Notebook for Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley Martinez, Antonio Garcia Citation (APA): Martinez, A. G. (2016). Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley [Kindle Android version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com Prologue: The Garden of Forking Paths Highlight (yellow) - Page 8 As I observed more than once at Facebook, and as I imagine is the case in all organizations from business to government, high-level decisions that affected thousands of people and billions in revenue would be made on gut feel, the residue of whatever historical politics were in play, and the ability to cater persuasive messages to people either busy, impatient, or uninterested (or all three). PART ONE: Disturbing the Peace Highlight (yellow) - The Undertakers of Capitalism > Page 25 To paraphrase the very quotable Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, in the future there will be two types of jobs: people who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do. Highlight (yellow) - The Undertakers of Capitalism > Page 26 an incumbent in a market dominated by a few, with total information asymmetry, and the ability to make prices on the market rather than just take them, has little incentive to increase transparency. Highlight (yellow) - The Undertakers of Capitalism > Page 26 many markets were and are inefficient, because that inefficiency is very profitable to those running the market, even if only in the short-term picture. Highlight (yellow) - The Undertakers of Capitalism > Page 30 In all my experience in both startups and large companies, including and especially at Facebook, I would always prefer—a hundred times prefer—being subject to the rigors of the market, the fickleness of luck, and the whims of users than to navigate the popularity-contest politics of a large company, surrounded by the mediocre duffers who’ve succeeded in life through nothing more than guile and appearances. Highlight (yellow) - The Human Attention Exchange > Page 35 One week into my new Silicon Valley life, and the lesson was this: if you want to be a startup entrepreneur, get used to negotiating from positions of weakness. Highlight (yellow) - Knowing How to Swim > Page 42 An empty pageant; a stage play; flocks of sheep, herds of cattle; a bone flung among a pack of dogs; a crumb tossed into a pond of fish; ants, loaded and laboring; mice, scared and scampering; puppets, jerking on their strings; that is life. In the midst of it all you must take your stand, good-temperedly and without disdain, yet always aware that a man’s worth is no greater than the worth of his ambitions. —Marcus Aurelius, Meditations Note - Knowing How to Swim > Page 42 Note to self to read Meditations Highlight (yellow) - Knowing How to Swim > Page 42 It’s not the rats who first abandon a sinking ship. It’s the crew members who know how to swim. Highlight (yellow) - Knowing How to Swim > Page 42 Real-life experience is instructive, but the tuition is high. Note - Knowing How to Swim > Page 42 Experience is a great teacher but woe is the man who can only learn from it. Books and experience. Mind and hand. Highlight (yellow) - Knowing How to Swim > Page 42 The first sign of trouble was an externally visible one, a symptom that any suitably experienced startup practitioner could have detected: nobody from the early days of the company was still around other than Murthy. Highlight (yellow) - Knowing How to Swim > Page 43 As Vonnegut wrote in Bluebeard, never trust the survivor of a massacre until you know what he did to survive. Highlight (yellow) - Knowing How to Swim > Page 44 In the same way that a trust fund just makes a drug addict’s spiral more long lasting and painful, a cash-generating business that doesn’t improve the product postpones the inevitable by floating the charade, all the while actually making failure more likely. Highlight (yellow) - Knowing How to Swim > Page 49 Ideas without implementation, or without an exceptional team to implement them, are like assholes and opinions: everyone’s got one. Highlight (yellow) - Knowing How to Swim > Page 49 the fastest way you can indicate your level of startup naïveté to a VC (or to anybody in tech), is either by claiming you’re in “stealth”—that is, with an idea so secretly valuable you can’t disclose it—or by forcing someone to sign a nondisclosure agreement before you even discuss it. You may as well tattoo LOSER on your forehead instead, to save everyone the trouble. Highlight (yellow) - Knowing How to Swim > Page 50 When confronted with any startup idea, ask yourself one simple question: How many miracles have to happen for this to succeed? Highlight (yellow) - Knowing How to Swim > Page 51 The classic sign of a shitty startup idea is that it requires at least two (or more!) miracles to succeed. Highlight (yellow) - Abandoning the Shipwreck > Page 73 Engineers can be so smart about code, and yet so dense about human motivations. They’d be better served by reading less Neal Stephenson and more Shakespeare and Patricia Highsmith. PART TWO: Pseudorandomness Highlight (yellow) - Like Marriage, but without the Fucking > Page 89 Here’s how it needs to be: either you’ve achieved a certain Vulcan-quality mind-meld with your founders, your brains welded together in the crucible of some formative life experience like the military or hard-won work experience, or there’s one guy running the show (with at least 51 percent of the equity). End of story. Highlight (yellow) - Like Marriage, but without the Fucking > Page 90 As PG told us all: Have a leader! Accept that he or she is a dictator. Don’t like it? Think you can make a better captain? Then get the fuck out and find your own startup ship to run. Highlight (yellow) - Like Marriage, but without the Fucking > Page 93 People go into startups thinking that the technical problems are the