Chaos Monkeys

An interesting and easy to read story about the inside world of IT-startups. It often resembles Silicon Valley TV show. I was pleasantly surprised by the size of author's vocabulary. Last time I had to look up so many words was maybe when reading Henry Miller's books. I liked the author's writing manner. Each time the reading becomes boring, there is a hilarious story from the past or a philosophical musing or an introducing of some fun character.

Couldn't put it down for the first 40%. Then interest dipped sharply at 60% and failed to recover. It's written in a speculative thriller sort of way albeit without much to reveal. Also the constant analogy-making thesaurus powered writing style gets tedious fairly quickly. If you haven't read it, the only thing you're missing on is some valley goss you can get in a summary. To be fair, I would have liked it more if it ended at the 50% mark, the second half draaaags.

While parts of this are interesting from a historical perspective, this book was just super hard for me to get into. I found myself loathing pretty much every person in the book. The tone felt like a narcissistic tech geek power fantasy, but with mostly bumbling and little true interest.

I do not recommend this unless you were personally involved in a social media startup in the mid 2000's.

A realistic and critical inside view of Silicon Valley's heart.

This started out so promising - a sarcastic, informative, and realistic insider's take on the world within a world that is Silicon Valley. It turns out that about half of the book delivers on that promise, and then the rest unravels into a mostly uninteresting memoir full of bad blood and axes to grind. The author is genuinely talented with a great sense of humor - I just wish that an editor would have reigned in the narrative and kept the book on course. I don't regret reading it, but it drags on for at least 100 pages too long.

At no point do you get the sense that Martínez is censoring himself beyond what he might absolutely have to do for legal reasons. He's all in. His personal life is a wreck and he shamelessly puts it out there for all the world to see and judge him by. His career in both Wall Street and Silicon Valley is full of of ups and downs and decisions that are, at best, morally ambiguous.

The writing is good. It's funny, irreverent, and shows more than a passing knowledge of history and literature. There's a ton of hard won advice and insight into not only Valley culture, but business, negotiation, and how to live the startup life. For all the self deprecation: “there was nothing badass about my career in technology. The scant success I had was due purely to happenstance, combined with being a ruthless little shit when it counted.” it's clear that his mostly upward career trajectory was due to more than just luck.

You'll learn a lot about the cutthroat world of online ads. About how decisions are made inside Facebook, and to a lesser degree, Twitter. You'll get some lessons in the mysterious machinations of His Holiness Paul Graham and vice-pontiff Chris Sacca. You'll learn how to optimize your job offer, how to read a term sheet and how to win from a position of weakness. It's information that someone who wasn't willing to sacrifice their career at the alter of full-disclosure could never tell you. I seriously doubt you'll ever read anything like this again.

Come for the schadenfreude, stay for the insight.