Chaos Monkeys Revised Edition audiobook

…technology entrepreneurs are society’s chaos monkeys, pulling the plug on everything from taxi medallions (Uber) to traditional hotels (AirBnB) to dating (Tinder). One industry after another is simply knocked out via venture-backed entrepreneurial daring and hastily shipped software. Silicon Valley is the zoo where the chaos monkeys are kept, and their numbers only grow in time. With the explosion of venture capital, 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. If you want to learn about sex you will get a lot more useful intel from a hooker than you would from a nun (hopefully). If you want to learn about what life is like in Silicon Valley, you would do well to let to someone who has done the deed and lived the life show you the way. Antonio Garcia Martinez is our Virgil through a dark landscape where every great fortune is founded on a great crime, where morality is not only violated, but where its very existence is not recognized, where millionaires are a dime a dozen and where any sort of social consciousness is kept nicely sedated, a place where greed is king, fast is worshipped to the exclusion of better, and death is always at the door. Antonio Garcia Martinez - from Money.cnn.comMartinez has the cred to offer the tour. Having toiled as a quant at that paragon of virtue, Goldman Sachs, he eventually found life on The Street less than fully rewarding. He says that quants at Goldman were mostly failed scientists like me who had sold out to the man and suddenly found themselves, after making it through years of advanced relativity and quantum mechanics, with a golf-club-wielding gorilla called a trader peering over their shoulder asking them where their risk report was. We were quantitative enablers, offering the new and shiny blessings of modern computation to the old business of buying and selling… quants were the eunuchs at the orgy. The fluffers on the porn set of high finance. We were the ever-present British guy in every Hollywood World War II film: there to add a touch of class and exotic sophistication, but not really consequential to the plot (except perhaps to conveniently take some bad guy’s bullet.) As someone with pretty high end analytical and programming skills, he saw (or says he saw, who knows?) the impending meltdown in the 2007 financial world, and opportunities in the new frontier out west, so traded The Street for The Valley, taking a chance on a job on the other coast. The book follows Garcia’s chronological trail from startup to finish, from employee to entrepreneur, to buy-out target, to middle-manager at a monster Valley corporation to…well, you’ll see, if you read the book, or just Google the guy. It is a well-worn trail, but not for you or me, most likely. So a tour guide is definitely called for. And Martinez is nothing if not an informative and eager cicerone through what can be a very dark and sulphurous place. Of course, there is plenty of that brimstone stench emanating from the author, an indication of just how well he fit in. anyone who claims the Valley is meritocratic is someone who has profited vastly from it via nonmeritocratic means like happenstance, membership in a privileged cohort, or some concealed act of skullduggery. Since fortune had never been on my side, and I had no privileged cohort to fall back on, skullduggery it would have to be. It does not seem like it was out of character for AGM to engage in a bit of back-stabbing, double-dealing, and multiple instances of self-serving justification for his various dark deeds. When he talks about his income and net worth, for instance, which would be a pretty sweet take for most of us, yet regarding it as subsistence level, one might be forgiven for gleefully imagining Martinez in his thirty-seven-foot sailboat having a very unfriendly encounter with a pod of large, angry, breaching sperm whales.He offers an entertaining, if sometimes off-putting, alarming, even rage-inducing account of his experiences, offering many a word to the wise, or at least the ambitious, on how deals are made, how organizations are structured, and how to interpret some of the observables you might see. He is incisive and funny, and has a wicked way with words. I have added a selection of quotes as part of the EXTRA STUFF bit at the bottom of the review. You will definitely see what I mean. And he demonstrates quite a gift for selecting absolutely fabulous quotes to introduce most chapters. Martinez covers the highs and lows of the struggle to rise up in The Valley. This includes the ABCs of doing a startup, getting funding, how to divide your equity for the most efficient operation, handling media to get the most buzz for your launch, researching the people you will be dealing with, and, if things go well, negotiating with the bigger blobs that want to absorb your company. One revelation was that acquisition of startups by the big players is just a higher-ticket form of HR recruiting. There are worse ways of monetizing sociopathy than startups. If you know any better ways, I’m listening. For policy wonks, you will learn about the H-1B sort-of immigration program that brings thousand of foreign workers to American jobs in a form of high-end indentured servitude. Martinez offers a peek inside the operations of Twitter and Facebook, which is either entertaining or depressing, depending. But every company has its own culture, and AGM