Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley

performing employees, their final score was very rich indeed.

No, every real problem in startups is a people problem,

you will it, it is no dream; and if you do not will it, a dream it will remain.” Willing

Have a mad vision, and you’re a kook. Get a crowd to believe in it as well, and you’re a leader.

was the guardian of the Facebook Ads team, sussing out obscene

Incidentally, it helps to have enemies. While love is a beautiful emotion, far more empires have been built, books written, wrongs righted, fights won, and ambitions realized out of vengeful desire to prove some critic wrong, or existential dread of some perceived enemy, than all the love in the world. Love is grand, but hate and fear last longer.

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

irreverence without disrespect, competence without arrogance, ambition without ego.

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