YouSaid · the spoken record

Antonio García-Martinez

lines on the record: 89
first: 2016-07-25
most recent: 2016-07-25
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, but then, but then I have to go back into sociopathic mode. I have to go into like sociopathic Antonio mode. I have to become like American psycho again, which I absolutely was. And like, I don't know if I want to be that again.”
2016-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Chaos Monkeys" author Antonio García-Martinez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, he wasn't well prepared. Anyhow, so at least a notion, I don't know about the world, but definitely Australian back or Polynesian back sort of thing. And so that's what I'm working on now. And as I mentioned in the book, there was two different boats that I fitted out for that and then kind of let Rod away, like so many relationships and my children and all the rest for the sake of the glory of Facebook, right? But I think it's time that I'm getting a little old. And so it's time to actually go ahead and do that. And so I think after this whole PR mayhem is over, I'm going to focus on that.”
2016-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Chaos Monkeys" author Antonio García-Martinez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh my god, it's a very quick question. I'm on a boat. So the other thing that my mother died. So the other thing on the bucket list was sailing around the world alone on a sailboat. Which sounds ridiculous, but it sounds wrong.”
2016-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Chaos Monkeys" author Antonio García-Martinez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Apologies because we never talked after the deal, and I think he's probably still pissed off. Oh, he's nice. I'm sure he's way over. But he's the one guy that we maybe didn't do that right by at the end. But he also basically offered to basically lend us the money for the lawsuit, a terrible deal for him.”
2016-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Chaos Monkeys" author Antonio García-Martinez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, I know opinions are often mixing them or whatever, but in my opinion, he was the noblest sort of character in the book, and that he literally burned relationships to protect us, not because we were particularly promising or anything, but just that's you're one of the family. And this is just how it was. And if I have to walk into Mayfield and say, you know, screw you, then I will. And he was willing to do that, as was Sam Altman, even Ted Wang from Ted Wang.”
2016-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Chaos Monkeys" author Antonio García-Martinez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, the only universal moral good, I think, in the book was early on when we got sued. It's clear that there are rules. I think there's no rules. I mean, there are certainly some guiding principles. And that I think particularly principled individuals will follow those rules even to their own detriment, right? So like Paul Graham, who I obviously love a lot as a startup guru.”
2016-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Chaos Monkeys" author Antonio García-Martinez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They need So what is the bad part and the good part of that? You talk a lot about the bad parts of it, the arrogance, the waste, the lying to yourself, that kind of stuff. What's the good part of that?”
2016-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Chaos Monkeys" author Antonio García-Martinez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What they need is wealthy people willing to spray money on 23 year old kids with an idea. That's what they need. And that culture is impossible to import. So what is...”
2016-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Chaos Monkeys" author Antonio García-Martinez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think tactically, yes. To be a success, you have to seem a success. Everyone's always killing it. Every graph is up and to the right. I mean, I'm playing the same game with the book, right? By splashing bestseller on it, et cetera, which it is. But is it really necessary, this constant? I think it's one of these things. This Silicon Valley vibe where everyone's always killing it and people put huge sums of money over stupid bullshit. It's like one of those things, it's like democracy or religion. If everyone believes in it, it sort of becomes true, right? And the fact that we have this collective delusion that, yeah, you can write a $50,000 check, that'd be worth $5 million later if it becomes Google Uber, it is an important delusion to have. And the reality is that other countries, everyone would love to have what we have, these problems we'd like to have. And so, you know, if you go to Barcelona, the city is investing huge sums of money trying to recreate Silicon Valley. Right, they all are. Right. And they think if they somehow have co-working spaces with exposed brick and industrial lighting and little coffee machines, it's like this cargo cult, like the magical just happen, and they don't realize it's the delusion.”
2016-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Chaos Monkeys" author Antonio García-Martinez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is that important to the success of you were talking about everything as a transformational technology right now, and it really is what's going on? Is it a necessary part of this or is it just the bullshit part?”