challenges. In practice, the technical stuff is easy, unless you’re incompetent or really at the hairy edge of human knowledge—for example, putting a man on Mars. No, every real problem in startups is a people problem, and as such they’re the hardest to solve, as they often don’t have a real solution, much less a ready software fix. Highlight (yellow) - The Hill of Sand > Page 125 In VC, as often in life, it’s the incompetent and insecure who are generally the assholes; the masterful and successful—not to mention those universally perceived as the best in their field—are playing the long game. You never know where the next Airbnb is coming from. Highlight (yellow) - The Hill of Sand > Page 129 One quick way to cut through the shit: 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 (whether he or she acts like one or not). Highlight (yellow) - Turning and Turning in the Widening Gyre > Page 134 The Prince: war is never avoided; it’s only postponed to someone’s advantage. Highlight (yellow) - Turning and Turning in the Widening Gyre > Page 136 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, Highlight (yellow) - The Dog Shit Sandwich > Page 158 Whenever you face some stressful, time-consuming, and risky challenge, firewall the rest of the company away from the mess. They’ll likely add no value, and the attendant uncertainty will corrode their productivity when you likely need it most. No matter what happens in the outside world—lawsuit, money issues, the fucking zombie apocalypse—do not let it infect the company’s headspace and become the top item in the internal narrative. Highlight (yellow) - The Dog Shit Sandwich > Page 164 In my limited experience, there are two traits that distinguish successful startup founders at whatever level of the game, Highlight (yellow) - The Dog Shit Sandwich > Page 164 First, the ability to monomaniacally and obsessively focus on one thing and one thing only, at the expense of everything else in life. Highlight (yellow) - The Dog Shit Sandwich > Page 165 Second, the ability to take and endure endless amounts of shit. Highlight (yellow) - Launching! > Page 172 I observe that some men, like bad runners in the stadium, abandon their purposes when close to the goal; while it is at that particular point, more than at any other, that others secure the victory over their rivals. —Polybius, Histories Note - Launching! > Page 172 I should remember this. I am guilty of this. One should push hard and fast, up til the end. Highlight (yellow) - Launching! > Page 176 The quicker we iterate, the more steps we can take in the direction of this mythical point of perfect fit. Highlight (yellow) - Dates @Twitter > Page 178 Walking into any meeting, you should know every goddamn thing there is to know about the other person; if you don’t, you’re failing. Quoth Emerson and the intro screen to Mortal Kombat 3: “There is no knowledge that is not power,” and that’s especially true in terms of people. That means a combined Facebook-Twitter-LinkedIn stalk at least. Highlight (yellow) - Dates @Twitter > Page 191 What a company builds (SVP, Product), how it builds it (SVP, Engineering), how that eventual product is operationally run (COO), and what other companies it buys (Corp Dev): those are the core functions of any large tech company, Highlight (yellow) - Getting Poked > Page 216 stalking each and every interviewer.* Note - Getting Poked > Page 216 Interesting. Naive me would have never thought stalking was so important. Goes to show I'm no poker player either. Highlight (yellow) - The Dotted Line > Page 244 This old guy knew that, which is why he was racing reckless young jackasses like me. He probably had a wife, kids, property, and all that bougie shit, and yet the moment he saw a challenger in his rearview, he tossed that aside for a bit of the old screeching rubber. The fact he was risking all that he had achieved by committing felonious acts of reckless driving, reckless endangerment, and “exhibition of speed” (to use the California penal code’s name for it) was immaterial. He didn’t get to that Porsche by turning down all-in challenges. Neither will you, gentle reader. PART THREE: Move Fast and Break Things Highlight (yellow) - Product Masseur > Page 274 Facebook always had a high-level report for every area, whether it was ads or growth or something else, with the key number that defined success set off in large yellow letters in the upper left of the screen. Note - Product Masseur > Page 275 This is probably the North Star metric Highlight (yellow) - Product Masseur > Page 278 The Ads team’s mandate was very simple: make more money, but don’t piss off users while doing so. Highlight (yellow) - Product Masseur > Page 279 It was clear that nobody—and I do mean nobody—in the Ads team had ever worked at any sort of advertising company. Highlight (yellow) - Product Masseur > Page 279 Everyone on the Ads team seemed to have been vetted for Facebook acceptability and values, but nobody (other than perhaps the aforementioned former Googlers) had any notion of what the outside ads world was like. What was weirder, everyone seemed absolutely cool with that. They didn’t know what they didn’t know, and it was a feature rather than a bug. Note - Product Masseur > Page 280 Interesting to note. When looking for people to run your business hire people with specific skills / industry knowledge, not just paper or even worse, unrelated, skills. There's a caveat here though as discussed in the next paragraphs: you need people with fresh ideas, unburdened by Einstellung. The key is balance perhaps, someone with a marketing background but is creative and innovative. Highlight (yellow) - Product Masseur > Page 280 Any culture able to shut itself off from the outside world goes insane in its own unique way, Highlight (yellow) - Google Delenda Est > Page 282 By itself, genius can produce original thoughts just as little as a woman by herself can bear children. Outward circumstances must come to fructify genius, and be, as it were, a father to its progeny. —Arthur Schopenhauer, “On Genius,” The Art of Literature Highlight (yellow) - Google Delenda Est > Page 286 Companies are like countries: the populations really vote only with their feet, either coming or going. Highlight (yellow) - Google Delenda Est > Page 288 Carthago delenda est. ‘Carthage must be destroyed.’ Highlight (yellow) - Leaping Headlong > Page 294 As in life, so in business: maintain a bias for action over inaction. Highlight (yellow) - Leaping Headlong > Page 295 In essence, I had earned my spurs: I had safely shipped new product the market seemed to want, leveraging an engineering team that respected my product guidance, and with a plan to iterate the product going forward, with metrics to mark our progress. In a nutshell, that’s what Facebook expected of its product managers. Highlight (yellow) - Leaping Headlong > Page 296 You make what you measure, so measure carefully. Highlight (yellow) - The Narcissism of Privacy > Page 329 If you stop for a moment and realize how suicidally stupid it would be for Facebook to hand over its data on users to anyone, for any amount of money, you’ll realize how tired that “Facebook sells your data” meme is. Note - The Narcissism of Privacy > Page 329 But in an earlier chapter there was stuff about having an internal group that showcases those who were arrested. What if motivations change later on from arresting legitimate criminals to those who dissent from certain power structures? Highlight (yellow) - O Death > Page 337 When we moved into Menlo Park, there were Sun logos on lots of conference room doors and public spaces. Rather than remove them all, Zuck ordered that a few of them remain. Like corporate memento mori, they were to remind employees that Facebook could also go the way of extinction, and be reduced one day to logos and swag. Highlight (yellow) - O Death > Page 342 the first rule of startups is also true of any fast-paced, competitive workplace like Facebook: act like you belong there, even if you don’t. Highlight (yellow) - Going Public > Page 353 The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist, and its power is employed above all to enforce this claim. Highlight (yellow) - Going Public > Page 355 As the ever-sagacious @gselevator quoted: in communism people made lines for bread, while in capitalism they make lines for iPhones. Highlight (yellow) - Going Public > Page 359 Say what you like about Marxism in practice, but it describes our contemporary technobourgeois society exactly. Highlight (yellow) - Monetizing the Tumor > Page 373 Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell. —Edward Abbey, The Journey Home Note - Monetizing the Tumor > Page 373 So we must grow towards something, but what if we don't know what to grow towards yet? Isn't readying oneself a good thing while the ideas do not flow yet? Highlight (yellow) - The Great Awakening > Page 389 All ambitious men want either to please their fathers or to punch them in the goddamned face. Highlight (yellow) - Barbarians at the Gates > Page 399 He was a brogrammer, a title he wore with pride. This was a species of educated, well-socialized frat boy who coded PHP or C++, all the while maintaining the dress and hygiene of a college junior at the Alpha Tau Omega house at UVA.* He was, in many ways, the antithesis of the unkempt basement dweller people call to mind when thinking about programmers. Think instead of Bluto (played by John Belushi) in Animal House, but slimmed down, and with a computer science education (and perhaps even $200 sunglasses). Code, curls, and girls, those were the priorities of the day, and in that order.* Note - Barbarians at the Gates > Page 400 Lol Highlight (yellow) - IPA > IPO > Page 404 The more one limits oneself, the closer one is to the infinite; these people, as unworldly as they seem, burrow like termites into their own particular material to construct, in miniature, a strange and utterly individual image of the world. —Stefan Zweig, Chess Story Highlight (yellow) - IPA > IPO > Page 412 The fastest way to cheapen anything—be it a woman, a favor, or a work of art—is to put a price tag on it. And that’s what capitalism is, a busy greengrocer going through his store with a price-sticker machine—ka-CHUNK! ka-CHUNK!—$4.10 for eggs, $5 for coffee at Sightglass, $5,000 per month for a run-down one-bedroom in the Mission. Highlight (yellow) - Full Frontal Facebook > Page 436 To be someone or to do something, which would I choose?* A man occasionally reaches a fork in life’s path. One road leads to doing something, to making an impact on his organization and his world. To being true to his values and vision, and standing with the other men who’ve helped build that vision. He will have to trust himself when all men doubt him, and as a reward, he will have the scorn of his professional circle heaped on his head. He will not be favored by his superiors, nor win the polite praise of his conformist peers. But maybe, just maybe, he has the chance to be right, and create something of lasting value that will transcend the consensus mediocrity inherent in any organization, even supposedly disruptive ones. Highlight (yellow) - Ad Majorem Facebook Gloriam > Page 456 There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat, And we must take the current when it serves, Or lose our ventures. —William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar Highlight (yellow) - Pandemonium Lost > Page 479 Always show enough skin to get a second date. If in doubt, show more. Epilogue: Man Plans and God Laughs Highlight (yellow) - Pandemonium Lost > Page 496 Theodor Herzl, “If you will it, it is no dream; and if you do not will it, a dream it will remain.”