The Wolves of Silicon Valley: how megalomaniacs in hoodies became tech's answer to Wall Street
The Wolves of Silicon Valley: how megalomaniacs in
hoodies became tech's answer to Wall Street
By Alix O'Neill 4 JULY 2016 • 4:00PM
As far as commutes go, an air-conned shuttle bus kitted
out with wi-fi is a pretty sweet ride to work. Then there’s all that free food
– breakfast, lunch and dinner sorted. Ooh, and “graffiti” walls, where you can
stick it to the man without getting hauled off to HR. And what could beat a
game of mid-afternoon of table football or meditation in a sleep pod to stave
off RSI? Few places are so enshrined in urban myth as Facebook, Google and co.
Silicon Valley has long been considered the Neverland of corporate life – a
place where office slides and oversized Lego figures are as ubiquitous as water
coolers. But what’s it really like to work at one of these Silicon Valley
behemoths?
'Everyone freaked out when they found out I’d written
this'
One person should know – Antonio Garcia Martinez. His CV
includes Facebook product manager, Twitter advisor and start-up CEO. Today,
however, the 40-year old is casting himself as lowly writer, soon-to-be
“unemployable in tech”, thanks to Chaos Monkeys, his newly released exposé of
life inside Silicon Valley. Martinez joined Facebook’s nascent advertising team
in 2011, but a vocal critic of the company’s strategy, he was pushed out after just two years.
Dubbed “Liar’s Poker meets The Social Network”, the book
is his sweet revenge – a sneering critique of the swelling wealth and influence
of Silicon Valley. Charting the evolution of social media through Martínez’s
career, from Wall Street quant to tech entrepreneur, he says: “everyone freaked
out when they found out I’d written this".
You can see why too. Martínez’s portrayal of Mark
Zuckerberg’s empire and the rest of Silicon Valley is pretty damning stuff. The
tech hub’s elite are painted as sociopaths in hoodies. Forget the dog-eat-dog
capitalism of Wall Street - these guys make Gordon Gekko look like Ghandi.
“Wall Street is the open ruthlessness of gladiatorial
combat,” says Martínez. “You’re tossed in there, a lot of blood flows and one
man triumphs. In Silicon Valley, it’s more like this mafioso drama with a lot
of aggressive behaviour and back-room dealing. Behind the manicured exterior of
being an entrepreneur or an investor, there are all these knives in the back
which are never discussed publicly.”
The changing face of the Valley
The spirit of Silicon Valley, he says, is changing. What
came from a 1960s counterculture is morphing into just another industry where
Ivy League kids go to try to make a name for themselves. ‘So many people in
tech have no sense of right or wrong’, he says describing one guy he saw close
up expressing abuses and intimidation in the form of a company rather than an organised
crime outfit. ‘He’d probably be in jail if he had a bit more violence to him’,
he says. ‘These companies are temples to the founders’ egos. You don’t even
have that level of self worship on Wall Street.”
But you do have comparable levels of wealth. The
Economist recently identified 99 listed tech companies in Silicon Valley with
market values over $1 billion. Together, they account for 6% of all corporate
America’s profits. Meanwhile, a new report published by the California Budget
and Policy Center revealed middle-class families now make up less than half of
households in the area and while the state has more billionaires than any country
except the US and China, San Francisco has the highest levels of homelessness
in the US.
“There are literally shanty towns underneath most highway
overpasses in the city,” says Martínez. “But that techie kid who goes and gets
his $5 single-origin, cruelty-free pour-over in some trendy coffee shop? He
doesn’t give a s***. He just wants to get some liquidity around his shares and
steps over the homeless guy en route to his yoga class.”
Generally speaking, with start-ups, those who join in the
early stages are entitled to a greater share of its equity. So when Facebook
decided to launch IPO proceedings in 2012, anyone who arrived pre-2009 was in
for a windfall. Martínez recalls the day Zuckerberg made the announcement. “I
was sitting behind a 25-year-old, who at the time was one of Facebook’s
longest-serving employees. She was scanning $3 million San Francisco real
estate listings, while Zuck was on stage telling everybody else who wasn’t
about to make that kind of money to ‘stay focused on the mission.’”
The rise of newly minted millennials
Publicly, flashing cash is against the Facebook ethos –
Zuckerberg famously wears a grey t-shirt to work every day, claiming, “I feel
like I’m not doing my job if I spend any of my energy on things that are silly
or frivolous”. Newly minted tech-millennials, therefore, are forced to set up
private groups (on Facebook, of course), where they can discuss the pressing
needs such as where to buy private aviation, the best five-star resorts in Maui
and “how to buy a bunch of land then put it in a trust so people don’t realise
you’re amassing a compound and you can maintain your privacy”. One such group
bears the imaginative title NR250– the “Nouveau Riche first 250 Facebook
employees”.
“You basically have a two-tier society at Facebook –
those worth double or even triple-digit millions and then people who are worth
decent money. It might seem a lot to those not in this world, but if you make
one or two million after four years of pretty hard work at Facebook, you’re
basically kind of middle class. It caused a lot of resentment.”
Still, you can’t say it’s easy money. The book depicts an
all-consuming work culture too. Martínez encountered interns sleeping in
meeting rooms and a programmer coding in the toilet cubicle next to him. “I was
emotionally frazzled by the end. I gained 30lb, barely saw my kids [now aged
six, four and nine months] and suffered two subsequent failed relationships. My
life was a complete mess.”
However, surprisingly, few seem to share his sentiment.
Zuckerberg has no shortage of willing disciples, dedicated to “the mission. If
you’re an engineer at Facebook and you own a piece of code you could have
50million people engaged with something you created, the impact is way more
than a CEO of even a moderately successful start-up. It’s perfect for the sort
of person who doesn’t necessarily need to be the star of the show, but still
wants to make their mark. That’s the genius of Zuck – he’s created a culture that
gets these 23-year-old kids tethered to a corporate campus for fourteen-hour
days.”
Which also goes someway to explain how Facebook also
seems to shrug off charges of a sexism in the workplace and a recent left-wing
bias controversy after being accused of deliberately suppressing conservative
views in its trending topics section. “At the end of the day, there’s nothing
restraining Zuck’s vision. One of the jokes that we had was that Facebook could
throw an election by showing reminders to go vote in certain districts but not
others. That’s the level of control it has. It’s scary.” Still, at least you
get to sit on a bean bag while toppling governments. You don’t get that on Wall
Street.
Chaos Monkeys: Inside the Silicon Valley Money Machine,
£12.99, Ebury Press, is out now
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