
Excerpt from Chaos Monkeys by Antonio García Martínez (2016) - melenaboija
https://www.wired.com/2016/06/how-i-sold-my-company-to-twitter-went-to-facebook-and-screwed-my-co-founders/
======
flunhat
The book is ok — it has plenty of interesting stories about Facebook during
its heady IPO ish era. And a bunch of great startup-y tales.

But what kills the reading experience for me are the constant
metaphors/analogies/similes/parentheticals/whatever the author keeps making.
It’s funny if it’s done sparingly, but he just interlards every passage with
them. Like so:

“After my day of interviews, I had imagined that MRM and Facebook would get
along about as well as a Berkeley hippie and a Marine scout sniper, and I was
right.”

It’s funny, but imagine an entire book (that’s otherwise a good read) filled
with these sometimes successful attempts at humor. It gets tiring after a few
chapters.

Just 50% less of it would’ve made the book waaay better IMO. Plus humor like
that usually lands better if you use it sparingly.

~~~
0898
I have to disagree. I enjoyed the use of metaphor, and actually highlighted
several on my Kindle.

# "Zuck had once famously derided [Twitter] as 'a clown car that drove into a
gold mine'"

# "One of the Harvard mafiosi got into the habit of theatening engineers that
he'd "punch them in the face" if they messed up. Quod licet Bozi, non licet
bovi. Gods may do what cattle may not."

# "Eventually, Russia, India, Brazil and parts of Africa will fall into the
Growth team's patient ministrations. Then, Mark Zuckerberg, like a young
Alexander the Great at the Indus River, will weep for having no more world to
conquer."

~~~
flunhat
It’s like eating a cake made purely out of frosting -- fun at first, but then
it just becomes too much after a hundred pages or so.

~~~
idoby
I wish I could upvote you twice for the irony

~~~
agustif
Need to ask for that meta-upvote feature

------
kristianc
I always have a hard time with books that seem to be trying to create a second
wave of success on "Hey, look what an asshole I was."

If you've realized that you've been a jerk, you owe it to yourself to
recognize that and keep quiet about it, not try to turn the fact that you were
a jerk into your next big opportunity.

~~~
toomuchtodo
This requires quantities of humility and empathy some people don’t have.

------
habosa
I bought that book a while ago and never opened it. Never will now, that was
just very poorly written and uninteresting. Felt like reading a fake story
about Silicon Valley on a high school kids Tumblr.

~~~
bko
I did read the book and your impressions are correct. The narrator comes off
as very immature and a total jerk. A few examples:

\- After getting let go from Facebook he describes peeling out of the parking
lot and speeding on campus

\- He has a whole chapter on a sexual encounter he had with a colleague at
work that had no bearing on the story

\- He doesn't even bother naming the woman who bore two of his children,
referring to her only as "London Trader". Even a pseudonym would have been
appropriate if he wanted to keep her anonymity. His whole relationship with
her was cringey and the author was not the least bit self-aware.

~~~
tartoran
All this bragging and assholery speaks volumes about their pronounced
narcissistic traits. Unfortunately our culture makes for this type of
behaviour to thrive because making money and bragging about it is what sells.

------
goatinaboat
_In October 2010, a mother in Florida had shaken her baby to death, as the
baby would interrupt her FarmVille games with crying. A mother destroyed with
her own hands what she’d been programmed over aeons to love, just to keep on
responding to Facebook notifications triggered by some idiot game. Products
that cause mothers to murder their infants in order to use them more, assuming
they’re legal, simply cannot fail in the world_

Everything you need to know about everyone involved in this.

~~~
tybit
Yeah I wasn’t sure if he was going for dark humour there, but it just read as
though he is a despicable human being.

~~~
gurumeditations
Someone without morality or guilt or shame or a conscience can’t really be
called a human being. Someone who displays the same sociopathic traits and
narcissistic love for their traits as Chaos Monkey’s author seems to would’ve
made a fine Nazi commander.

~~~
NateEag
People who do horrible things are absolutely still human beings.

The test is your genome, not your actions.

If your life philosophy does not account for that, it needs to be replaced.

Dehumanizing people does not stop them from mistreating others - it encourages
more of the same.

------
rluhar
I read the book when it came out. It is an interesting snapshot of a
particular period in technology history but, as in any memoir, it comes with
heavy dose of the author’s personality. I finished the book because the time
period is interesting (social media maturing, Facebook and Twitter both
growing, the start of “SV bro” Culture etc).. but I found parts of the book
incredibly, teeth-grindingly irritating. YMMV.

