The self-deprecation doesn't sound genuine and - let's face it - he comes across as a complete tool. Not worth the money

I don't read a great deal as I struggle to find books that capture me, 'Chaos Monkeys' had me within the first few pages.A great account of Antonio's life chapters from Wall Street to Techie to startup and working with the big boys in Silicon Valley.Really enjoyed the style of writing, very humorous in places, and great to get an insight into the large techie firms.Couldn't wait to read more, read the book in a week which is excellent for me!If you like the world of tech or IT, I recommend you read this book.

This book had been on my list for a couple of years but I’d kept moving it down because of the gimmicky sounding title. It’s an amazing read, enhanced by the fact I personally know a couple of the people (briefly) mentioned. It presents an inside view that I don’t think is available in print anywhere else. Learnt so much and truly grateful to the author for writing it. If you work in tech and read anything this year, it should be this.

There are really interesting informative bits and the author can be quite funny too - towards the end of the book goes into boring detail about Facebook's ad systems - so 1st half is a good read second half is heavy going