BROADCASTS.com

b'With Antonio Garcia Martinez,\\xa0Former Product Manager at Facebook\\xa0and author of\\xa0Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley

Not all monkeys run amok in the wild or in cages at the San Diego Zoo. Some monkeys\\u2014the chaos monkeys that Antonio Garcia Martinez refers to in his book\\u2014are doing their disruptive dance in Silicon Valley. These monkeys are actually software programs designed to be let loose on computer systems to test their efficiency and resilience.
Author Antonio Garcia Martinez barely survived the Goldman Sachs bubble-burst before heading west to join the in-crowd of the tech industry. That crowd turned out to be a culture of rampant self-expression, with uber-confident whiz-kids throwing ideas at the digital wall desperately hoping for one to stick, and shooting the competition in the heart at every opportunity. While the mainstream news agencies headline Silicon Valley innovations and successes, the duplicity, back-stabbing, and often vengeful machinations are seldom revealed as in Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley.
Silicone Valley operates by its own rules and its own requirements. A Harvard business degree is valued less than a stint with Y Combinator, a sort of training program for technology innovators whose \\u201cgraduates\\u201d Garcia Martinez describes as \\u201cbomb-throwing anarchist subversive[s] mixed with coldblooded execution mixed with irreverent whimsy, a sort of technology-enabled 12-year-old boy.\\u201d More specifically, Y Combinator is a company that produces other companies, such as Airbnb and Dropbox, by setting up a boot camp of sorts where a product can be pitched in front of Silicon Valley venture capitalists. If successful, money is raised and a business is born.
The disruption created by unleashing the chaos monkey theory sounds the death-knell for some and opens the way for a successful culture-changer for others, such as occurred with the standard taxi business when Uber was created. Silicon Valley YC grads are set loose to \\u201cbasically rampage through society, knocking over or shutting down one or another industry by disruptive technology.\\u201d \\xa0The monkeys at play.
The author began his own startup called AdGrok which he sold to Twitter before heading on over to the golden realm of Mark Zuckerburg\\u2019s Facebook, back before the IPO when it was still in startup mode. He calls Zuckerberg a genius, a driven motivator, and a force of nature who fires up all the cylinders of Facebook. Garcia Martinez describes the Facebook atmosphere as a \\u201ccorporate culture in which a 23-year-old engineer feels empowered to look at Facebook and push some change and have it succeed or fail or whatever, but be in this constant maelstrom of really creative dynamism and constantly pitching new products, many of them frankly ill-thought-out or poorly executed. The point is to actually find that winner that opens the new chapter in social media.\\xa0 Creating that culture and maintaining it over years, I think, is where the genius aspect comes in for Zuckerberg.\\u201d

As Garcia Martinez so amusingly tells it, a never-flagging adrenalin-surge was essential to holding your place in such a competitive arena where you had to constantly prove your worth to stay in the game. Although he points fingers and tells tales,'