Chaos Monkeys Revised Edition: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley by Antonio García MartínezMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
A fun and inciteful book on the state of startups, morphing with a buyout into a story about working within a FANG. Great business anecdotes, from working with Y Combinator, working with VCs, leaving gainful employment with a declining tech company, getting sued by same former employer, shopping and selling the startup, and working for Facebook until not working for Facebook. Along the way, the author explains how the internet makes money with ads, and how ad capabilities are becoming more “weaponized” through the use of additional user data. In other words, he explains how better ad-serving technology competes with user privacy concerns, from the ad savvy technical side of things. I found some of the explanations very good, and some were confusing, but in total I found I learned some things on modern internet advertising that I hadn’t realized were happening. This is not a how-to book. This is more a business memoir. Very interesting story. I enjoyed the flow. The author was a bit into himself, using the book to lay claims to events, actions, and thoughts along the way. This added interest to the story when presented in small bits, and the author mostly did this, but some passages were a bit too self-serving for my taste. Despite those bits, I found the book overall to be a very nice overview of the “career flow” hitting a lot of typical technology employers – the declining tech, the startup, and the unicorn. This is certainly the dream of many workers in technology or marketing, and the author illustrates how this did happen for him, sharing both good and bad.
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