Antonio Garcia Martinez Quotes

To paraphrase the very quotable Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, 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. Wall

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.

It’s not the rats who first abandon a sinking ship. It’s the crew members who know how to swim.

Dedication To all my enemies: I could not have done it without you.

Ideas without implementation, or without an exceptional team to implement them, are like assholes and opinions: everyone’s got one.

Here’s some startup pedagogy for you: When confronted with any startup idea, ask yourself one simple question: How many miracles have to happen for this to succeed?

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

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

If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough. —Mario Andretti, Formula One driver

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell. —Edward Abbey, The Journey Home

As Geoff Ralston, a YC partner, told us: people don’t really change, they just become better actors.

Incidentally, 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. Love is grand, but hate and fear last longer.

Together we may arrive at the set of mutually agreed-upon lies called history.

The receptionists were jaw-droppingly hot. I’m talking “got lost on the way to New York Fashion Week” hot. They took our names and escorted us into a conference room. Then

You make what you measure, so measure carefully.

lawyers. An error at the hour of signing a big contract, or negotiating an acquisition, could easily cost you millions, or be the deciding factor between summers in Ibiza with your model girlfriend or taking a consolation-prize job as product manager at Oracle instead (look,

Here is a key insight for any startup: You may think yourself a puny midget among giants when you stride out into a marketplace, and suddenly confront such a giant via litigation or direct competition. But the reality is that larger companies often have much more to fear from you than you from them. For starters, their will to fight is less than yours. Their employees are mercenaries who don’t deeply care, and suffer from the diffuse responsibility and weak emotional investment of a larger organization. What’s an existential struggle to you is merely one more set of tasks to a tuned-out engineer bored of his own product, or another legal hassle to an already overworked legal counsel thinking more about her next stock-vesting date than your suit. Also, large companies have valuable public brands they must delicately preserve, and which can be assailed by even small companies such as yours, particularly in a tight-knit, appearances-conscious ecosystem like that of Silicon Valley. 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. So long as you maintain unit cohesion and a shared sense of purpose, and have the basic rudiments of living, you will outlast, outfight, and out-rage any company that sets out to destroy you. Men with nothing to lose will stop at nothing to win.

What is writing? It’s me, the author, taking the state inside my mind and, via the gift of language, grafting it onto yours. But man invented language in order to better deceive, not inform. That state I’m transmitting is often a false one, but you judge it not by the depth of its emotion in my mind, but by the beauty and pungency of the thought in yours. Thus the best deceivers are called articulate, as they make listeners and readers fall in love with the thoughts projected into their heads. It’s the essential step in getting men to write you large checks, women to take off their clothes, and the crowd to read and repeat what you’ve thought. All with mere words: memes of meaning strung together according to grammar and good taste. Astonishing when you think about it.

You live and die by such decisions, and they may well be wrong, but it’s more fatal to not make decisions than to make them.

As PM, if you can convince engineers to build things you stipulate, you are golden. But if you can’t, then you are like the dictator who has lost control of his army.

API is “application programming interface,” and it’s the set of functions and subroutines that an outside party can run in order to build its own third-party services on top of a company’s service.

As I observed more than once at Facebook, and as I imagine is the case in all organizations from business to government, high-level decisions that affected thousands of people and billions in revenue would be made on gut feel, the residue of whatever historical politics were in play, and the ability to cater persuasive messages to people either busy, impatient, or uninterested (or all three).

Managing a combined deal between Facebook and Twitter was like trying to engineer simultaneous orgasm between a premature ejaculator and a frigid woman: nigh impossible, fraught with danger, and requiring a very steady hand.

What man has bent o’er his son’s sleep, to brood How that face shall watch his when cold it lies? Or thought, as his own mother kiss’d his eyes, Of what her kiss was when his father woo’d? —Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The House of Life

The amnesiac tech press weaves the narrative fallacy around the proceedings, fabricating a make-believe dramatic arc from steely-eyed product ideation to flawless and unhesitating technical execution. What was an improbable bonanza at the hands of the flailing half-blind becomes the inevitable coup of the assured visionary.

