Chaos Monkeys

Chaos Monkeys is a fun behind-the-scenes look that lifts the veil on some of the weird, mysterious and sometimes questionable practices going on behind closed doors of mega startups in Silicon Valley.

Way back in Europe in the 18th century, people who hadn’t won the ethnic and cultural lottery, for example by being born poor or with a certain racial background, had few options. There was no way for a peasant to become king, or for a Jew to just shed his religion, if Jews were being discriminated against in his country.

But once the first European settlers had made it to America, a new hope arose. People could try to flee their country, make the dangerous trip to the new world and start fresh. To do so, many happily entered gruesome deals, like serving as a slave for the master who’d take them across the big pond.

Fortunately, we’re long past that. But as always, history repeats itself: H-1B visas, which are the type of visas non-immigrant foreign workers require in the US, are almost impossible to get. Only 8% of all 200,000 applicants trying to get one to work in Silicon Valley in 2013 received one. Even worse, if they’re then fired or their startup fails, the visa expires, so they usually accept low salaries and bad working conditions. Plus, it takes five years before they can apply for a green card.

To avoid all this, it’s not all that rare that startup employees trying to move to San Francisco or the Valley enter fake marriages, like one of the author’s co-founders, Argyris. Since his long-time girlfriend was getting a PhD in the US, being her husband would qualify him for an F-2 student-spouse visa and allow him to stay in the US – so they married a bit earlier than they would have 😉

The year Antonio spent as the CEO of AdGrok, his own startup providing software to optimize Google Ads, before they sold it to Twitter, was shaped by long work nights, dozens of tech events, giving up hobbies, books, movies, friends and basically living family life only via Skype. In the end, AdGrok sold to Twitter for $5 million, but it took a fair share of insanity to get there. The main word used to describe startup founders in this context (by both themselves and those close to them) is obsessed. Until they’ve made it, whatever that means to them, nothing else matters. By the way, that’s not just for startups. Even if you “just” want to build a normal business, you have to be crazy enough to refuse to give up on it until it works. I see it with Four Minute Books.…