2016-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Chaos Monkeys" author Antonio García-Martinez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. Absolutely. You know, there's also a poem, and I'm blanking on Louise Gluck. It was about Circe and the men of Odysseus in Odysseus. And she says, I didn't make them pig. Some men are pigs. I just showed them to be that. It was something like that. It's a great line like that. So let's talk a little bit about that idea of the farce of Silicon Valley and how it displays itself.”
2016-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Chaos Monkeys" author Antonio García-Martinez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, yes, several, many. I would say Pierre. He was at the beginning and the end. I mean, he's got the same issues, positive and negative, but he's still the same person. There's quite a few. There's more people that get licked up and down all day and really believe all the bullshit. It's more and more. And then become weirdly eccentric in a way that's incredibly rude and think that's okay because everybody says yes all day.”
2016-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Chaos Monkeys" author Antonio García-Martinez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Has anyone ever actually? Now I'm asking you a question. Has anyone actually ever dealt with it like a normal human? Yes. Okay.”
2016-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Chaos Monkeys" author Antonio García-Martinez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“FBX made Facebook half a billion dollars a year just with three guys that's what you could do if you get in the middle of the eyeball flow. And then the random failure is to some degree I felt I kind of failed in a way, but also random success, right? That's the other thing that I think Silicon Valley often lies to itself that it's a meritocracy in the book. Meritocracy is the propaganda that blesses a charade. And the weird thing is that one person, it's not just lottery, right? Obviously there's some skill involved, but you'll have a hundred million dollar exit and somebody will have zero. And I really can't believe that person looks at himself in the mirror and says, yeah, I'm 100 million times better than that guy. They actually do. There's an app for that. I've met them and I know they do. They're all of them.”
2016-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Chaos Monkeys" author Antonio García-Martinez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm curious because I've been trying to think. Mean, it's a good thing for Brian Chesky, obviously, right? And his investors. Is it a good thing for the Barcelonas? No, not necessarily, in fact. I'm not convinced it is.”
2016-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Chaos Monkeys" author Antonio García-Martinez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, they make a mess. And so the idea being Silicon Valley is like the zoo where the chaos monkeys are kept and entrepreneurs are going around saying, hey, you know what? We're not going to have taxis anymore. We're going to have this app called Uber. Anybody can become a taxi driver. You know what? We're not going to have hotels anymore. Anyone with a spare bedroom can suddenly become a hotel keeper. And then society has to judge whether it's robust to that. And things like, for example, I wrote part of the book in Barcelona. And the entire Barcelona real estate market has been completely roiled by Airbnb and changed everything about Central. And so the Chaos Monkey visited Barcelona, right? And the Barcelona.”
2016-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Chaos Monkeys" author Antonio García-Martinez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, everyone asked that. It's a good question. So imagine a wild monkey rampaging through a data center, knocking over boxes, playing on cables. There's actually a piece of software called The Chaos Monkey that was made by Netflix, and what it does is it literally goes and kills boxes in a data center, and they test whether they can still stream House of Cards or whatever.”
2016-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Chaos Monkeys" author Antonio García-Martinez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, except I think in my case, I will eat lunch in this town. Right. Because the reaction from even old time Facebookers, who a lot of them we've had, we've clashed online about Facebook has they take criticism to the company very poorly. The reaction has been almost universally. Obviously sample bias because they're the ones who still talk to me. But I might disagree with you with the detail here or there or I might disagree in the high level strategic interpretation of something. But basically you got it right. That's what it was to be inside Facebook at that time. And this is an unvarnished view of that world that's never been told. That's almost universally the response.”
2016-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Chaos Monkeys" author Antonio García-Martinez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so that's been one side of the reaction that I think oh, they just don't like Silicon Valley. The reaction has actually been surprisingly positive. I thought I was literally incinerating my career”
2016-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Chaos Monkeys" author Antonio García-Martinez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, well, of course, it's like looking at Picasso's Guardnica and saying, oh, it's everything wrong with wars. Like, yeah, that's the point, exactly. And like you're saying, I'm only saying things that everyone says, but just never says in public because they're unwilling to do it.”
2016-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Chaos Monkeys" author Antonio García-Martinez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And a lot more. So, like I said, the reviews have been all over the place. One has been, you know, I don't like your book. Everything that's wrong with Silicon Valley. And it's like”
2016-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Chaos Monkeys" author Antonio García-Martinez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She showed up my reading yesterday with the kids. Okay. All right. So, no, she's the sort of person who's not considered and was perfectly.”