An empty pageant; a stage play; flocks of sheep, herds of cattle; a bone flung among a pack of dogs; a crumb tossed into a pond of fish; ants, loaded and laboring; mice, scared and scampering; puppets, jerking on their strings; that is life. In the midst of it all you must take your stand, good-temperedly and without disdain, yet always aware that a man’s worth is no greater than the worth of his ambitions. —Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

A man occasionally reaches a fork in life’s path. One road leads to doing something, to making an impact on his organization and his world. To being true to his values and vision, and standing with the other men who’ve helped build that vision. He will have to trust himself when all men doubt him, and as a reward, he will have the scorn of his professional circle heaped on his head. He will not be favored by his superiors, nor win the polite praise of his conformist peers. But maybe, just maybe, he has the chance to be right, and create something of lasting value that will transcend the consensus mediocrity inherent in any organization, even supposedly disruptive ones. The other road leads to being someone. He will receive the plum products, the facile praise afforded to the organization man who checks off the canonical list of petty virtues that define moral worth in his world. He will receive the applause of his peers, though it will be striking how rarely that traffic in official praise leads to actual products anybody remembers, much less advances the overall cause of the organization.

The reality is that Facebook has been so successful, it’s actually running out of humans on the planet. Ponder the numbers: there are about three billion people on the Internet, where the latter is broadly defined as any sort of networked data, texts, browser, social media, whatever. Of these people, six hundred million are Chinese, and therefore effectively unreachable by Facebook. In Russia, thanks to Vkontakte and other copycat social networks, Facebook’s share of the country’s ninety million Internet users is also small, though it may yet win that fight. That leaves about 2.35 billion people ripe for the Facebook plucking. While Facebook seems ubiquitous to the plugged-in, chattering classes, its usage is not universal among even entrenched Internet users. In the United States, for example, by far the company’s most established and sticky market, only three-quarters of Internet users are actively on FB. That ratio of FB to Internet user is worse in other countries, so even full FB saturation in a given market doesn’t imply total Facebook adoption. Let’s (very) optimistically assume full US-level penetration for any market. Without China and Russia, and taking a 25 percent haircut of people who’ll never join or stay (as is the case in the United States), that leaves around 1.8 billion potential Facebook users globally. That’s it. In the first quarter of 2015, Facebook announced it had 1.44 billion users. Based on its public 2014 numbers, FB is growing at around 13 percent a year, and that pace is slowing. Even assuming it maintains that growth into 2016, that means it’s got one year of user growth left in it, and then that’s it: Facebook has run out of humans on the Internet. The company can solve this by either making more humans (hard even for Facebook), or connecting what humans there are left on the planet. This is why Internet.org exists, a vaguely public-spirited, and somewhat controversial, campaign by Facebook to wire all of India with free Internet, with regions like Brazil and Africa soon to follow. In early 2014 Facebook acquired a British aerospace firm, Ascenta, which specialized in solar-powered unmanned aerial vehicles. Facebook plans on flying a Wi-Fi-enabled air force of such craft over the developing world, giving them Internet. Just picture ultralight carbon-fiber aircraft buzzing over African savannas constantly, while locals check their Facebook feeds as they watch over their herds.

What’s an IPO, exactly? A company decides it wants to “float” part of its equity on the public markets, allowing employees and founders to sell private shares to pay them off for years of service, as well as sell shares out of the corporate treasury to have some money in the bank. Large investment banks (such as my former employer Goldman Sachs) form what’s called a “syndicate” (“mafia” might be a better term) wherein they offer to effectively buy those shares from Facebook, and then sell them into the capital markets, usually by pushing it via their sales force onto wealthy clients or institutional investors. That syndicate either guarantees a price (“firm commitment”) or promises to get the best price it can (“best effort”). In the former case, the bank is taking real execution risk, and stands to lose money if it doesn’t engineer a “pop” in the stock on opening day. To mitigate the risk, the bank convinces the offering company to expect a lower price, while simultaneously jacking up what real price the market will bear with a zealous sales pitch to the market’s deepest pockets. Thus, it is absolutely jejune to think that a stock’s rise on opening day is due to clamoring and unexpected interest. Similar to Captain Renault in Casablanca, Wall Street bankers are shocked—shocked!—that there should be such a large and positive price dislocation in the market they just rigged.