has a keen eye for the differences, and an analyst’s talent for examining structure. His take on large corporations functioning like nation-states, to the point of exchanging what are essentially diplomats, adds definite texture to the notion of corporations as the trans-national entities they truly are. Worse, he points out not only how corporations are like religion, but how, in that, they are very like the cult-world of some communist nations. There are a few things that made this less than an entirely effervescent read. First, while part of his story line was how he worked towards installing a particular form of ad-revenue generation at FB, the details tended to get in the way of the overall picture. Office politics are nothing new, even in this bubbly narrative. Second, while AGM is obviously an uber-bright guy, with a keen mind for some things, and a talent for writing, he comes across as (and probably is) someone with the soul of a slave-trader. If you can hold your nose at his unnecessary tales of sexual adventure, his willingness to endanger the lives of regular folks with childish antics, and his casual acquaintance with ethical standards, there is much to be gleaned in Chaos Monkeys. It is a look at the sausage factory, a peep-show of how a bill becomes a law software grows from an idea to a tool, a walk through The Valley and its shadows. Slap on a gas mask to block the stench and take in the sights. You may not care for the aroma, but I guarantee that in terms of gaining insight into one of the major economic engines of the planet, this book is smokin’. Review Posted - August 19, 2016Publication date – June 28, 2016=============================EXTRA STUFFLinks to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pagesAugust 24, 2016 - A really interesting NY Times Magazine article on how FB has become a very large kahuna in the delivery of political ads - Inside Facebook’s (Totally Insane, Unintentionally Gigantic, Hyperpartisan) Political-Media Machine - by John Hermann==================================QUOTES-----196 - humans, even at the rarified heights of the economic elite, are in truth scared, needy children playing at dress-up and pretending to be grown-ups-----324 - Here’s what people don’t understand about advertising. Facebook is simply a routing system, almost like an old-time telephone exchange, that delivers a message for money. The address on that message can be approximate (e.g. males aged thirty five in Ohio), or it can be specific (e.g., the person who just shopped for a specific pair of shoes on Zappos). But either way, Facebook didn’t make the match of user and messenger, and at most decides secondary things like how often the ad is seen in general, or which of two ads addressed to you is seen that particular instant. In this sense, ads on Facebook are no different from phone calls or emails.-----355 - At their extremes, capitalism and communism become equivalent: Endless toil motivated by lapidary ideals handed down by a revered and unquestioned leader, and put into practice by a leadership caste selected for its adherence to aforementioned principles, and richly rewarded for its willingness to grind whatever human grist the mill required? Same in both A (mostly) pliant media that flatters the existing system of production, framing it as the only such system possible? Check! Foot soldiers who sacrifice their families and personal lives for the efficient running of the system, and who view their sole human value through the prism of advancement within that system? Welcome to the People’s Republic of Facebook. But one can simply quit a job in capitalism, while from communism there is no escape, you’ll protest. As for the actual ability to opt out under capitalism: look at Seattle or SF real estate prices, and the cost of a decent US education, and consider whether Amazon or Facebook employees could really opt out of their treadmill I’ve never known one who did, and I’ve known many. Ask your average family providers, even those in a two-income family, whether they felt they could simply quit when they liked. They could barely get a few weeks off when they had a child, much less opt out. Switching jobs would amount to nothing more than changing the color of the shackles.... The reality is that capitalism, communism and every other sweeping ideology feed off the same human drives—the founder’s or revolutionary’s narcissistic will to power, and the mass man’s desire to be part of something bigger than himself—even if with very different outcomes...yoking together the monomaniac’s twitchy urge and the follower’s hunger for a role in some captivating story. -----359 – What was intriguing was how the unwealthy embraced the system, even if they weren’t the beneficiaries of this new social order we’d all joined. The junior hire was sucked along by enthusiasm and cluelessness, but the more senior employees at the middle-manager level knew the score. They knew that they lived one lifestyle, but their old-timer supervisor, who wasn’t necessarily more talented, lived very much another. This was a textbook case of the Marxist argument that capitalists instill the values of the property owners into their managerial classes, while still keeping most of the fruits of labor, in order to make common cause against the exploited proletariat, even though manager and worker have more in common than either does with the senior leadership.

