Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley

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

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

performing employees, their final score was very rich indeed.

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

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.

and you are their first whiff of corporate

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

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