Here’s some startup pedagogy for you: When confronted with any startup idea, ask yourself one simple question: How many miracles have to happen for this to succeed? If the answer is zero, you’re not looking at a startup, you’re just dealing with a regular business like a laundry or a trucking business. All you need is capital and minimal execution, and assuming a two-way market, you’ll make some profit. To be a startup, miracles need to happen. But a precise number of miracles. Most successful startups depend on one miracle only. For Airbnb, it was getting people to let strangers into their spare bedrooms and weekend cottages. This was a user-behavior miracle. For Google, it was creating an exponentially better search service than anything that had existed to date. This was a technical miracle. For Uber or Instacart, it was getting people to book and pay for real-world services via websites or phones. This was a consumer-workflow miracle. For Slack, it was getting people to work like they formerly chatted with their girlfriends. This is a business-workflow miracle. For the makers of most consumer apps (e.g., Instagram), the miracle was quite simple: getting users to use your app, and then to realize the financial value of your particular twist on a human brain interacting with keyboard or touchscreen. That was Facebook’s miracle, getting every college student in America to use its platform during its early years. While there was much technical know-how required in scaling it—and had they fucked that up it would have killed them—that’s not why it succeeded. The uniqueness and complete fickleness of such a miracle are what make investing in consumer-facing apps such a lottery. It really is a user-growth roulette wheel with razor-thin odds. The classic sign of a shitty startup idea is that it requires at least two (or more!) miracles to succeed. This was what was wrong with ours. We had a Bible’s worth of miracles to perform:

Truth in the world resides only in mathematical proofs and physics labs. Everywhere else, it’s really a matter of opinion, and if it manages to become group opinion, it’s undeservedly crowned as capital-T Truth.

At their extremes, capitalism and communism become equivalent: Endless toil motivated by lapidary ideals handed down by a revered and unquestioned leader, and put into practice by a leadership caste selected for its adherence to aforementioned principles, and richly rewarded for its willingness to grind whatever human grist the mill required? Same in both.

One week into my new Silicon Valley life, and the lesson was this: if you want to be a startup entrepreneur, get used to negotiating from positions of weakness. I’d soon have trickier situations to negotiate than convincing a cop to let me take a cab. And so will you if you play the startup game. The next morning, I wasn’t merely hungover, but was in fact still mildly drunk. The company all-hands meeting, wherein the entire company gathered to hear about new deals and employees, and generally to get pep-rallied by Murthy Nukala, the CEO, was scheduled for noon that day. I had to be there or risk having my coworkers file a missing persons report, as well as look like a pussy. My frazzled brain was slow to realize my car was still somewhere in San Mateo. One hundred and thirty dollars and too much sunlight later, I was standing beside my four-wheeled Bavarian steed at the scene of last night’s triumph over the rule of law, and fifteen minutes later I was an acceptable five minutes late for the all-hands. As I walked into the company-wide meeting, a murmur was heard from a corner of the assembled crowd, expressing either surprise or amusement at my being both alive and unincarcerated. The company rumor mill had been busy that morning. I probably looked as pickled and embalmed as I felt. Murthy launched into his weekly harangue. The wheels of capitalism ground ever on.

The miserable conclusion was that Facebook, though assumed to be a rich repository of user data, did not in fact have much commercially useful data at all. Social plugin data, despite its ominous and all-pervasive nature, might fall into that same depressing category.

You learn that what matters in a big company is to avoid falling victim to firing or layoffs, and to appear important and critical to the company’s mission

Credit” is the third-person singular conjugation of the present tense of the Latin verb credere, “to believe.” It’s the most exceptional and interesting thing in the financial world. Similar leaps of belief underlie every human transaction in life: Your wife might cheat on you, but you hope otherwise. The online store you paid may not ship you your goods, but you trust otherwise. Credit derivatives are just the explicit encapsulations of such beliefs, in financial and contractual form, for corporate entities. Unlike other financial securities, such as shares of IBM stock or oil futures, a credit derivative is not even some theoretical value of a tangible good. It’s the perceived value of a complete intangible, the perception of the probability of meeting some future obligation. People often asked me in the early days of my tech career how I had gone from Wall Street to ads technology. Such a person almost certainly knew nothing about either industry, or the answer would have been obvious. I did the same thing the whole time: putting a price on a human’s perception, be it of a General Motors bond or a pair of shoes coveted on Zappos. It’s the same difference either way; only the scale of the money pile changes.