I’m not a techie - I use a minimal amount of my smartphone’s many capabilities and survived the introduction of major technology into my chosen career with a bit of luck and much help from friends and colleagues – but I am interested in the business of technology. That’s to say, how the introduction of electronic technology has transformed industries I’ve known and worked in and how it has introduced new businesses I couldn’t have dreamt of when I began my working life. I know (or knew) little about Silicon Valley, other than an awareness that it’s the home of mega-companies such as Facebook, Google and Apple. So this ‘insider’ exposé, from a man who had worked his way up the ladder from launching his own start-up company to holding a prominent role at Facebook, seemed like the ideal place to commence my education.Antonio Garcia Martinez quit his PhD studies in Physics to earn some lucre working for Goldman Sachs. His job was to model prices for credit derivatives (he explained this but I’d have to say it flew way over my head). After becoming disillusioned with banking he used his skill set to set up a new technology company in the field of advertising and after it’s sale to Twitter he took up a role within the Facebook hierarchy. By this stage he’d developed some expertise in linking data streams (e.g. Facebook’s own knowledge of it’s members and their personal internet browsing history) with which he hoped to leverage monetisation of the business through the improved ability to supply a more focused advertising approach. Well, that’s my own interpretation/understanding of what he was trying to achieve – in truth, one downside of this book is that there is a lot of technical language here with dozens of acronyms thrown in for good measure and consequently I’m sure his own one-liner on this would be much more colourful.Aside from this, there is a good deal of interesting insight here. For instance, how new technology businesses are typically funded and how the entrepreneurs are ultimately rewarded for their efforts is explained in some detail. Also, the way in which online advertising has become increasingly targeted to individuals is brought to life. This is good stuff and it’s interspersed with the account of the author’s own life and experiences, though there’s not a lot on Martinez’s life outside of work simply because there wasn’t much life outside of his work. It’s clear that if you’re going to be a success in Silicon Valley then work is your life! There are some humorous moments too, but in truth these are few and far between.Possibly the most interesting section for me was where he lifted the lid on the culture inside of Facebook. For instance, I didn’t know that meals were (and maybe still are) provided free to all workers - either as purely benevolent act on the part of the company or possibly to remove a reason for workers to head home or outside of the workplace for their next refuelling stop. And in the eager push to land new projects mantras such as ‘done is better than good’ and ‘perfect is the enemy of good’ were thrown about with abandon. Overall I enjoyed my time with this book. I do think that the tech-savvy reader/listener will extract more than I was able from this account but there was certainly enough here for non-techies like me too.

This book is several things.1) A great introduction to how Silicon Valley tech really works. I've worked in tech startups for two decades, and this is exactly they kind of stuff which often happens but is rarely publicly discussed.2) An enthralling memoir of one of the most interesting people around in tech. Middling for a rock star or international war correspondent, but vastly more interesting than most of the people in tech.3) Insights into how Facebook made critical product decisions in what was to them initially a non-core area, and later core to their revenue. Particularly, multiple mistakes, political squabbles, etc., all ultimately rendered irrelevant through a tangential success, followed by going all-in on the winner.4) A spectacular bonfire of bridges.

