An unvarnished look at Facebook
Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley is a chronicle of author Antonio Garcia Martinez’s journey from the moment he left his job as a number cruncher at Goldman Sachs in New York, to joining an advertising startup, to launching his own entrepreneurial adventure, to working for Facebook in its pre-initial public offering phase and eventually landing at Twitter.
The book plunges into the everyday workplace realities in Silicon Valley and the startup years of Facebook: the frenzied turns, the bosses’ decisions and actions, and toe-curling office politics. The “monkeys” referred to in the book title are essentially software programs created to cause confusion on a computer system to test its resilience. But the term is used by Garcia Martinez metaphorically to demonstrate how “successful disruption often comes as much from luck as from skill.”
The New York Times bestseller is truly an interesting read if only because Garcia Martinez provides a more private look at Facebook. As an insider, he shares interesting details like how women employees are expected to wear “non-revealing clothing” and that managers “were in constant battle with each other over perceived slights.”
He lets you in on the time FB staff defaced their office with “crude cave drawings when they were handed spray cans and told by Zuck (Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg) to create something authentic on the walls.”
Or how about the time Zuck commanded his company to operate in “lockdown” mode? Or how teams work around the clock and on weekends, using eccentric team-building exercises and motivational posters.
Garcia Martinez further reveals, “Facebook, though assumed to be a rich repository of user data, did not in fact have much commercially useful data at all. Social plugin data, despite its ominous and all-pervasive nature, might fall into that same depressing category.”
The author claims to cling to an attitude of doing what’s best for the products, rather than making choices based on office politics. “Don’t be deceived by my withering treatment of Facebook,” he says. “Inside every cynic lives a heartbroken idealist.” And he recognizes the role of his critics as he writes in the book’s dedication: “To all my enemies: I could not have done it without you.”
Despite his criticisms, García Martínez gives Facebook credit for cultivating loyal employees and producing enviable products. “Workers join the company because its products serve millions of people,” he writes. “They aren’t in it for the money. They are true believers who really, really will not stop until every man, woman and child on earth is staring into a blue-framed window with a Facebook logo.” Facebook declined to comment on the author’s observations in the book.
There are a number of key takeaways and quotable quotes that you can glean from Garcia Martinez’s contrarian but gleeful views:
Don’t quit your day job and if you do, make something people will pay for. Learn what it takes for a startup to make it. You have to have luck, be a great pitch person, and get even luckier. There can only be one person in charge at a startup and “the more cooks at the stove, the worse the stew.”
You might be David vs. Goliath. You may think yourself a puny midget among giants when you join the marketplace and suddenly confront a giant via litigation or direct competition. But the reality is that larger companies often have more to fear from you than you from them. As long as you maintain unit cohesion and a shared sense of purpose, and have the basic rudiments of living, you will outlast, outfight, and out-rage any company that sets out to destroy you. Men with nothing to lose will stop at nothing to win.
Two traits distinguish successful startup founders at whatever level of the game, from minuscule to epoch-changing. 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 nonsense.
There are no eternal allies and no perpetual enemies. That’s how companies like Facebook are. They merely have “eternal and perpetual interests,” as Lord Palmerston put it.
Embracing change isn’t enough. It has to be so hardwired into who we are that even talking about it seems redundant. The Internet is not a friendly place. Things that don’t stay relevant don’t even get the luxury of leaving ruins. They disappear.
A man with conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point, according to Leon Festinger.
Never let the facts get in the way of a good story. That’s the old Fleet Street mantra that is a law when it comes to product marketing in tech.
Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.
The ego drives, and honor compels, and stubbornness steels the will that moderation and judgment might sap.
“If you will it, it is no dream; and if you do not will it, a dream it will remain,” said Theodor Herzl.
Investors are people with more money than time. Employees are people with more time than money.
Entrepreneurs are simply the seductive go-betweens.
Marketing is like sex. Only losers pay for it.
People who leak to you, leak about you.
Most managers are incompetent. They maintain their jobs via inertia and politics.
People don’t really change. They just become better actors.
One quick way to cut through the s**t: 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.
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.
Love is grand, but hate and fear last longer.
There is no knowledge that is not power.
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Chaos Monkeys is available at National Book Store. Email bongosorio@gmail.com for comments, questions or suggestions. Thank you for communicating.