2016-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Chaos Monkeys" author Antonio García-Martinez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Shotgun blast to someone's back required doing. Long story short, you wanted to tie your genetic wagon to the bucking horse of her bloodline. If I'm going to be quoted, it'll be quoted.”
2016-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Chaos Monkeys" author Antonio García-Martinez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The British trader. She had wild green eyes with a natural red spots in their irises when you pulled close, reminiscent of that Afghan girl from the National Geographic cover. Her personality was flinty and rough, and as leathery as her skin. She had spent years between various jobs backpacking around the rougher parts of the world. She was an imposing broad shouldered presence, six feet tall and bare feet, and towering over me in heels. Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, coseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness and generally full of shit. They have their self regarding entitlement feminism and ceaselessly vaunt their independence, but the reality is come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion, they become precisely the sort of useless baggage you trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel. And this is the important thing to put in context. I am contrasting this broad overgeneralization to the reality of the woman that I was falling in love with. British trader, on the other hand, was the sort of woman who would end up a useful ally in that post-apocalypse, doing whatever work, be it carpentry, animal husbandry, or”
2016-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Chaos Monkeys" author Antonio García-Martinez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hold on. Well, I could, well, I could almost feel like I could probably almost read. I want you to read it. Okay, I've got it marked off. Good. Because this thing isn't a Yeah, it is. Yeah, that's okay.”
2016-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Chaos Monkeys" author Antonio García-Martinez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hold on. Well, I could almost feel like I could probably almost read. I want you to read it. Okay, I've got it marked off. Good. Because this thing isn't going to go on my tombstone, frankly. Yeah, it is. Yeah.”
2016-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Chaos Monkeys" author Antonio García-Martinez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, exactly. But they are complete reactionaries and very conservative and not nearly as liberal and tolerant as they think they are.”
2016-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Chaos Monkeys" author Antonio García-Martinez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I said that in a piece today by Peter Teal. It's like, The way it is. No, I go further than that in the book. I say actually, Silicon Valley is very reactionary. Everyone doesn't realize it because they don't wear button down shirts and whatever. And they like.”
2016-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Chaos Monkeys" author Antonio García-Martinez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right at And so Well, I think they're quite conservative. I've always thought I said that in a piece today by Peter Teal he is really quite an outlier and people here as much as they talk about disrupting like society the way it is.”
2016-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Chaos Monkeys" author Antonio García-Martinez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, because, well, here's where the nasty comes out, right? For all their presumptions of being subversive and bohemian and counterculture, whatever, Silicon Valley people actually maintain these very well-manicured exteriors. And frankly, everybody has too much to lose, right? At the end of the day, no one wants to pay the opportunity cost of saying the truth and missing out on being employee 70 at the next Pinterest or whatever. And so, yeah, they've just got too much skin in the game. And they really don't care about posterity. They don't think about the future.”
2016-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Chaos Monkeys" author Antonio García-Martinez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. I think, yeah, Silicon Valley is really guilty of always having that sort of fairy tale ending, right? The good guy always wins in the end and is always the sort of rah-ra-ra boosterism to it. I mean, Bradfeld, one of the VC critics of it, said, oh, there's so little optimism in it, right? It's kind of like criticizing a war novel for not having enough patriotism. I mean, I wonder what they'd say if they read All Quite on the Western Fund, for example. So, I mean, why did I write this book? It'll sound grandiose, but it's true. I think we live in exceptional times. Silicon Valley, for all the fun you can make of it, is actually doing amazing things. And I thought people a century or two from now would ask, you know, what happened when all of human knowledge is now on this mobile device that I'm holding in my hand, right? What happens when your social life gets mediated by companies like Facebook, right? I mean, to me, it's comparable to the industrial revolution. It's comparable to the printing press. It's that level of societal, right? And so because it sounds, you know, presumptuous, but nobody was writing it. So I thought, well, if not now when, if not me, who, why do you think?”