To paraphrase the very quotable Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, 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. Wall Street was merely the first inkling. The next place where this shift would be seen at whopping scale in terms of both money and technology (though I didn’t realize at the time) was in Internet advertising. And after that, it would hit transportation (Uber), hostelry (Airbnb), food delivery (Instacart), and so on. To take the theory further, computation would no longer fill some hard gap in a human workflow process, such as the calculators used by accountants. Humans would fill the hard gaps in a purely computer workflow process, like Uber’s drivers. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. There’s an additional lesson here. This shift from humans to computers took place predominantly on the equity side of things. The debt side of the financial world, for various reasons, still traded in what amounted to open-outcry markets with humans talking to one another, whether through phones or instant messaging systems. It was capitalism at the speed a tongue can wag or hands can type. This was mostly because a company’s debt is complex and multifarious, and entities like General Motors have hundreds if not thousands of different types of debt floating around the world’s trading floors. Briefly, they are not what economists call “fungible,” meaning interchangeable the way quarter-inch screws or bottle caps are.

Whether it be brand marketers trumpeting the new BMW X5, game developers getting players to spend real money on virtual goods, or someone selling an online nursing degree, the only difference is the time frame in which those different goals occur—in other words, the time between attention and action. If the time frame is very short, like browsing for and buying a shirt at nordstroms.com, it’s called “direct response,” or “DR” advertising. If the time frame is very long, such as making you believe life is unlivable outside the pricey mantle of a Burberry coat, it’s called “brand advertising.” Note that the goal is the same in both: to make you buy shit you likely don’t need with money you likely don’t have. In the former case, the trail is easily trackable, as the “conversion” usually happens online, usually after clicking on the very ad you were served.* In the latter, the media employed is a multipronged strategy of Super Bowl ads, Internet advertising, postal mail, free keychains, and God knows what else. Also, the conversion happens way after the initial exposure to the media, and often offline and in a physical space, like at a car dealership. The tracking and attribution are much harder, due to both the manifold media used and the months or years gone by between the exposure and the sale. As such, brand advertising budgets, which are far larger than direct-response ones, are spent in embarrassingly large broadsides, barely targeted or tracked in any way. Now you know all there is to know about advertising. The rest is technical detail and self-promoting bullshit spun by agencies. You’re officially as informed as the media tycoons who run the handful of agencies that manage our media world.

Here’s something you may not know: every time you go to Facebook or ESPN.com or wherever, you’re unleashing a mad scramble of money, data, and pixels that involves undersea fiber-optic cables, the world’s best database technologies, and everything that is known about you by greedy strangers. Every. Single. Time. The magic of how this happens is called “real-time bidding” (RTB) exchanges, and we’ll get into the technical details before long. For now, 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. 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. Remember Spear, Leeds & Kellogg, Goldman Sachs’s old-school brokerage acquisition, and its disappearing (or disappeared) traders? The company went from hundreds of traders and two programmers to twenty programmers and two traders in a few years. That same process was just starting in the media world circa 2009, and is right now, in 2016, kicking into high gear. As part of that shift, one of the final paroxysms of wasted effort at Adchemy was taking place precisely in the RTB space. An engineer named Matthew McEachen, one of Adchemy’s best, and I built an RTB bidding engine that talked to Google’s huge ad exchange, the figurative New York Stock Exchange of media, and submitted bids and ads at speeds of upwards of one hundred thousand requests per second. We had been ordered to do so only to feed some bullshit line Murthy was laying on potential partners that we were a real-time ads-buying company. Like so much at Adchemy, that technology would be a throwaway, but the knowledge I gained there, from poring over Google’s RTB technical documentation and passing Google’s merciless integration tests with our code, would set me light-years ahead of the clueless product team at Facebook years later.

In reality, though, it usually worked like this: A female candidate who will buzzkill your weekly happy hour? “Cultural fit.” A soft-spoken Indian or Chinese engineer, quietly competent but incapable of the hard-charging egotism that Americans almost universally wear like they do blue jeans? “Cultural fit.” Self-taught kid from some crappy college you’ve never heard of, without that glib sheen of effortless superiority you get out of Harvard or Stanford? “Cultural fit.” And so it goes. Shaffer’s machine-gun questioning and imperiousness had rattled me. I suspected that I had failed to pass his bar, and I needed to clear my head. The day had been nothing but a series of interrogations inside small, gray, rotten-smelling rooms. The Guantánamo vibe was fatiguing. Despite the NSA-level security on checking in and the way we were handed off like booby-trapped hot potatoes that no one could drop, nobody appeared for the next interview. Wining and dining evidently not in the offing, I wandered off and tried to find something to eat.

At that point in time, Gokul Rajaram was a legendary éminence grise in the ad-tech world. The so-called godfather of AdSense, Google’s secondary gold mine after AdWords, Gokul was a constant presence on the conference circuit, and an omnipresent adviser or investor in just about every advertising technology company worth talking about. He too had come to Facebook via a small acqui-hire, though really that had been just a career breather between his time at Google and his hiring at Facebook. University at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), followed by an American MBA, he was your standard-issue Indian techie, and probably that country’s most valuable export after steel and Tata Motors. “What’s the first thing you would change about Facebook Ads if we hired you?” There was about as much polish and prologue to Gokul as that of a North Korean diplomat. “I’d build a conversion-tracking system. It’s unbelievable you don’t have one yet.” A conversion-tracking system is software that tells you if an advertisement has worked in driving a conversion (or “sale” in marketing-speak), and lets you retweak your marketing campaigns based on performance. An ads system without conversion tracking is like a car without rearview mirrors; nay, it’s like a car without even rear or side windows. All you can see is forward, merrily driving along, not even understanding what’s behind you or what you just ran over. It’s a danger to yourself and others, and it was a sign of just how out-of-touch Facebook Ads management was that this somehow never got prioritized. From Gokul’s smile the conclusion was clearly . . . right answer! And so the conversation went, traversing various potential aspects of the Facebook Ads system, and what the company needed to build. It was a giddy Gokul—I’d soon learn he was almost always giddy—who escorted me out the door. The boys and I had arrived separately, assuming we’d get out at different times, and separately did we go back to the GrokPad. There, we compared notes. MRM and Argyris weren’t exactly rousing in their reviews of the experience. In fact, it was clear that the fascist vibe the company gave off had very much rubbed them the wrong way. They had never really liked Facebook, as either product or company, going back to our visits to their developer events. The daylong hazing had done nothing to charm them.

Commercial credit is the creation of modern times, and belongs, in its highest perfection, only to the most enlightened and best governed nations. It has raised armies, equipped navies, and, triumphing over the gross power of mere numbers, it has established national superiority on the foundation of intelligence, wealth, and well-directed industry. —Daniel Webster, US Senate speech, March 18, 1834*

I had also noticed that those who most made a big show of believing in Truth were unusually attached to whatever well-groomed pack of lies they held dear.

never let the facts get in the way of a good story.

Our only hope is that the profits from authoring schemes outweigh the costs of being extras in those of others; I

The corporate-development teams of large companies, insofar as their small-company deals are concerned, are really glorified HR recruiters with fatter checkbooks. That

The tech startup scene, for all its pretensions of transparency, principled innovation, and a counterculture renouncement of pressed shirts and staid social convention, is actually a surprisingly reactionary crowd. Its members preen and puff and protect their public image, like a Victorian lady powdering her nose, and refuse to acknowledge anything contrary to their well-marketed exteriors. Sure,

Ultimately, the Valley attitude is an empowered anomie turbocharged by selfishness, respecting some nominal “feel-good” principals of progress or collective technological striving, but in truth pursuing a continual self-development refracted through the capitalist prism: hippies with a capitalization table and a vesting schedule.

Silicon Valley is the zoo where the chaos monkeys are kept, and their numbers only grow in time. With the explosion of venture capital, there is no shortage of bananas to feed them. The question for society is whether it can survive these entrepreneurial chaos monkeys intact, and at what human cost.

In Ads, we had completely failed to realize the importance of the logout page on FB. A bit of background: In most developing countries, people do not own desktop computers, and their phones are non-smartphone pieces of shit (this is, of course, gradually changing). So people do what you do as a Western backpacker in Brazil or India or whatever: they use an Internet café or other public computer. They log in, use Facebook at some rate per hour, and then log out. What they leave behind is the logout screen, which just so happens to be the most common webpage up on browsers in the world. Really. You walk into a library or café anywhere in the world, and most of the screens will be glowing Facebook blue. And that is also how most new Facebook users in these countries came into being, not to mention nudging existing users into using Facebook. A fact that we in Ads did not even begin to appreciate.