At no point do you get the sense that Martínez is censoring himself beyond what he might absolutely have to do for legal reasons. He’s all in. His personal life is a wreck and he shamelessly puts it out there for all the world to see and judge him by. His career in both Wall Street and Silicon Valley is full of of ups and downs and decisions that are, at best, morally ambiguous.The writing is good. It’s funny, irreverent, and shows more than a passing knowledge of history and literature. There’s a ton of hard won advice and insight into not only Valley culture, but business, negotiation, and how to live the startup life. For all the self deprecation: “there was nothing badass about my career in technology. The scant success I had was due purely to happenstance, combined with being a ruthless little shit when it counted.” it’s clear that his mostly upward career trajectory was due to more than just luck.You’ll learn a lot about the cutthroat world of online ads. About how decisions are made inside Facebook, and to a lesser degree, Twitter. You’ll get some lessons in the mysterious machinations of His Holiness Paul Graham and vice-pontiff Chris Sacca. You’ll learn how to optimize your job offer, how to read a term sheet and how to win from a position of weakness. It’s information that someone who wasn’t willing to sacrifice their career at the alter of full-disclosure could never tell you. I seriously doubt you’ll ever read anything like this again.Come for the schadenfreude, stay for the insight.

If you're considering reading this book, you can read ten reviews and see how the room is split: half think that AGM is funny (if caustic), provides excellent analysis of the tech start-up world, and is brutally (if perhaps excessively) honest. The other half would label him egomaniacal, misogynistic, and a fool--a rather clever fool with the emotional depth of a pet rock. Neither would be wrong, and your enjoyment may come down to how you situate yourself to the narrative voice, which infuses every joke, story, and breakdown in this book.I've talked to some ambitious tech guys, so I had hardened myself for the man-boy , hypercompetitive, tone-deaf voice. Comparatively, I think AGM probably cut his twenty most egregious statements when writing this book. Part of that register, for me, is the fascination with reading this book, and discovering the cultural milieu that start-up culture has created and then attempted to reign in. It's like the Wolf of Wall Street, except now they are doing cocaine to work a few more hours, instead of doing cocaine on a yacht. As others have noted, AGM is effective as explaining monetization of data, tech mergers, hierarchies within tech companies, how they create leverage, and the culture of some of the most powerful companies on the planet. Unlike TV shows like Silicon Valley (ragtag bunch against the world) or The Dropout (evolution of a con-woman), this is a real, classic tale of exposing trade secrets: outsider breaks into an industry, embeds themselves within a tightly-knit network, and then cashes out with a tell-all. It's as American as apple pie or the CIA funding dictators in developing counties.

As somebody who overlapped at FB on the Ads team with the author (though we never actually worked together), I found this an extremely accurate portrayal of the company and the larger Silicon Valley culture in general. If you're interested in the inside perspective, I recommend this highly.

** spoiler alert ** Chaos Monkey is about Silicon Valley which is one of the most interesting places in the world. First, chaos monkey is a metaphor for Silicon Valley which resembles a monkey running crazy through a server farm literally punching boxes, pulling on cables etc. So like Travis Kalanick at Uber once have said – you know what, we are not going to have taxis anymore. We’re just going to have a mobile app and anybody can be a taxi driver. You’re just going to hail a taxi through your phone. Another example is Brian Chesky who once have said – you know what. We’re not going to hotels anymore. We’re just going to have an app and monetise an underutilised asset which is your spare bedroom and everyone would be a hotel keeper. So Silicon Valley is like the Zoo where the chaos monkeys are kept and there’s a lot of bananas, a lot of money to chase after.Anyway, Antonio Garcia Martinez, the author of the book, tells the honest story of working in Silicon Valley the way it really looks like. He goes into great details about meetings, planning and everything else that goes on in Silicon. He takes the reader from Goldman Sachs all the way to his stint at Facebook where he focuses in the middle of the book. It was really interesting to read his opinion that Facebook didn’t have any vision and still doesn’t have the idea where it should be heading. The thing which the company is really great at is a combination of the agile approach, a quick response towards customer needs, marketing trends and luck. You might treat his story as a kind of revenge on his former employees as he writes in a bit ranty way. Nevertheless, I believe there is much truth in his stories and reflections.The reader would see what it is like to work in the tech start-up environment. How challenging it is and how downright vicious people you could meet there. The book hits the status quo and describes certain companies in very high regard as the gold standard for corporate culture. However, the truth is... (if you like to read my full review please visit my blog https://leadersarereaders.blog/chaos-...)

