García Martínez - Chaos monkeys: obscene fortune and random failure in Silicon Valley

The events described in this work, with the exception of one scene in New York, occurred between roughly March 2010 and October 2014, in and around the San Francisco Bay Area. This account is based on archived emails, Facebook posts and messages, tweets, and blog posts from the time. Any dialogue, if quoted from emails, texts, or messages, is verbatim. If quoted from conversation or phone calls, its been reconstructed from memory. While these re-creations are not exact, Ive done my level best to capture the spirit and significance of every scene depicted. To those who may have been present but feel I have misconstrued events, I invite you to write your own competing account. Together we may arrive at the set of mutually agreed-upon lies called history.

Note: Some names have been omitted to protect the truly guilty.

To all my enemies:
I could not have done it without you.

To Zo Ayala and Noah Pelayo,
the only lasting products I have ever shipped.

Lastly, to Rachel Cador.
Lo prometido es deuda.

Contents

1. PART ONE: Disturbing the Peace
   
2. PART TWO: Pseudorandomness
   
3. PART THREE: Move Fast and Break Things
   

Had I had 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 Zucks 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 Facebooks campus. The dcor 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, Facebooks 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 Aquariums 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, Zucks official beverage.

Inside Facebooks 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 Facebooks five business-unit leaders. Zucks 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, Facebooks 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 arms 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 Zucks and Sheryls 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-lyses 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 Sheryls 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 nanoseconds 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 tables end. Schrage held an elevated-sounding and vague title but was Sheryls 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 firmwhich 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 meetings 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, Sheryls all-powerful executive administrative assistant, or admin, milled about and tapped away on her laptop, wrangling meeting participants.

Wheres 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. Wed 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.