Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley

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

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.

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

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

Investors are people with more money than time. Employees are people with more time than money. Entrepreneurs are simply the seductive go-betweens. Startups are business experiments performed with other people’s money. Marketing is like sex: only losers pay for it. Company culture is what goes without saying. There are no real rules, only laws. Suc

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

performing employees, their final score was very rich indeed.

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

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