Uma ótima perspectiva do que se passa no Silicon Valley e com o Facebook em especial, vindo de alguém de dentro. O Antonio Martinez é formado em física, saiu da Goldman Sachs para criar uma startup e foi para o Facebook logo depois. E o livro conta a experiência do processo, ao mesmo tempo que se afasta da situação e conta como a transição do Facebook de 2010 para 2014 refletiu na plataforma e em como se faz publicidade na internet.Um bom livro para entender a mentalidade das plataformas atuais, como acontece o processo empírico de descobrir o que dá dinheiro e o que prende a atenção das pessoas. Escrito de forma bem irreverente. Um pouco mais autobiográfico e menos sistêmico do que o que procuro ler, mas valeu bem a leitura de qualquer forma.Não sei até onde o autor é parcial para falar de si e dos colegas de trabalho, mas ele se coloca como mais um que comprou a mentalidade do FB (bebeu o Kool-Aid). Não se coloca acima disso ou como alguém que lá atrás sabia o que estava fazendo ou onde tudo ia terminar.

Liar’s Poker—remember that book? I wonder how it was received in 1989. It’s now considered a classic and is gleefully passed around summer training classes. It’s the North Star in a constellation of Wall Street memoirs spanning from Reminiscences of a Stock Operator (1923) to Straight to Hell (2015). I’ve spent many a night gazing into this galaxy, exploring some celestial objects that are little more than dimly lit orbs of gaseous matter.In Liar’s Poker, which is one of about four Wall Street books that anyone should ever consider reading twice, Michael Lewis (who is now a respected American novelist) details his experience during the glory days of Salomon Brothers, an investment bank that specialized in bond trading. Lewis wrote astutely of everything from his days in training class (which is probably why new recruits find the book so charming) to the big swinging d****s (high performers) who roamed the trading floor, to the game that is the book’s namesake. Through all of this, Lewis was on the sidelines. In fact, he might have only been in New York for summer training and spent the rest of his time in London. He had no importance to the story—and an endearing criticism of the book is that he was just a snarky little twentysomething who ended up writing what was, to 1980s Wall Street, received as if it were tabloid journalism. Many have tried and failed to capture the magic of the company exposé like Michael Lewis did. Dan Lyons wrote Disrupted, which was about his time at Hubspot, in a similar vein, but it was nothing compared to Liar’s Poker. As soon as it becomes obvious that someone is sticking around just for the story, some of the magic is lost. So one must walk a fine line when writing a Liar’s Poker.Antonio Martinez goes overboard on a few occasions, but he’s come closer than anyone else to writing the Liar’s Poker of Silicon Valley. And this is not an easy thing to do. Michael Lewis himself attempted to write the Liar’s Poker of Silicon Valley. It was called The New New Thing and was published in 1999. It’s now embarrassingly dated and has been relegated to the lowest quartile of Lewis’ published works ranking. There is a parallel between the excesses of 1980s Wall Street and late 90’s Silicon Valley, but the book was forgettable. It didn’t read the same way that Liar’s Poker did. Michael Lewis failed to write the Liar’s Poker of Silicon Valley. Why did we have to wait seventeen years for a quant to come along and commit career suicide with the goal of delivering it?First and foremost, Antonio Martinez knows what he’s talking about. He’s exceptionally well-read, smart, ambitious, and has high emotional intelligence. One of my favorite thing to do is bust phonies like Tai Lopez who claim to be voracious readers and aren’t. Faced with mountains of well-selected quotes, tight editing, and advanced vocabulary, I believe Antonio when he says he spent his childhood in the library. He convinced me to read Meditations with one great quote selection. This gives him significant credibility as a narrator, and affords him some room to make derisive statements, such as calling Nassim Taleb a pseudo-intellectual.Antonio knows what he’s talking about because he followed the noble path of starting as an engineer before transitioning to project management. During these years, he was at the forefront of advancements in the ad space. He knew the business so well and was able to seamlessly describe what was going on. Unlike Wall Street, which always is accompanied by a murky foreboding, the implications of digital ad technology are both very real and very easy to understand. He did a wonderful job explaining his industry, his role in the industry, and the valley as a whole.So, why isn’t this book considered a modern classic?We’ll start with a softball. Character development is poor compared to a Lewis book. Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg: we know them. A few others: geeks like me know them. The other actors are hard to connect with because Antonio’s narration style is overwhelming. Saying he’s an egoist might be a stretch, but he remained the center of attention throughout. Also, the monikers ‘British Trader’ and ‘Israeli Psychologist’ were ill-conceived. To me, those are two of the worst countries to use as descriptors because there’s no consistency in the mental images readers will generate. The only character I really remember is the CMU football player, but only because the guy who sits next to me at work also played there, also studied engineering there, and shares some facial features. When it comes to storytelling, Antonio is talented, but he and Michael Lewis apply their wit differently. On one hand, it’s a wildly fun read. On the other hand, it sacrifices the potential for cultural longevity to appeal to what people like me want to read right now. Will people be reading Tucker Max in ten years? Shenanigans are funny, but unless you’re a master of the craft, it’s hard to phrase these things timelessly (not to suggest Antonio was trying to be timeless, or that timelessness is even a goal worth pursuing when writing a memoir). To that point, the DUI incident and reckless driving were kind of dumb.Generally, the way Antonio discusses his relationships women will be perceived as politically incorrect. I don’t care. But the flippancy of it all irked me. His relationship with British Trader leading to the birth of their first child fit into the story well, but after that it became haphazard. The reader is left without any real comprehension of the nature of Antonio’s relationships with women or his children. And if all of this irked me, there is no doubt that it’s the main reason the book has been rebuked within certain circles. Antonio never could have predicted popular opinion moving so harshly against the alpha male, but more prudence would have gone a long way here. Liar’s Poker was meant to serve as a warning; it’s remembered for being an arousal. Chaos Monkeys was intended to be an electrifying, divisive, no-holds-barred memoir. It will be remembered as an electrifying, divisive, no-holds-barred memoir.View this review and others on my blog