2016-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Chaos Monkeys" author Antonio García-Martinez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, so Emma died. And when you spend weeks on a cancer award, you start having these intimations of death and concentrations of mortality. And I realize there's only two things on my bucket list that I really cared about. And one was finally writing this book that I had sort of toyed with and never done. And so then I basically dropped all commitments, sold everything, moved to Europe for half the year in Barcelona, Berlin, wrote the book proposal, sold the book, and then lived like the unibomber in a small house up on the San Juan Islands of northwest Washington, and did the book. And that's been it so far.”
2016-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Chaos Monkeys" author Antonio García-Martinez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I left Facebook in some of the drama that I think we're going to get to probably in this interview. I joined as an advisor and eventually VP of product at Facebook's biggest ads partner, so the buy side of the sell side equation. And then not to be a downer, but then my mother died, right? And then, which is one of the things you have to be a downer about that? I can be a downer? You're allowed. I'm allowed.”
2016-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Chaos Monkeys" author Antonio García-Martinez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you want to be successful. But if you go on radio and provo Utah or Nashville, the fact that you sell a money losing company for $10 million is like, what do you mean? So yeah, AgRock was nothing in the scheme of things, but I think it was very emblematic of just what you said. Your typical AquaHire in which companies arguably overpay for a set of engineers. And the company isn't really a company. It's basically a job interview for a job that you otherwise wouldn't have gotten at a company like Facebook. And that's what happened. Of course, I always have to make the simple, complicated, and I insisted, there are sort of competing offers between Facebook for me and Twitter for the rest of the company. And I insisted for whatever reason, in retrospect, actually probably a bad decision to go to Facebook. And while the rest of the company went to Twitter. And so that's how I landed as Facebook's first ads targeting product manager. Literally the guy that takes your data and turns it into money at Facebook a year before the IPO as one of maybe 30 people on the ad store.”
2016-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Chaos Monkeys" author Antonio García-Martinez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. It was Google. So basically it was Google ads. Those ads you get next to the search results for smaller businesses, which is still an uncracked nut in a tech space. But as we learned, not every business problem has a technical solution, which is one of the lessons of the book. Anyway, after 10 months of literally every problem that befalls startups, co-founder issues, not raising money, raising money, getting sued, et cetera, we sold to Twitter for roughly $10 million after 10 months, even though having essentially no revenue and probably not a lot of prospects.”
2016-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Chaos Monkeys" author Antonio García-Martinez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, absolutely. From the beginning Right, career. I prefer to think of it as a trajectory, sort of like a comet burning up in the atmosphere. We started on Wall Street. Right. So I started, so I was a hippie-dippy physics student at Berkeley. I read Michael Lewis's Lyris Poker, which obviously I'm totally ripping off of in this book, went to Goldman right at the height of the credit sort of boom and then crashed, saw that all that happen, and then thought that tech would be like the one economic oasis amidst the sort of apocalypse. I got a job at this random company, a sort of later stage employee, learned the ads business, found co-founders, went through iCominator, which is his accelerator. Most of your listeners probably know that. And then after 10 months.”
2016-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Chaos Monkeys" author Antonio García-Martinez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yes, I knew along. I mean, this is total hunter S. Thompson Gonzo mode, unlike the Nixon bus in 1968 or whatever. This is totally me kind of going along for the ride, but understanding that ultimately it would be a book.”
2016-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Chaos Monkeys" author Antonio García-Martinez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's the reality. And And I just portrayed it accurately. So let's still make happen. Let's talk a little bit about how you did it. I mean, because it's very detailed. One of the things that's, you clearly were taking notes along the way. Oh, yes, I knew.”
2016-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Chaos Monkeys" author Antonio García-Martinez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But people Talk a little bit about why you did this. I mean, the book isn't nice because Silicon Valley isn't a nice place. That's the reality. And I feel that I accurately portrayed this world. And it's funny, a lot of the negative reviews, clearly it's not that they don't like my book. They just likes Silicon Valley. And I just portray it accurately. So I think it's just probably like the most unfiltered sort of real take on what it is to go through the Silicon Valley roller coaster, as I think one can write and not get sued for libel.”
2016-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Chaos Monkeys" author Antonio García-Martinez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT