To quote one Valley sage, if your idea is any good, it won’t get stolen, you’ll have to jam it down people’s throats instead.

Investors are people with more money than time. Employees are people with more time than money. Entrepreneurs are simply the seductive go-betweens.

I heard of Antonio Garcia Martinez (AGM for short) through his controversy at Apple. Apple brought him onto the company to strengthen their advertising branch through his expertise in online advertising, but was forced out quickly when Apple’s employees petitioned against him due to a book that he wrote. Of course after hearing this, I had to check the book out myself. In Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley, AGM covers his come up into the tech field, and his story as one of the co founders of a moderately successful start up.

I should mention that the title of the book is misleading. I picked it up thinking it would be about the engineering process of a company, but to my surprise, found out to be about AGM’s personal story building his company through Y Combinator and selling it to Twitter. The book focuses heavily on advertising, how it began to take shape throughout the early 2010’s, and how big it became once the industry saw its value.

The most interesting part of the book for me was how honest he was about the Facebook culture in its early days. The mottos “done is better than good” and “perfect is the enemy of good” provided a lot of insight into the company that Facebook is today. His perspective of the pre IPO days inspired me to reach that point in my own career.

While I found AGM to be funny most of the time, I did not really appreciate his casual insults of women, the Bay Area as a whole, and “techies”. Often times, he came off as egotistical, and at these points, the writing style was not quite for me.

Despite this shortcoming, Chaos Monkeys was an interesting read. As someone who thought about the start up field and the IPO process, this book offered a cynical but honest take into the industry. For anyone not interested in either of these however - it might be better to skip this one.

Overall Rating: 6/10