Were it not for the possibility of legal complications, Chaos Monkeys could have been titled “Fear and Loathing in Silicon Valley.” It is a unique blend of high stakes gambling, sex, alcohol and hubris. For those willing to wade through technical detail, it shows how Internet applications like Facebook and Google convert pixels into dollars. For the rest of us, the story of the excruciatingly hard work and intense drama that go into both a startup company and the internal machinations of an established, aggressive hi-tech company provide plenty of drama.Garcia Martinez is obviously widely read. His well chosen chapter heading quotes and references to disparate sources make that clear. His writing is articulate, fast paced, intense and focused. The fact that he names names and gives an insider perspective to well known events makes the story an especially interesting one.Having been sucked in, ground up and spit out of the Silicon Valley madness, Garcia Martinez is talking about taking off on a circumnavigation aboard his sailboat. One cannot help but wonder if he can make the change from the pressure and fast pace of his old existence to the new. I hope so.

If Antonio Martinez never writes another book, he will still go down as the author who best captured the Zeitgeist in the hottest (dare I say central?) industry of our times. Much like Michael Lewis’ debut a short 26 years ago, this is the story of a young graduate who lands a seat at the high table without having formally been invited, makes the most of it, keeps his sanity and lives to tell.So you follow him from the Vampire Squid to Adchemy, you cheer for him when he persuades two engineers to leave and help him set up AdGrok, you do the math alongside him when he’s selling to Twitter and Facebook at the same time, you pitch FBX (Facebook Exchange) with him to Sheryl… I guess I’ve spoilt it enough, let’s leave it there.You may cringe at language that would make Matt Taibbi blush, but the profanity is always a propos and would certainly never be out of place at the series of workplaces where this drama unfolds. The author’s writing is truly mesmerizing, constantly reminding me that no matter how hard I try I shall never be able to write as well as the truly gifted. Martinez’ command of the English language is only bettered by his grasp of the nowadays high tech business of persuasion and his ability to convey the basics to the reader. Now I’ve read Chaos Monkeys I have some faint idea of how it all works.Here’s to hoping that he’s got more books in him.