Cash, as always, is the poor man’s credit. It would actually have been more expensive to go with the cheaper lawyer, as that bill would be paid in crisp, green benjamins, rather than equity funny money.

Long story short: I don’t know shit about whatever dancing monkey of the moment is amusing the plebes.

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

As a Facebook product manager, you resembled an Afghan warlord or a pirate captain: fearsome in appearance to any outsiders, the scourge of entire companies and industries, but actually barely in control of your small band of engineer-hooligans, and always one step from mutiny. To the outside world, your job was easy: a two-line email would have the senior management of any company waiting eagerly in the Facebook reception area almost instantaneously. Many were the startups I conjured thusly, they sputtering in flattery despite my showing up late and surly, demanding and getting a full walk-through of their entire product and business model, then dismissing them after a forty-five-minute meeting.

If humanity had waited until 2010 to invent masturbation, it would not have caught on as fast as CityVille. That

Marketing is like sex: only losers pay for it.

But such is the greased pole of Silicon Valley fame and power; anyone can try to ascend, but nothing will arrest your fall.

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

Fund-raising is an operatic drama on the order of a Latin American telenovela. Avoid

In the startup game, there are no real rules, only laws, and weakly enforced ones at that. In the end, success would forgive any sins, as it did for Gates and Jobs, and continues to do for countless startup entrepreneurs.

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

Facebook could have a video of you fornicating wildly with a frisky German shepherd, with your Social Security number and bank details written in lipstick on the dog’s back, while some deep voice in the background read out your deepest, darkest secrets from childhood and adolescence, and you know what? No advertiser would give a shit.

In all my experience in both startups and large companies, including and especially at Facebook, 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, surrounded by the mediocre duffers who've succeeded in life through nothing more than guile and appearances.

To paraphrase Lord Palmerston about great nations, companies like Facebook had no eternal allies and no perpetual enemies, they merely had eternal and perpetual interests.

Here is a key insight for any startup: You may think yourself a puny midget among giants when you stride out into a marketplace, and suddenly confront such a giant via litigation or direct competition. But the reality is that larger companies often have much more to fear from you than you from them. For starters, their will to fight is less than yours. Their employees are mercenaries who don’t deeply care, and suffer from the diffuse responsibility and weak emotional investment of a larger organization. What’s an existential struggle to you is merely one more set of tasks to a tuned-out engineer bored of his own product, or another legal hassle to an already overworked legal counsel thinking more about her next stock-vesting date than your suit.

Unlike other financial securities, such as shares of IBM stock or oil futures, a credit derivative is not even some theoretical value of a tangible good. It’s the perceived value of a complete intangible, the perception of the probability of meeting some future obligation.

In general, be it at startups or aggressive companies like Facebook, there should be a cultural bias for launching. The perfect is very often the enemy of the good, and as the Facebook poster screamed from every wall: DONE IS BETTER THAN PERFECT. Very few companies have died due to launching early; at worst, you’ll have a one time product embarrassment (as Apple did with the first version of its iPhone Maps app). However, countless companies have died by losing the nerve to ship, and freezing into a coma of second-guessing, hesitation, and internal indecision. As in life, so in business: maintain a bias for action over inaction.

The classic sign of a shitty startup idea is that it requires at least two (or more!) miracles to succeed. This

To be a startup, miracles need to happen. But a precise number of miracles. Most successful startups depend on one miracle only. For Airbnb, it was getting people to let strangers into their spare bedrooms and weekend cottages. This was a user-behavior miracle. For Google, it was creating an exponentially better search service than anything that had existed to date. This was a technical miracle. For Uber or Instacart, it was getting people to book

book and pay for real-world services via websites or phones. This was a consumer-workflow miracle. For Slack, it was getting people to work like they formerly chatted with their girlfriends. This is a business-workflow miracle. For the makers of most consumer apps (e.g., Instagram), the miracle was quite simple: getting users to use your app, and then to realize the financial value of your particular twist on a human brain interacting with keyboard or touchscreen. That was Facebook’s miracle, getting every college student in America to use its platform during its early years. While there was much technical

the day-to-day, the lifeblood of a VC wasn’t money, it was deal flow. Getting a first look at a potential Uber or Airbnb is what distinguished a first-class VC from an also-ran. Given Y Combinator’s immense success in drawing the best entrepreneurs, it had a quasi-stranglehold on the best early-stage deal flow in the Valley.

