Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley
updated 5h ago
updated 5h ago
Ultimately, the Valley attitude is an empowered anomie turbocharged by selfishness, respecting some nominal “feel-good” principals of progress or collective technological striving, but in truth pursuing a continual self-development refracted through the capitalist prism: hippies
Eli added 4mo ago
was the guardian of the Facebook Ads team, sussing out obscene
Eli added 4mo ago
you will it, it is no dream; and if you do not will it, a dream it will remain.” Willing
Eli added 4mo ago
performing employees, their final score was very rich indeed.
Eli added 4mo ago
irreverence without disrespect, competence without arrogance, ambition without ego.
Eli added 4mo ago
It really is a user-growth roulette wheel with razor-thin odds.
Eli added 4mo ago
Have a mad vision, and you’re a kook. Get a crowd to believe in it as well, and you’re a leader.
Andrew McCluskey added 6mo ago
Andy Warhol was wrong. In the future, we wouldn’t all be famous for fifteen minutes; we’d be famous 24/7 to fifteen people. That was the new paradigm, even if the outside world didn’t realize it yet. Facebook employees—we few, we happy few—knew what world was coming, and we’d help create it.
Benyamin Elias added 8mo ago
No user data we had, if fed freely into the topics that Facebook’s savviest marketers used to target their ads, improved any performance metric we had access to. That meant that advertisers trying to find someone who, say, wanted to buy a car, benefited not at all from all the car chatter taking place on Facebook. It was as if we had fed a mile-lon
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