No bullshit from a bullshitter. Funny, savage and truth-too-close-to-home depressing.I listened to the audiobook. I expect I'll revisit to dig into some of the heavier material while skimming the cynicism and personal attacks.

I so wanted to hate this book. I really did. What is not there to hate, a misogynistic jerk constantly bragging about how he took sleazy shortcuts for personal gains, had sex in the Facebook closets, and sweet talked himself out of a DUI case by pulling his white privilege card. You can hate the misogynistic rhetoric, but God this guy can write. And ironically he writes an honest story to the point of even disclosing his pay and salary at twitter. I do not know many honest people in Silicon Valley but I know many jerks. And this guy happened to be both. His style of writing is mirroring Antony Bourdain’s kitchen confidential to a great length. In fact you can replace “founder” with “ chef du cuisine”, “engineer” with “chef de partie” and VC with “garbage man” and it is pretty much the same story. The story of greed and backstabbing, mixed with sex and laced with profanity and drenched in a deep layer of pessimism. He doesn’t burn bridges, he nukes them and pees all over the ashes just to signal he was there. How can you hate a book when the content is honest and entertaining and the writing is impeccable. I watched a few of the interviews of the author and he came across as a very real persona. And the jerk that he portrayed in his book is completely absent in his interviews. At times I wondered if the chauvinist pessimist in the book is just an imaginary self for this author. Like a good erotic novel I binged this book. Like a divorced chubby man who is left with nothing but a bucket of ice cream, I shoved my faced in it and ate it all in one sitting. It wasn’t healthy but it felt so good when it was going down. All that sugar and gossip clogging my veins was all I needed in between my healthy meals of salad and Silicon Valley bullshit.

Hope King ran her review of Chaos Monkeys on CNN Money under the title “New book compares Facebook’s culture to fascism but fails to prove it.” The subtitle is equally revealing, concluding that the book “reads like four year’s worth of Medium posts from a scorned man.”Clearly, Antonio Garcia Martinez has rubbed a whole lot of people the wrong way, and not just one reviewer for CNN Money. His takedown of Silicon Valley’s culture in general and Facebook’s in particular is withering, but writing it all off to spite is grossly unfair. Chaos Monkeys reveals the ins and outs of venture capital, the vicissitudes of launching a tech company, the intricacies of compensation in Silicon Valley, the divide between the Valley’s “haves” (early hires) and “have-nots” (most of the rest), and the internecine warfare among the behemoths of the technology world (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft). And Martinez writes about it all in a take-no-prisoners style that is at once profane, colorful, and incisive. Though it’s all viewed through the eyes of one unhappy veteran of the Valley, Chaos Monkeys is nonetheless an important book. The author is clearly brilliant, uncannily articulate, and an unusually sharp observer. Discount the seething anger that seeps between the lines, and you’ll emerge from reading this book with a much clearer picture of what life in Silicon Valley is like.A lucid insider’s accountChaos Monkeys is a lucid insider’s account of three years of life and work in the belly of the Silicon Valley beast. Martinez shreds the reputations of many of those he worked with, not just at Facebook but (previously) at Goldman Sachs and (later) at two other San Francisco tech companies. With only a couple of exceptions, no one comes across as worse than Martinez himself. Chaos Monkeys, as much confessional as expose, is imbued throughout with the author’s cynicism. However, he urges us not to “be deceived by my withering criticism of Facebook in this book; inside every cynic lives a heartbroken idealist. If I’m now a mordant critic, it’s because at one point, like Lucifer once being the proudest angel before the fall, I too lived and breathed for Facebook, perhaps even more than most.” Martinez is as disdainful of his own behavior as he is of others.A warped perception of life in AmericaUnfortunately, the author ingenuously reveals his own warped values. Explaining that after four years at Facebook (he was only there for two), his compensation would have amounted to nearly $1 million per year. Then he complains that “it was really about $550,000 take-home per year, or about twelve times the median US family income . . . This was about San Francisco middle class, or barely, really.” (Really??!!) “Coupled with another tech salary from a spouse, it would be the high-six-figure take-home that would permit a normal, though not posh, life in what was becoming the country’s priciest city.” One million dollars per year?? Middle class?? Give me a break!About the authorAntonio Garcia Martinez left a highly paid job as a “quant” at Goldman Sachs for a two-year stint at a firm developing software and services for online advertisers. Then, with two coworkers, he left to co-found a startup in the same field. In just one year, the three sold their business to Twitter — but Martinez managed to escape the deal and take a lucrative middle-management job at Facebook. His two years there forms the bulk of Chaos Monkeys.

