Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

That’s the smoldering ambition of every entrepreneur: to one day create an organization that society deems worthy of a price tag. These are the

and you are their first whiff of corporate