Like the canniest early-stage investors, YC cared a lot more about the team at this point than whatever improbable idea we might have. The latter was really there only to judge the former; it was valueless in itself.

What’s my big beef with capitalism? That it desacralizes everything, robs the world of wonder, and leaves it as nothing more than a vulgar market. The fastest way to cheapen anything—be it a woman, a favor, or a work of art—is to put a price tag on it. And that’s what capitalism is, a busy greengrocer going through his store with a price-sticker machine—ka-CHUNK! ka-CHUNK!—$4.10 for eggs, $5 for coffee at Sightglass, $5,000 per month for a run-down one-bedroom in the Mission. Think I’m exaggerating? Stop and think for a moment what this whole IPO ritual was about. For the first time, Facebook shares would have a public price. For all the pageantry and cheering, this was Mr. Market coming along with his price-sticker machine and—ka-CHUNK!—putting one on Facebook for $38 per share. And everyone was ecstatic about it. It was one of the highlights of the technology industry, and one of the “once in a lifetime” moments of our age. In pre-postmodern times, only a divine ritual of ancient origin, victory in war, or the direct experience of meaningful culture via shared songs, dances, or art would cause anybody such revelry. Now we’re driven to ecstasies of delirium because we have a price tag, and our life’s labors are validated by the fact it does. That’s the smoldering ambition of every entrepreneur: to one day create an organization that society deems worthy of a price tag. These are the only real values we have left in the twilight of history, the tired dead end of liberal democratic capitalism, at least here in the California fringes of Western civilization. Clap at the clever people getting rich, and hope you’re among them. Is it a wonder that the inhabitants of such a world clamor for contrived rituals of artificial significance like Burning Man, given the utter bankruptcy of meaning in their corporatized culture? Should we be surprised that they cling to identities, clusters of consumption patterns, that seem lifted from the ads-targeting system at Facebook: “hipster millennials,” “urban mommies,” “affluent suburbanites”? Ortega y Gasset wrote: “Men play at tragedy because they do not believe in the reality of the tragedy which is actually being staged in the civilized world.” Tragedy plays like the IPO were bound to pale for those who felt the call of real tragedy, the tragedy that poets once captured in verse, and that fathers once passed on to sons. Would the inevitable descendants of that cheering courtyard crowd one day gather with their forebears, perhaps in front of a fireplace, and ask, “Hey, Grandpa, what was it like to be at the Facebook IPO?” the way previous generations asked about Normandy or the settling of the Western frontier? I doubt it. Even as a participant in this false Mass, the temporary thrill giving way quickly to fatigue and a budding hangover, I wondered what would happen to the culture when it couldn’t even produce spectacles like this anymore.

Truth in the world resides only in mathematical proofs and physics labs. Everywhere else it's really matter of opinion, and if it manages to become group opinion, it's undeservedly crowned as capital-T truth. And so you need to determine whatever the local version of truth is you're inhabiting.

The great source of both the misery and disorders of human life, seems to arise from over-rating the difference between one permanent situation and another. Avarice over-rates the difference between poverty and riches: ambition, that between a private and a public station: vainglory, that between obscurity and extensive reputation. The person under the influence of any of those extravagant passions, is not only miserable in his actual situation, but is often disposed to disturb the peace of society, in order to arrive at that which he so foolishly admires. —Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments

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. —Leon Festinger et al., When Prophecy Fails

Every Jobs has his Wozniak. I

Recall the depths of the credit crash at Goldman back in 2008. Goldman could have pushed for the obvious technical step of trading credit derivatives on exchanges, which would have resulted in greater volume and greater transparency, and taken the regulatory heat off. But would Goldman cede its information asymmetry in the form of the trading flows that it, and only it, saw? Would it cede the ability to more or less arbitrarily set prices for credit risk, alongside a tightly knit network of brokers, effectively manipulating the market to its own benefit, rather than offering an open one?

The cofounder relationship goes way beyond the typical professional collegiality one finds in blah corporate life. One can stretch these military analogies too far—nobody is taking incoming artillery fire here, who are we kidding?—but the startup experience does have a certain comrade-in-arms, foxhole quality to it. Nobody believes in what you’re doing except this other poor fool sitting next to you, who’s just as fucked as you are if you don’t succeed. Nothing is keeping the entity going except your shared delusion. And there you sit, working, raging, doing both the best, and also the most poorly thought out, work of your life.