Gawd. This four star rating is so hard to give. I hate myself for liking this book so much. Honestly, I would have given this book 2 stars had I not listened to the interview with Dan John Miller and the author following. Seriously, Antonio Garcia Martinez sounds so much more thoughtful during that interview than he seems in the book. In the book, he sounds so punchable. Like right in the yabbos punchable. Like could you please try to see women as people rather than objects to fuck? We are humans. I swear to God.Rant over. To me, this book is akin to a gossip rag about people I know. Having lived and worked in Silicon Valley/San Francisco for the last decade, I am all too familiar with this story and these people. This read was kind of like binging 5 years of Valleywag (RIP).This book is so well written, but it's incredibly glib, and I'm not sure what the central thesis is after considering it. So, here's what I learned:1) Antonio Garcia Martinez is on a kamikaze mission to destroy only himself, tech will march on. But also, he's got enough money and some excellent writing chops and he will be fine contrary to his belly aching about not making a fortune after selling his FB shares. He should keep writing and just keep his thoughts about women to himself2) The author is right about many things, just not women. Seriously bro, stop acting like a douche. Even if it is just a persona, you're alienating a large swath of humanity 3) There are not enough women working in tech and Sheryl Sandberg can't police all the dudes, but I'm glad to hear she tries4) The musings on privacy are especially interesting given the author's willingness to put everything on the table. It makes sense because Facebook 5) Toiling away this hard for a company isn't worth it. You're trading your life for a chunk of money that regardless of how large it seems to us work-a-day chumps, it's never going to seem like enough to you when it's over

Cracking, rip-roaring whirl through modern Silicon Valley.Highly recommended for techies.Unflinching description of people, politics, work and places in tech land. The non YC investors are hilariously described. I suspect author does not have the ability to self criticize; nevertheless worth your time.

An incredibly accurate and insightful portrayal of Silicon Valley life, in both startups and large companies (Facebook in this case). It's also very relatable to me personally, having lived through similar experiences during the same time period (e.g. selling a startup to Twitter in 2012).

In case your eyes are still sparkling about Silicon Valley riches, incredible startup life and how you're going to make it big in tech, this cynical perspective on SF drama might just be for you.Antonio destroys his family, loses touch with his two kids, burns through his early youth years and at the end has very little to show for other than a hindsight look at how tech companies work and how less magical but still full of politics they are. There's not much new here if you've been working in the field but it's definitely an amazing perspective for those still green or without much experience.From the VC dance, to the insane startup working hours to the even crazier product development cycle (hint: most people have no idea what they're doing and eventually cause hits much more because they try everything and not because they're pure geniuses), the semi-religions and cultural movements that are started and propagated throughout this neo-Capitalism theater.You get to learn a few terms that come and go frequently in startup life, the many mistakes he made, how much meritocracy actually counts and the very well known problem that if you're not getting money in all you have to provide is your labour, Karl Marx style. The goal here is not to make you run away from tech, it's still and is most likely going to continue to be one of the best paying fields available for common people, but acts as a cautionary tale that all is not rainbows and unicorns.