Antonio García Martínez - Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley

A hardcover edition of this book was published in 2016 by HarperCollins Publishers.

CHAOS MONKEYS. Copyright 2016, 2018 by Antonio Garca Martnez. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST HARPER PAPERBACKS EDITION PUBLISHED 2018.

Digital Edition JULY 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-288448-0

Version 07092018

Print ISBN: 978-0-06-245820-9 (pbk.)

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.

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.

Contents

Thanks to British Trader, who not only bore most of the burden of raising our children but also provided invaluable counsel during the most trying times. Shame that a household, like a ship, admits only one captain.

Thanks to Israeli Psychologist, my long-suffering mate during the Facebook half of this book, without whose warm ministrations Id never have survived that infernal experience. As your people once wrote: A woman of valour, who can find? For her price is far above rubies. She openeth her mouth with wisdom; and the law of kindness is on her tongue. Your endless kindness deserved a worthier target.

Finally on the partner front, thanks to French Architect, who first read the manuscript, and who very patiently dealt with her pregnancy while I dealt with my deadlines. I suspect your take on all this parallels what your countryman Racine wrote: After such sweetness beyond memory. He who held me so dear, to yet betray! Oh! I have loved him too much not to hate.

To our ever-fluctuating love and hate, always so fiery, and so intoxicating.

Life is a marathon, not a sprint, goes the clich. This book was both at once. From deal to physical book took ten months, about as long as AdGrok took to found and sell. The breakneck start was thanks to my agent, Sloan Harris, who saw this works inchoate promise from the first moment. Whether on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley, never have I seen a product better packaged and sold than what came to be known as Chaos Monkeys under Sloans adept representation.

To Jennifer Barth at HarperCollins, my editor, who dealt gracefully and knowledgeably with my intemperate prose and character. Chaos Monkeys would be half as readable without her massive help (which included removing the dozen uses of the word massive).

If Chaos Monkeys had a single, dramatic conception moment, it was when Kate Lee (then an agent at ICM, now at Medium) emailed me about my first viral AdGrok blog post, suggesting I write a book. Google classified the email as spam, and only my random search for a waylaid email uncovered it. Had I not, you wouldnt be looking at these words. Thanks to Kate Lee for her initial encouragement, gentle goading through these many years, and editing of my early Medium posts (some of whose content ended up here). You truly nurtured the idea from a mere attention-grabbing blog post to a book.