- Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley by Antonio Garcia Martinez
- Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble by Dan Lyons
- The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz
Three books set in startup land, each with a very different perspective on the startup experience. The most enjoyable of the books is Chaos Monkeys. The author, Antonio Garcia Martinez, describes his journey from being a Strat at Goldman Sachs to moving to join an advertising startup in Silicon Valley to founding his own startup to selling the company to Twitter while engineering a job for himself at Facebook to his ultimate ejection from Facebook. He comes across as quite a rascal, super-smart, ascerbic and driven; someone who doesn’t suffer fools gladly and by his account he comes across a lot of fools on his journey.
For me the most interesting part of the book was the short period running his own startup - breaking free of the company he was working for, getting accepted into Y-Combinator, dealing with angel investors and VCs, to being acqui-hired by Twitter (with the twist that he himself is acqui-hired by Facebook). I found it fascinating and educational even without all the salacious insider-gossip-type details the author throws in.
I was less impressed by Disrupted, the story of an old-school writer/editor who gets laid off by Newsweek and decides to venture into startup land, albeit in Boston rather than Silicon Valley. I think I was put off by the snarky, “I’m the only sane person in the building” tone to the book - you could sense an almost continuous rolling of the eyes. There’s definitely another side to this story that I would be interested in hearing about. That being said, the company he joins, HubSpot, does seem highly dysfunctional. The behavior Lyons describes seems more like very poor management practices than some unique aspect of modern-day startups. He also is very sarcastic about the DiSC Assessment which I happen to find very useful, even if the underlying science is a bit shaky - that probably biased me against the author ;-)
Twenty minutes in to the audiobook version of The Hard Thing About Hard Things I had a foreboding that it might be a waste of time - the books starts off with some anecdotes about the author’s youth that seemed a bit shallow. However, the book does improve greatly and by the end I was glad that I had read it. Although the book does talk about the author’s experiences in two different startups, it concerns itself mostly with the phase when I started is well-funded has a sizeable number of people working for it and needs to act like a proper company - not the three guys hacking away in a rented apartment that Chaos Monkeys describes. As such it offers a lot of advice for someone transitioning from Founder to CEO. Not sure I’ll ever get to the place where his advice will come in useful, but a worthwhile read nonetheless.