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Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley
Harper
July 2016
On Sale: June 28, 2016
528 pages
ISBN: 0062458191
EAN: 9780062458193
Kindle: B019MMUAAQ
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
Liar’s Poker meets The Social Network in an irreverent
exposé of life inside the tech bubble, from industry
provocateur Antonio García Martínez, a former Twitter
advisor, Facebook product manager and startup founder/CEO. The reality is, Silicon Valley capitalism is very simple: Investors are people with more money than time. Employees are people with more time than money. Entrepreneurs are the seductive go-between. Marketing is like sex: only losers pay for it. Imagine a chimpanzee rampaging through a datacenter powering
everything from Google to Facebook. Infrastructure engineers
use a software version of this “chaos monkey” to test online
services’ robustness—their ability to survive random failure
and correct mistakes before they actually occur. Tech
entrepreneurs are society’s chaos monkeys, disruptors
testing and transforming every aspect of our lives, from
transportation (Uber) and lodging (AirBnB) to television
(Netflix) and dating (Tinder). One of Silicon Valley’s most
audacious chaos monkeys is Antonio García Martínez. After stints on Wall Street and as CEO of his own startup,
García Martínez joined Facebook’s nascent advertising team,
turning its users’ data into profit for COO Sheryl Sandberg
and chairman and CEO Mark “Zuck” Zuckerberg. Forced out in
the wake of an internal product war over the future of the
company’s monetization strategy, García Martínez eventually
landed at rival Twitter. He also fathered two children with
a woman he barely knew, committed lewd acts and brewed
illegal beer on the Facebook campus (accidentally flooding
Zuckerberg's desk), lived on a sailboat, raced sport cars on
the 101, and enthusiastically pursued the life of an
overpaid Silicon Valley wastrel. Now, this gleeful contrarian unravels the chaotic evolution
of social media and online marketing and reveals how it is
invading our lives and shaping our future. Weighing in on
everything from startups and credit derivatives to Big
Brother and data tracking, social media monetization and
digital “privacy,” García Martínez shares his scathing
observations and outrageous antics, taking us on a humorous,
subversive tour of the fascinatingly insular tech industry.
Chaos Monkeys lays bare the hijinks, trade secrets, and
power plays of the visionaries, grunts, sociopaths,
opportunists, accidental tourists, and money cowboys who are
revolutionizing our world. The question is, will we survive?
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