Startups are experiments in group psychology. As CEO, you’re both the therapist leader, and the patient most in need of therapy.

There’s a Jewish folktale about a biblical king who dispatches one of his wise men to craft him a mantra that would both humble the proud and console the unfortunate. After searching in the market, where our wise man consults a local jeweler, he returns to the king with an engraved ring. The king holds the ring close and reads: THIS TOO SHALL PASS. So remember that, when lamenting your troubles, contemplating the perceived triumphs of peers and competitors, or rejoicing in that rare entrepreneurial triumph. It will all soon pass, and much faster than you think.

Eventually Russia, Iran, India, Brazil, and parts of Africa will fall to the Growth team’s patient ministrations. Then, Mark Zuckerberg, like a young Alexander the Great at the Indus River, will weep for having no more world to conquer.

To be someone or to do something, which would I choose?

Have a mad vision, and you’re a kook. Get a crowd to believe in it as well, and you’re a leader. By

People go into startups thinking that the technical problems are the challenges. In practice, the technical stuff is easy, unless you’re incompetent or really at the hairy edge of human knowledge—for example, putting a man on Mars. No, every real problem in startups is a people problem, and as such they’re the hardest to solve, as they often don’t have a real solution, much

As the ever-sagacious @gselevator quoted: in communism people made lines for bread, while in capitalism they make lines for iPhones. Sure, iPhones are better than bread, and the standard of living in capitalist countries is clearly higher, but the lived experiences of either, from the point of view of the working proles, bears more than a passing resemblance.

Making the Facebook sale to the CEO of General Motors was like teaching an Amazonian tribesman how to set a clock radio: possible, so long as you couched it in their language and framed it in whatever quirky mythology they held sacred. Fox,

This is how online advertising works: money turns into pixels and electrons in the form of ads, which turn into a scintilla of attention in someone’s mind, which after a few more clicks and electrons shuffling about, turns back into money. The only goal here is to make that second pile of money as large as possible relative to the first pile of money.

To fans of irony, Wall Street provided endless delectation. The all-out, unfettered, and glorified pursuit of gain was like sex in pubescent adolescence: it was all you could think about, and all you wanted to think about. But there was corporate decorum to maintain all the same. We were doing God’s work, remember.

What’s my big beef with capitalism? That it desacralizes everything, robs the world of wonder, and leaves it as nothing more than a vulgar market. The fastest way to cheapen anything—be it a woman, a favor, or a work of art—is to put a price tag on it. And

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, and be, as it were, a father to its progeny.

I wouldn’t be the first person in Silicon Valley history to interview at a company at which I didn’t really want a job, but these were certainly somewhat unique circumstances.

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

A “pivot” is supposed to recall a ballerina’s demi détourné, a delicate change of course as graceful as it (hopefully) seems intentional. In reality, a startup’s pivot is a panicked sprint comparable to that of a Titanic passenger who’s spotted the last open life raft.

What a company builds (SVP, Product), how it builds it (SVP, Engineering), how that eventual product is operationally run (COO), and what other companies it buys (Corp Dev): those are the core functions of any large tech company, and the people from the Ads team we met during forty-eight busy hours in 2011 would, by 2015, be that core leadership of Twitter.

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

A plug for the quantitative sciences: The reality is, most humans manage to feed, clothe, and amuse themselves, and yet are not able to formulate a rational argument that stands up to informed scrutiny, derive the conclusion of a syllogistic argument, or understand a mathematical proof. Doing advanced studies in any quantitative field is like surviving Marine boot camp while the rest of the world is channel surfing and inhaling Oreos; you don’t exactly need to fear the push-up test. Even when the intellectual test is being doled out as filter to the elite ranks of a globe-spanning tech company, you won’t be out of your league if you understand the problem space. So if nothing else, aspiring physicist or mathematician, rest comfortable knowing you’ll come out of that long academic tunnel thinking circles around most people.

Despite the fact that the entire continent was unable to itself produce even a single consumer Internet company of global scope, Europe did reserve the right to control how those (American) companies did business.

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

Don’t work for the survivors or architects of massacres. You’ll live just long enough to regret it.