Definitely one of the most entertaining books I've read in a long time. Some will most definitely find it offensive, but Antonio bares all his life with clever wit that keeps you engaged and amused throughout the book. If you want to get a behind the door perspective of life at Facebook and at the same time learn about digital advertising, then this is your book. His book resonated with me because he made the switch from the depths of Wall Street to the hopes and dreams of Silicon Valley. He goes on to explain similarities as well as discuss the world of startups and how the entrepreneur life is truly without the glamour that we may only see. I'd probably read this a second time to focus on the digital advertising sections.

The first half is actually quite interesting. The startup life and all. However towards the end it gets a bit too boring. At least for my taste. Lots of quotes from other literature throughout the book. The author sure leaves the impression of an intelligent person :)

Still worth a read. Just not as interesting as some of the other valley stories. IMHO.

I personally liked the book but it felt quite dragged. I am coming from the advertising world and got all the lingo but I believe a lot of people would be probably lost in the dark hole of adtech terms and explanations which do not really contribute to the storyline at all but rather make the book more boring. However, would definitely recommend it to the people in the industry!

Interesting for the most part, but some of the financial stuff was way over my lay persons ability to understand. I got this on audiobook to listen to in the car with my husband. I think he enjoyed it much more than I did.

This book answers the question: "what do you get when you take an extraordinarily cynical, deliciously misanthropic, somewhat misogynistic, highly functioning manipulative sociopath and equip him with tech skills and self-awareness and set him loose in Silicon Valley?"

Most definitely, a polarizing book: you are either going to hate it as a result of the author's transgressions or you are going to love it and embrace it in spite of them, which I seriously hope you do, dear readers, because if you can look past his character flaws (of which he has many) there's a wealth of information to be had about the inner workings of the world's most influencing social media platforms.

Moreover, If you're a bit of a techie you'll find his mini disquisitions on the philosophy and engineering behind the ad market machine that runs what we see on the web extremely clear if not a bit disquieting. This alone is worth the price of the book IMHO.

Overall, it is a funny, illuminating, and downright scary account of life and death in "The Valley". Throughout, in his very own particular way, the author keeps reminding us that he is not a one-off: guys like him (but richer and more powerful) run the tech world and, misguided or not, are out there injecting their worldview into the products that are changing society. Think about that for a second.

To give credit where is due, Mr. Martínez did not spare himself in this account and only time will tell the extent of the damage done to his reputation by publishing this book. But for now, gather 'round folks, and bask in the warm glow of his career self-immolation...

This is a very uneven book. It starts with a lot of promise but quickly devolves into a resemblance of the blogpost collections.

Antonio’s writing is great and he is an undeniably smart person. Book reveals that he has strong opinions about the world and he views the world through the lenses of these opinions.

On its own, this is not the problem. In the end, everybody does this. But Antonio's lenses do not resemble a key to happiness. He believes the world is hypocritical about being a moral place and as consequence himself makes actions which arguably belong to a no man’s land on a moral landscape. To paraphrase the Batman movie “Some men just like to see the world scheming”

You won't find examples of deep meaningful connections in this book. In some sense it is a book about pain and suffering due to the world being immoral, fake and the only way to succeed is to behave in a similar way.

There is a lot of interesting information in the book about the way Silicon Valley, advertising, targeting and the way Facebook works. But it is drowned in the vast amount of text borderning in value with that of a twitter rant.

It is a shame, given Antonio clearly has a talent for writing and finding words.

I would recommend reading this book only if you don't have much else to do. Otherwise it is better to find some summary and a list of key points to save yourself some time.

Liar’s Poker—remember that book? I wonder how it was received in 1989. It’s now considered a classic and is gleefully passed around summer training classes. It’s the North Star in a constellation of Wall Street memoirs spanning from Reminiscences of a Stock Operator (1923) to Straight to Hell (2015). I’ve spent many a night gazing into this galaxy, exploring some celestial objects that are little more than dimly lit orbs of gaseous matter.

In Liar’s Poker, which is one of about four Wall Street books that anyone should ever consider reading twice, Michael Lewis (who is now a respected American novelist) details his experience during the glory days of Salomon Brothers, an investment bank that specialized in bond trading. Lewis wrote astutely of everything from his days in training class (which is probably why new recruits find the book so charming) to the big swinging d****s (high performers) who roamed the trading floor, to the game that is the book’s namesake.

