Lately I have been on a binge fest, devouring memoir after memoir couched in startupland. And Chaos Monkeys by Antonio Garcia Martinez has been the latest kill. 

Martinez is a physics PhD dropout from Berkeley who leaves a job at Goldman Sachs in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis to join a an adtech startup in the Silicon Valley.  From there, he ventures into his own startup with help from the accelerator Y-Combinator.  Eventually he sells the company to Twitter and transitions into the role of a Product Manager at Facebook. Martinez has provided a detailed autobiographical account of his entire career journey in the book.

A few pages in though, I started wondering how this book had managed to make it into the New York Times Bestseller’s list and I ploughed through much of this five hundred page tome trying to figure out the answer.  In the end, I emerged disappointed and exhausted.  While Anna Wiener used wit and Dan Lyons employed satire to produce entertaining tell all accounts, Martinez has relied on a disparaging tone that serves mostly to vex the reader and generate dislike for the narrator.

Martinez has devoted swathes of the book to his obsession, a product called FBX, which he championed while working at Facebook. Reading page after page on the merits of FBX really isn’t engaging unless you are into advertising technology.  This disquisition really needed to be tempered.

Another thing that I did not like was the fact that Martinez made no attempt to disguise the identity of the Indian origin CEO of the startup where he was employed.  He openly names this person and displays his contempt for him using words like sycophant and tyrant, going to the extent of stating: I’ve probably never hated one man so much, other than my father.  Using a pseudonym or a nickname would have been a better technique to deal with this matter.

The book does have its moments though.  Martinez is interviewing at Facebook when he goes to the bathroom to relieve himself.  The sound of laptop keyboard clicking emerges from one of the stalls.  From the cadence, it dawns on Martinez that the person inside the stall is writing code while on the pot.  This level of geekiness manages to startle even a tech veteran such as Martinez, though it does not deter him from signing on the dotted line at Facebook.

While reading these memoirs, I feel like a curious kid observing, with nose pressed against the window, the inner workings of tech startups and I can’t help but make comparisons with the corporate world.  It seems that the cast and culture are different but the narrative is similar – desire and insecurity collude to manifest themselves in a variety of shenanigans and wiles.  As the author says, “Sure, it’s no worse than traditional industry or politics, but certainly no better either.”

Overall, this tell all memoir is just so-so.  I would advise you to read it if you are interested in ad tech or are planning to audition for a role at Facebook, otherwise you can safely give it a pass.