------
rsanek
I found the book pretty enjoyable. The description of advertising technology
could be more lucid, the portion on Facebook seemed a tad long, and the
romantic intrigues were pretty tame to be mentioned. Still, there's alot to
like: I enjoyed the autobiographical tour from quant to startup employee to
startup founder to grown-up startup employee to unemployed, particularly the
description of the AdGrok acquisition talks. It's always difficult to
ascertain what might or might not be true in these kinds of books, but I was
left feeling like a friend of Martinez, him pulling back the curtain a bit and
letting slip a few secrets, me discovering cracks in the Silicon Valley blend
of meritocracy and 'we're changing the world' companies.

Recommended read, though the meat of the book is in the first 1/2 to 2/3\.
Tone is pretty polarizing, though clearly I was a fan.

------
mtlynch
I read this last year. The story was interesting, but the author comes across
as abrasive and irritating.

Here are my notes on the useful takeaways:

[https://mtlynch.io/book-reports/chaos-monkeys/](https://mtlynch.io/book-
reports/chaos-monkeys/)

------
Cactus2018
NYT "Review of ‘Chaos Monkeys’, Silicon Valley tell-all"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12003912](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12003912)

85 comments

~~~
Cactus2018
"I am Antonio Garcia Martinez, a tech entrepreneur who lied to my investors.
AMA."

[https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5b4tqe/i_am_antonio_g...](https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5b4tqe/i_am_antonio_garcia_martinez_a_tech_entrepreneur/)

and

"I'm an ex-Facebook exec: don't believe what they tell you about ads
(theguardian.com)"

131 comments
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14250910](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14250910)

------
boffinism
Needs a "(2016)" in the title. The article, like the book, is years old.

------
melenaboija
It is still surprising to me all these stories that sound like science fiction
and create heroes and villains that drive so many people motivations.

I wonder how this small bubble will be seen in 500 years

~~~
karatestomp
> I wonder how this small bubble will be seen in 500 years

How much do you know about the movers & shakers in steel production in AD 1520
Toledo? Same, but spice trade merchant-empires in Italy? How many people know
more than like 5 names and a couple events or anecdotes (which may or may not
even have actually happened) from _all of US industry_ 1880-1930?

There you go. No one but specialists will remember it at all. A couple names
might survive but almost nothing about them, and little of it true.

~~~
melenaboija
That is actually my point.

Knowing what greediness brought to human history seems a good reason to try to
change things to better.

And I am not talking about this specific case but the whole Silicon Valley
phenomenon and the fact of concentrating this amount of wealth in such small
community.

BTW I am the OP and what caught my attention, besides its veracity, is
precisely how this kind of stories have interest in the tech scene that
sometimes seem to be totally disconnected from a much broader reality

------
silentsea90
Contrary to folks here, I found the story of negotiating with Twitter and
Facebook to be quite fascinating.

------
romanovcode
The writing is so immature "try-to-be edgy" that I cannot even finish reading
this crap article.

------
madads
Great book for SV outsiders. And reflective of what I have read on here and in
tech media.

~~~
forgingahead
Doesn't that mean this could be complete fiction?

------
slynn12
Upvoted because it was interesting, not because I like the behavior.

------
ghoshbishakh
i tried to read it but found it unreadable

------
tsegratis
He vastly improved twitter's deal and did it at half price

Nobody's THAT generous ;)

"His team mates turned back to their code, without a word. Crying at the
thought of his noble sacrifice and departure"

------
rudiv
I like the thumbnail. It's quite accurate.

------
janeshmane
This seems like the personality you have to have to want to work at Facebook.
Money uber alles.

------
ChrisArchitect
more discussion on this book review from back in (2016), when this was news

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12003912](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12003912)

------
chrisbennet
I read it and found it interesting. -Country Bumpkin

------
ohduran
Uninteresting book, to be honest. Not the worst story, though, but
uninteresting.

------
heyoo
tldr: Twitter offered $10 million for startup with CEO and co-foundes. CEO
would rather work at Facebook without co-founders. Company sold for $5
million.

~~~
WrtCdEvrydy
Facebook wanted the CEO.

Twitter wanted the developers minus the CEO for 5 million.

~~~
haggy
The way the author comes off, I'm not surprised Facebook and their insane frat
culture only wanted the CEO.

