Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley

548 Pages·2018·2.36 MB·English

by  Antonio García Martínez

Dedication
To all my enemies:
I could not have done it without you.
To Zoë Ayala and Noah Pelayo,
the only lasting products I have ever shipped.
Lastly, to Rachel Caïdor.
Lo prometido es deuda.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue: The Garden of Forking Paths
Part One: Disturbing the Peace
The Undertakers of Capitalism
The Human Attention Exchange
Knowing How to Swim
Abandoning the Shipwreck
Part Two: Pseudorandomness
Let Me See Your War Face
Like Marriage, but without the Fucking
Speed Is a Feature
D-Day
A Conclave of Angels
The Hill of Sand
Turning and Turning in the Widening Gyre
¡No Pasarán!
The Dog Shit Sandwich
Victory
Launching!
Dates @Twitter
Acquisition Chicken
Getting Liked
Getting Poked
The Various Futures of the Forking Paths
Retweets Are Not Endorsements
The Dotted Line
Endgame
Part Three: Move Fast and Break Things
Boot Camp
Product Masseur
Google Delenda Est
Leaping Headlong
One Shot, One Kill
Twice Bitten, Thrice Shy
Ads Five-Oh
The Narcissism of Privacy
Are We Savages or What?
O Death
The Barbaric Yawn
Going Public
When the Flying Saucers Fail to Appear
Monetizing the Tumor
The Great Awakening
Barbarians at the Gates
IPA > IPO
Initial Public Offering: A Reevaluation
Flash Boys
Full Frontal Facebook
Microsoft Shrugged
Ad Majorem Facebook Gloriam
Adiós, Facebook
Pandemonium Lost
Epilogue: Man Plans and God Laughs
Afterword
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
Index
About the Author
Praise
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue: The Garden of Forking Paths
Had I been present at the creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the
universe.
—attributed to Alfonso X, “the Wise,” of Castile
FRIDAY, APRIL 13, 2012
The area housing the Facebook high command was a completely unexceptional
cluster of desks, remarkable only for the pile of sporting equipment kept by Sam
Lessin, one of Zuck’s lieutenants. Similar clusterings, arranged like hedgerows,
extended as far as you could see into either leg of the large L formed by Building
16 on Facebook’s campus. The décor was standard-issue Silicon Valley tech:
industrial shag carpet, exposed ceilings revealing ventilation ducts and fire-
retardant-covered steel beams, and the odd piece of home-brewed installation
art: an imposing Lego wall featuring the blocky murals left by employees,
another wall papered with the vaguely Orwellian posters the in-house printshop
churned out.
At the exact vertex of Building 16 was the “Aquarium,” Facebook’s glass-
walled throne room, where Zuck held court all day. It jutted into the main
courtyard, allowing passing Facebookers to snatch a glance of their famed leader
while strolling to lunch. Its windows were reputedly bulletproof. Just outside the
Aquarium’s entrance was a makeshift foyer with couches and some trendy
coffee-table book or another, which the ever-present scrum of waiting FB
courtiers ignored as they made last-minute tweaks to presentations or demos. An
adjoining minikitchen, like so many that littered the campus, stocked plenty of
lemon-lime Gatorade, Zuck’s official beverage.
Inside Facebook’s campus, geography was destiny, and your physical
proximity to Zuck was a clear indicator of your importance. Along the periphery
of the L ran the exclusive conference rooms of Facebook’s five business-unit
leaders. Zuck’s desk neighbors at that point were Sheryl Sandberg, the star chief
operating officer (COO) of Facebook; Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, the engineering
director who had created News Feed; and Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s chief
technical officer (CTO). None of them were at their desks as I strode in from the
courtyard that afternoon.
Unlike much of the user-facing side of Facebook, the Ads team was held at
arm’s length, as if it was a pair of sweaty underwear, in the next building over.
That would eventually change, and Ads team members would occupy some
prime real estate in and around Zuck’s and Sheryl’s desks. That was still a long
way off, though, and every senior management meeting I was pulled into
involved crossing the courtyard at ground level.
The centerpiece of this Facebook Champs-Élysées were the letters H-A-C-K,
actually inlaid in the concrete slab that formed the courtyard and easily a good
one hundred feet long. Angled to be readable on the Google Maps satellite image
of campus, it appeared as the supreme Facebookian commandment.
