Recently, I wrote about how scientists could stand to learn a lot from the tech industry. In that spirit, today I want to share a book review of Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley, Antonio García Martínez’s best-selling memoir about his time in tech and “a guide to the spirit of Silicon Valley” (NYT).
Chaos Monkeys is one of the most literary memoirs I’ve read. The book itself is a clear homage to Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; Martínez writes in the “gonzo journalism” style, blending larger-than-life personal exploits with frank accounting of the facts. But Antonio García Martínez’s writing, replete with GRE-level words and classical epigraphs, invites further literary comparisons.
The first comparison that springs to mind is The Odyssey. Odysseus, the protagonist of The Odyssey, is frequently described as polytropos (lit. “many turns”), which denotes his wily and cunning nature. Antonio García Martínez (or, per the tech fondness for acronyms, “AGM”) certainly deserves the same epithet.
Chaos Monkeys is structured as a recounting of AGM’s escapades in Silicon Valley. In order, he (1) leaves his job at Goldman Sachs and joins an ad-tech company, (2) quits and founds his own company, AdGrok, (3) gets accepted to Y Combinator and survives a lengthy legal battle with his former employer, (4) sells AdGrok simultaneously to both Twitter and Facebook, eventually sending the other employees to Twitter and himself to Facebook, (5) becomes a PM at Facebook and engineers a scheme to fix their ad platform and make them profitable, (6) succeeds, sorta, but pisses people off and gets fired, and then (7) turns around and sells his expertise to Twitter.
His circuitous journey around the Bay Area has the rough form of an ancient epic: at each company, he’s faced with new challenges and new adversaries, and his fractious relationships with his superiors mean that he’s often at the mercy of capricious higher powers, not unlike Odysseus. Nevertheless, through a mixture of cunning and hard work he manages to escape with his skin intact every time, ready for the next episode. (And, best of all, he literally lives on a boat while working at Facebook.)
(His escapades have only continued since this book was published: he got hired at Apple, unceremoniously fired a few weeks later [for passages in Chaos Monkeys], made it on Joe Rogan, and has now founded spindl, a web3 ad-tech startup, while simultaneously converting to Judaism.)
Chaos Monkeys bears a structural resemblance to Moby-Dick. Narrative passages alternate with lengthy technical discussions about the minutiae of Silicon Valley: one chapter, you’re reading about how AGM flooded Mark Zuckerberg’s office trying to brew beer inside Facebook, while the next chapter is devoted to a discussion of how demand-side advertising platforms work.
The similarities run deeper, though. Venture capitalism, the funding model that dominates Silicon Valley, was originally developed to fund whaling expeditions in the 1800s (ref, ref). While once venture capitalists listened to prospective whaling captains advertising the quality of their crews in a New England tavern, today VCs hear pitches from thousands of startups hoping to develop the next killer app the best ChatGPT frontend and make millions.
This isn’t a coincidence: whaling expeditions and tech startups are both high-risk, high-reward enterprises that require an incredible amount of skill and hard work, but also a healthy dose of luck. Both operations have returns dominated by outliers, making picking winners much more important than making safe bets, and in both cases the investment remains illiquid for a long time, demanding trust from the investor.
Much like Ishmael in Moby-Dick, AGM’s adventures see him join forces with a motley crew of high-performing misfits from around the globe. And just as Ahab’s quest for the whale is foreshadowed to be a ruinous one, so too does the reader quickly come to understand that AGM’s tenure in Silicon Valley will not, ultimately, end well. A fatalistic haze hangs over the book, coloring his various hijinks with a sense of impending loss.
(And did I mention he lives on a boat?)
The emotional tone of the book, however, is best compared to that favorite of high-school English classes, The Great Gatsby. AGM, like Nick Carraway, is an outsider in the world of the nouveau riche—opulent parties, high-speed road races, conspicuous consumption—and, over the course of the book, is alternately infatuated with and disgusted by his surroundings. When at last AGM retires to a quiet life on Ithaca the San Juan islands, it’s with feelings of disillusionment, betrayal, and frustration, not unlike Carraway withdrawing to the Midwest. As AGM writes in the penultimate paragraph of Chaos Monkeys’s acknowledgements:
To Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, Sam Altman, and the rest of the Y Combinator partners and founders involved in the AdGrok saga. In a Valley world awash with mammoth greed and opportunism masquerading as beneficent innovation, you were the only real loyalty and idealism I ever encountered.
But Chaos Monkeys isn’t solely an indictment of Silicon Valley’s worst excesses. Not unlike The Wire, Chaos Monkeys manages to simultaneously portray the positive and negative aspects of its subject matter, refusing to be reduced to “tech good” or “tech bad.” The panoply of grifters, Dilbert-tier bosses, and Machiavellian sociopaths lambasted by AGM can exist only because of the immense value that their enterprises provide to society—and his faith in the ability of tech to create wonders persists even as his own efforts to do so are undermined.
So the underlying message of Chaos Monkeys, ultimately, is one of hope for tech. If the excesses of tech are worse than other industries, it's only because the underlying field itself is so much more fertile. Far from condemning it, the depths of the decadence spawned by Silicon Valley bear witness to the immense value it creates. Imitation is the highest form of flattery; grift is the surest sign of productivity.
Overall, Chaos Monkeys is an exhilarating and hilarious read, a gentle introduction to the world of term sheets, product managers, and non-competes, and a book replete with anecdotes sure to fulfill the stereotypes of tech-lovers and tech-haters alike.