Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune And Random Failure In Silicon Valley Quotes

"Had I 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

"Commercial credit is the creation of modern times, and belongs, in its highest perfection, only to the most enlightened and best governed nations."

"The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image." —Guy Debord, The Society of Spectacle

"In the future there will be two types of jobs: people who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do."

"The only time we quants shone was when some particularly hairy deal came up, and a befuddled trader dropped off a thick bond indenture document, pleading for help."

"Wall Street and Silicon Valley possess surprising parallels."

"Without that number, your privileged place in the New York hierarchy goes away."

"I would always prefer—a hundred times prefer—being subject to the rigors of the market, the fickleness of luck, and the whims of users than to navigate the popularity-contest politics of a large company."

"The entire worth as a human is defined by one number: the compensation number your boss tells you at the end of the year."

"If Wall Street investment bankers were dogs, they would flaunt their expensive collars and leashes as marks of status, not realizing their true purpose."

"if you want to be a startup entrepreneur, get used to negotiating from positions of weakness."

"Every new form of media initially emulates the forms of the past."

"This emulation is merely a result of the organic progression of our mad and clever species from one technological toy to another."

"In media, money is merely expendable ammunition; data is power."

"The only goal here is to make that second pile of money as large as possible relative to the first pile of money."

"Life is what happens when you're making other plans."

"Real-life experience is instructive, but the tuition is high."

"To be a startup, miracles need to happen. But a precise number of miracles."

"What is writing? It’s me, the author, taking the state inside my mind and, via the gift of language, grafting it onto yours."

"If you ever run across an online dating profile with the above as a tagline, be aware you’re in for one life-changing date."

"Whoever doesn’t have revolutionary genes, or doesn’t have revolutionary blood. Whoever doesn’t have the courage, heart, or brain that adapts itself to the effort and heroism of the revolution. Let them go! We don’t want them! We don’t need them!"

"Skilled immigrant tech workers in the United States have effectively one method of entry: the famous H-1B visa."

"Like many startup founders from foreign countries, many of whom have contributed immeasurably to the economic and technical success of this country, Argyris lived in a legal gray area until we managed to get him an H-1 visa."

"Engineers can be so smart about code, and yet so dense about human motivations."

"Capitalism is an amoral farce in which every player—investor, employee, entrepreneur, consumer—is complicit."

"The reality is, Silicon Valley capitalism is very simple: Investors are people with more money than time. Employees are people with more time than money. Entrepreneurs are simply the seductive go-betweens."

"Marketing is like sex: only losers pay for it."

"Company culture is what goes without saying."

"Greed and vanity are the twin engines of bourgeois society."

"Most managers are incompetent and maintain their jobs via inertia and politics."

"If everything seems under control, you're just not going fast enough."

"The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell."

"For the next ten minutes, nobody will attempt to save you, and in that stretch of rough, cobblestoned street, there is neither God nor law."

"The sensation was one of prickly intensity: life slowed down in that grainy, black-and-white way in which your brain mimics the JFK assassination reels when you’re doing something seriously dicey."

"It was a mosh pit of greed and glib persuasion, ambition trading itself for money trading itself (hopefully) for more money in the future."

"Startups are business experiments performed with other people’s money."

"The higher the valuations (or the caps), the less the investors’ take, even for the same amount of money they give you."

"The great enemy of every entrepreneur, the villain hiding in each cap table, is that monster of gradual, withering decay: dilution (!)."

"Men with nothing to lose will stop at nothing to win."

"A large company didn’t sue a small company just because it could. This was bullying on the startup playground."

"America still loves an underdog, and you’ll be surprised at how many allies come out of the woodwork when some obnoxious incumbent is challenged by a scrappy startup with a convincing story."

"The only way out of this mess was by raising money and using that to defend ourselves."

"There are worse ways of monetizing sociopathy than startups."

"Starting a company is like eating glass and staring into the abyss of death." —Elon Musk

"In the startup game, there are no real rules, only laws, and weakly enforced ones at that."

"Marketing was like sex; only the losers paid for it."

"The harsh reality is this: to have influence in the world, you need to be willing and able to reward your friends and punish your enemies."

"The ability to monomaniacally and obsessively focus on one thing and one thing only, at the expense of everything else in life."

"It helps to have enemies. While love is a beautiful emotion, far more empires have been built, books written, wrongs righted, fights won, and ambitions realized out of vengeful desire to prove some critic wrong, or existential dread of some perceived enemy, than all the love in the world."

"Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result." —Winston Churchill

"Like all parents, PG pretends he loves all his startup children equally. The reality is some companies get more of his attention than others."

"Total commitment, like unconditional love, is the only type that matters."

"Never ignore people who can write really big checks."

"The combination of enchantment and surrender is essential to love."

"Is it a reasonable thing, I ask you, for a grown man to run about and hit a ball? Poker’s the only game fit for a grown man."

"Send thou men, that they may spy out the land of Canaan, which I give unto the children of Israel; of every tribe of their fathers shall ye send a man, every one a prince among them."

"If you can only be good at one thing, be good at lying . . . because if you’re good at lying, you’re good at everything." —@gselevator, July 25, 2013

"The kingdom of heaven is like a king who prepared a wedding banquet for his son . . . but when the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing wedding clothes. He asked, 'How did you get in here without wedding clothes, friend?' The man was speechless. Then the king told the attendants, 'Tie him hand and foot, and throw him outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.' For many are invited, but few are chosen." —Matthew 22:2, 11–14

"Faster, faster, faster until the thrill of speed overcomes the fear of death." —attributed to Hunter S. Thompson

"If you want to seduce a beautiful woman, court her ugly sister." —Spanish proverb

"Screw your investors and word will get around."

"Words were grand, baby, but signatures on dotted lines make the world go round."

"Silicon Valley job offers can be so complex—each a miniacquisition for one person."

"Morality, such as it exists in the tech whorehouse, is an expensive hobby indeed."

"In the future, we wouldn’t all be famous for fifteen minutes; we’d be famous 24/7 to fifteen people."

"Cynicism is the last refuge of the shiftless."

"Despite carrying the weighty title of founder, nobody at AdGrok actually owned anything yet."

"The human need for immortality projects—those ends that dole out meaning and purpose beyond ourselves—hasn’t changed since the pyramids."

"Facebook was the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in everyone’s bed."

"For that reason, let a prince have the credit of conquering his State, as the means will always be considered honorable, and he will be praised by all because the vulgar masses are always seduced by the appearances of things and by the outcome of events; and in this world there are only vulgar masses."

"By itself, genius can produce original thoughts just as little as a woman by herself can bear children. Outward circumstances must come to fructify genius, be, as it were, a father to its progeny."

"Pause and consider all this for a lingering moment: the militant engineering culture, the all-consuming work identity, the apostolic sense of devotion to a great cause."

"Facebook is full of true believers who really, really, really are not doing it for the money, and really, really will not stop until every man, woman, and child on earth is staring into a blue-framed window with a Facebook logo."

"The greedy man can always be bought at some price or another, and his behavior is predictable. But the true zealot? He can’t be had at any price, and there’s no telling what his mad visions will have him and his followers do."

"In a company whose overarching mantras were DONE IS BETTER THAN PERFECT and PERFECT IS THE ENEMY OF THE GOOD, this represented a course correction, a shift to the concern for quality that typically lost out to the drive to ship."

"To the deceased, it felt like a passing too."

"The open ocean always awaited beckoningly, whispering at me to undo the dock lines and go."

"You make what you measure, so measure carefully."

"As in life, so in business: maintain a bias for action over inaction."

"It was as if we had fed a mile-long trainful of meat cows into a slaughterhouse, and had come out with one measly sausage to show for it."

"The principal reason for you to be technical is not to help technically design the system under development; if you’re doing that, then you’re PMing wrong."

"Ad blocking is tantamount to theft, or at the very least running a toll booth without paying."

"The reality is that Facebook isn’t showing you anything."

"How the land of suffocating Catholicism and potato famines came to be the regulator of the biggest accumulation of personal data since DNA is a curious story."

"Facebook does not sell your data; it buys it."

"Like hermit crabs, successful companies outgrow a series of larger and larger shells."

"If we don’t create the thing that kills Facebook, someone else will."

"Everything feels incredibly slow; it’s like you’re crawling. You can’t believe this is 80 miles per hour."

"The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist, and its power is employed above all to enforce this claim."

"Death didn’t inspire fear, however; only a reminder of the discipline required to keep decay at bay."

"A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point."

"In communism people made lines for bread, while in capitalism they make lines for iPhones."

"Welcome to the People’s Republic of Facebook."

"At the core of how we express ourselves lies a name; every language textbook starts with the mock dialogue my name is . . . je m’appelle . . . ich heiße. It’s central to our identity; there’s nothing more dehumanizing than losing one’s name as a result of political persecution or incarceration, being reduced to an inhuman number in an assembly line of brutality."

"Modern advertising is just selective name-calling, which is why it’s so wonderfully primal."

"We live in a society in which your cultural, religious, or political identity has been supplanted by your consumption patterns."

"The reality is that Facebook has been so successful, it’s actually running out of humans on the planet."

"The biggest thing going on in marketing right now, what is generating tens of billions of dollars in investment and endless scheming inside the bowels of Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple, is the puzzle of how to tie these different sets of names together, and who controls the links."

"All ambitious men want either to please their fathers or to punch them in the goddamned face."

"The more one limits oneself, the closer one is to the infinite; these people, as unworldly as they seem, burrow like termites into their own particular material to construct, in miniature, a strange and utterly individual image of the world."