Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley

“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.”

Key takeaway

Learning to code is empowering

“If my advertiser data about what you bought and browsed in the past was more important than publisher data like the fact that you were on Yahoo Autos right then, or that you were (supposedly) a thirty-five-year-old male in Ohio, then the power was mine as the advertiser to determine price and desirability of media, not the publisher’s. As it turned out (and as Facebook would painfully realize in 2011, forming the dramatic climax of this book), this “first-party” advertiser data—the data that companies like Amazon know about you—is more valuable than most any publisher data.”

Key takeaway

The more you know the more powerful you are. 1st Party data helps with Jobs-to-be-Done

“The Prince: war is never avoided; it’s only postponed to someone’s advantage.”

Key takeaway

Someone is always trying to gain leverage

“The Ads team takes users and turns them into money. The Growth team takes money and turns it into users. Together they form the counterweighted yin-yang of Facebook.”

Key takeaway

Ads and Growth go hand in hand

“Ads-Growth dialectic is this: What makes a user use the product does not necessarily make money, and the reverse is also true. In fact, they’re anticorrelated in general, and you can drive engagement or make money, but not both at once.”

Key takeaway

Everything is interconnected