My mission today was a meeting with Zuck, scheduled in Sheryl’s
conference room, which was named, for reasons I never discovered, “Only Good
News.” Skirting the pile of athletic equipment around the executive-desk cluster,
I walked into the glass cube of the conference room, which featured a long,
white table flanked by a score of pricey Aeron chairs, a flat-panel screen on one
wall, and a whiteboard on the other. Most of the meeting attendants, except the
two most important ones, were already seated.
Gokul Rajaram, the product management head of Ads and my boss, was
slouched in his usual twitching, anxious knot; he took a nanosecond’s break
from his ever-present phone as his eyes rose to mine. Next to Gokul sat Brian
Boland, a buzz-cut-and-balding guy you imagined had wrestled in college, and
whom cozy, corporate life had made thick with age. Boland ran product
marketing for the Ads team, the group that wove the thick packing layer of
polished bullshit that any Ads product was wrapped in before being given to the
sales team, who would then push it on advertisers.
Sitting at a remove and staring into his phone was Greg Badros, a former
Googler who ran both Search and Ads, but seemed more absence than presence
in either. Mark Rabkin, the engineering manager in Ads, and an early hire on the
Facebook Ads team, was closest to me in rank and attitude. A close collaborator
since my first days at Facebook, he resembled a less satanic version of Vladimir
Putin. Elliot Schrage was in his usual perch, close and to the right of the table’s
end. Schrage held an elevated-sounding and vague title but was Sheryl’s
consigliere in all matters. In his fifties, wearing a button-down shirt and
“business casual” slacks, he seemed out of place among the fleece-and-jeans-
wearing techies; he could have been mistaken for a senior lawyer in a stodgy
East Coast law firm—which is what he had been before joining Google and the
Sherylsphere.
I took a seat toward the opposite end of the Sheryl intimates, and flipped
open my Facebook-issue MacBook Pro to nervously remind myself of the
meeting’s script. The agenda was pitching Zuck on the three new ads-targeting
ideas I had dreamed up, and which constituted a big monetization bet the
company was (hopefully) soon to make.
Camille Hart, Sheryl’s all-powerful executive administrative assistant, or
admin, milled about and tapped away on her laptop, wrangling meeting
participants.
“Where’s Fischer?” asked Sheryl as she blew in through the door and took
her seat at the end of the table.
No meeting could start without the minyan of Elliot Schrage and David
Fischer, the entourage she had poached out of Google. Camille bolted out to find
him.
Most everyone stayed silent, pecking at smartphones or laptops. Boland and
Sheryl quietly conferred on the state of the slides we were presenting. We’d
already prepitched her our products, tweaking the message to maximally appeal
to Zuck. Any Zuck meeting around Ads required a bit of prechewing and spoon-
feeding. The reason was simple: Ads were not something he cared about at the
time, and I imagine he saw these meetings more as duty-bound drudgery than
anything else. In one year in Facebook Ads, I had seen the famously
micromanage-y founder and CEO in the Ads area precisely once: when he was
walking around the building in a circle to get in his ten thousand daily steps.
This stood in sharp contrast to the gossipy stories I had heard from product
managers on the user-facing side of Facebook about the withering spotlight one
lived in when working a product Zuck cared about.
In our premeeting meeting, Sheryl had let slip various hints about the best
way to present our plans. She clearly knew her boss inside and out. Here was a
woman who excelled in the role of gatekeeper and shepherd to difficult and
powerful men, whether that role was chief of staff for the prickly US treasury
secretary Larry Summers, or COO of and for Zuck. Between her ability to
navigate and manage the mercurial and fractious political landscape of a
complex organization like Facebook, and her ability to shape messages for Zuck,
she was both de facto and de jure the person who ran Facebook Ads. As the
debate about the future of Facebook monetization grew more polarized and
heated, these meetings would resemble the Supreme Court of Sheryl, the one
place where conflicting views could be aired with some hope of resolution.
In came Fischer: slim, dapper, and the best-coiffed man at Facebook.
Originally one of Sheryl’s reports at the Treasury Department, he had begun his