New York Review of Books Review

THE LITERATURE OF Silicon Valley is exceedingly thin. The tech overlords keep clear of writers who are not on their payrolls or at least in their thrall. Many in the valley feel that bringing the digital future to the masses is God's work. Question this, and they tend to get touchy. Anger them, and they might seek revenge. The billionaire investor Peter Thiel, outed by the local arm of the Gawker media empire, secretly financed a lawsuit to destroy it. Silicon Valley did not rise en masse and say this was seriously beyond the pale. No surprise, then, that there are so few books investigating what it really takes to succeed in tech (duplicity often trumps innovation) or that critically examine such omnipresent, comforting fables as "We're not in it for the money." There are other barriers to literature. A start-up is less a physical reality than the hype that surrounds it. (It's not lying if you believe it.) Boasts, threats, secret deals, betrayals are the coin of the realm, but lawsuits and news releases are the only things put in writing. Nailing this slippery culture would take an unholy combination of David Mamet and Tom Wolfe in their primes, but they would also have to be lucky enough to find a subject who did not realize he was a great subject and start censoring himself for fear he would never be hired again. Good luck with that. In the meantime, we have the next best thing: Antonio García Martínez's "Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley," a book whose bland all-purpose title belies the fact that this is a valley account like no other. The first hint that something is different here comes with the dedication: "To all my enemies: I could not have done it without you." This is autobiography as revenge, naming names and sparing few, certainly not the author. "I was wholly devoid of most human boundaries or morality," he notes in passing. In other words, he was a start-up chief executive. García Martínez came to the valley in 2008 from Goldman Sachs, where he was a pricing quant who modeled credit derivatives. In the valley, he tried to do the same with chunks of human attention, which meant inventing digital ad systems. He started at a flailing firm named Adchemy; quit with two engineers to found a start-up; sold the start-up to Twitter but went himself to work for Facebook, where he lasted two years. Flatly summarized, it is not a very interesting career. The start-up, named AdGrok, was a company mostly in name; it was three guys in a dumpy room trying to hustle themselves in a world full of hustlers. The answer to the problem plaguing Facebook during García Martínez's stint there - how can we use digital advertising to make some serious money? - was not solved by the author. No matter. Michael Lewis was never a top Wall Street bond salesman, but in "Liar's Poker" he captured an era. "Chaos Monkeys" aims to do the same for Silicon Valley, and bracingly succeeds. Nothing I've ever read conveys better what it actually is like to be in the engine room of the start-up economy. There were moments I laughed out loud, something I never recall doing while reading about Steve Jobs. García Martínez shows how a start-up is less about making a product that actually does something than desperately demonstrating you are worthy of being hired by Google, Twitter or Facebook. He describes the way the big companies resemble life in Cuba or Communist China circa 1965, with "endless toil motivated by lapidary ideals handed down by a revered and unquestioned leader," not to mention the posters on the wall proclaiming, "Proceed and Be Bold!" This is a place, he points out, where people take their laptops into a toilet stall and keep typing as they do what they came to do. If that strikes you as unseemly or unnecessary, you'll never make it in Palo Alto. The heart of the book is the period García Martínez spent at his start-up, which was intended to allow small businesses to efficiently advertise on Google. It was an auspicious moment. While the rest of the world was struggling to recover from the recession, the office parks of the valley were full of aggressive young men who had made pots of money by being early employees of Google. To prove they were not merely lucky, they needed to score again. Everyone was terrified of missing the next Facebook or, a little later, the next Airbnb or Über. Smart entrepreneurs capitalized on these fears. García Martínez's big break was hyping his way into Y Combinator, in effect the valley's finishing school for innovators. He labels the YC entrepreneur profile as "bomb-throwing anarchist subversive mixed with coldblooded execution mixed with irreverent whimsy, a sort of technology-enabled 12-year-old boy". He fit right in. Graduation from Y Combinator conveys the same prestige that a degree from Harvard does back East, and comes complete with an old boy - well, young men - network that is handy in all sorts of ways. "Anyone who claims the valley is meritocratic is someone who has profited vastly from it via nonmeritocratic means like happenstance, membership in a privileged cohort or some concealed act of absolute skulduggery," García Martínez observes. All three helped AdGrok; at one point the author manipulated the numbers for his investors, "cooking the books in the worst form. But it was either that or give up now, and surrender was unthinkable." THERE ARE A few problems with "Chaos Monkeys." García Martínez likes footnotes way too much (on one page there are four) and the epigraphs to each chapter are numbingly heavy-handed, although the Latin American proverb about how for every beautiful woman there's a man tired of making love to her sums up nicely his feelings about leaving the Kingdom of Facebook. More problematically, there is much more about digital ad technology here than most readers could possibly want. The implications of the technology, on the other hand, are somewhat scanted. "Imagine that every time you go to CNN.com, it's as though a new sell order for one share in your brain is transmitted to a stock exchange," he writes. "Picture it: Individual quanta of human attention sold, bit by bit, like so many million shares of General Motors stock, billions of times a day." That was the world García Martínez was doing his best to create. For all his criticism of the valley's way of doing things, he never stops to wonder about ethics. But then, he's got a full plate. Early in the narrative García Martínez conceives a daughter with a woman a mere two weeks after they meet. "If you jump into the abyss, jump headlong," he observes. Eighteen months or so later, during breakup sex, a son is conceived. AdGrok officially opens for business on his daughter's first birthday, which he skipped. "Success," he writes, "forgives all sins." In the end, though, his success as an entrepreneur was only middling. "Such is the greased pole of Silicon Valley fame and power; anyone can try to ascend, but nothing will arrest your fall," he writes. First prize in Silicon Valley is enough money so your family and descendants will never have to work again until the sun goes cold. Second prize is a whole heaping pile of money. Third prize is you're fired, which is often pretty sweet too. Three years after being escorted out of Facebook, García Martínez is living on a 40-foot sailboat on San Francisco Bay. 'To all my enemies," García Martínez writes: 'I could not have done it without you'. DAVID STREITFELD covers Silicon Valley for The Times. He is editing a collection of interviews with J.D. Salinger for publication next winter.