Chaos Monkeys

Little Kat purchased this book for me. It follows a guy who initially started out working on Wall Street. He left to work at a company in the online advertising space. Eventually he figured that company was destined to failure. He talked two other coworkers there to leave and start a small company named AdGrok.

This startup company lasted for 10 months. By then, one of the programmers had stop contributing. The other one was burned out. The author decided they needed to sell the company. Twitter offered them $5M total. Their investors did not like that one bit. Neither did the author.

Twitter later upped the price to $10M. But the author decided he did not want to work there. They attempted to get FaceBook to buy the company. But FaceBook only wanted to hire the author, not his two fellow company members.

In the end, the company was sold to Twitter. But the author did not go with them. Twitter was mad but still paid $5M. The investors were even madder. The two guys who did go to Twitter lasted the full 4 years until their stock options vested.

The author went on to work at FaceBook, eventually running a small team called FBX. The powers that be decided to go with another small team to take FaceBook advertising forward. After that, the author planned to resign. FaceBook fired him before he could quit. The author went to work at a partner company of FaceBook. He also consulted for Twitter, who had just purchased a company to do what the author was trying to do back at FaceBook.