Through all of this, Lewis was on the sidelines. In fact, he might have only been in New York for summer training and spent the rest of his time in London. He had no importance to the story—and an endearing criticism of the book is that he was just a snarky little twentysomething who ended up writing what was, to 1980s Wall Street, received as if it were tabloid journalism.

Many have tried and failed to capture the magic of the company exposé like Michael Lewis did. Dan Lyons wrote Disrupted, which was about his time at Hubspot, in a similar vein, but it was nothing compared to Liar’s Poker. As soon as it becomes obvious that someone is sticking around just for the story, some of the magic is lost. So one must walk a fine line when writing a Liar’s Poker.

Antonio Martinez goes overboard on a few occasions, but he’s come closer than anyone else to writing the Liar’s Poker of Silicon Valley. And this is not an easy thing to do. Michael Lewis himself attempted to write the Liar’s Poker of Silicon Valley. It was called The New New Thing and was published in 1999. It’s now embarrassingly dated and has been relegated to the lowest quartile of Lewis’ published works ranking. There is a parallel between the excesses of 1980s Wall Street and late 90’s Silicon Valley, but the book was forgettable. It didn’t read the same way that Liar’s Poker did.

Michael Lewis failed to write the Liar’s Poker of Silicon Valley. Why did we have to wait seventeen years for a quant to come along and commit career suicide with the goal of delivering it?

First and foremost, Antonio Martinez knows what he’s talking about. He’s exceptionally well-read, smart, ambitious, and has high emotional intelligence. One of my favorite thing to do is bust phonies like Tai Lopez who claim to be voracious readers and aren’t. Faced with mountains of well-selected quotes, tight editing, and advanced vocabulary, I believe Antonio when he says he spent his childhood in the library. He convinced me to read Meditations with one great quote selection. This gives him significant credibility as a narrator, and affords him some room to make derisive statements, such as calling Nassim Taleb a pseudo-intellectual.

Antonio knows what he’s talking about because he followed the noble path of starting as an engineer before transitioning to project management. During these years, he was at the forefront of advancements in the ad space. He knew the business so well and was able to seamlessly describe what was going on. Unlike Wall Street, which always is accompanied by a murky foreboding, the implications of digital ad technology are both very real and very easy to understand. He did a wonderful job explaining his industry, his role in the industry, and the valley as a whole.

So, why isn’t this book considered a modern classic?

We’ll start with a softball. Character development is poor compared to a Lewis book. Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg: we know them. A few others: geeks like me know them. The other actors are hard to connect with because Antonio’s narration style is overwhelming. Saying he’s an egoist might be a stretch, but he remained the center of attention throughout. Also, the monikers ‘British Trader’ and ‘Israeli Psychologist’ were ill-conceived. To me, those are two of the worst countries to use as descriptors because there’s no consistency in the mental images readers will generate. The only character I really remember is the CMU football player, but only because the guy who sits next to me at work also played there, also studied engineering there, and shares some facial features.

When it comes to storytelling, Antonio is talented, but he and Michael Lewis apply their wit differently. On one hand, it’s a wildly fun read. On the other hand, it sacrifices the potential for cultural longevity to appeal to what people like me want to read right now. Will people be reading Tucker Max in ten years? Shenanigans are funny, but unless you’re a master of the craft, it’s hard to phrase these things timelessly (not to suggest Antonio was trying to be timeless, or that timelessness is even a goal worth pursuing when writing a memoir). To that point, the DUI incident and reckless driving were kind of dumb.

Generally, the way Antonio discusses his relationships women will be perceived as politically incorrect. I don’t care. But the flippancy of it all irked me. His relationship with British Trader leading to the birth of their first child fit into the story well, but after that it became haphazard. The reader is left without any real comprehension of the nature of Antonio’s relationships with women or his children. And if all of this irked me, there is no doubt that it’s the main reason the book has been rebuked within certain circles. Antonio never could have predicted popular opinion moving so harshly against the alpha male, but more prudence would have gone a long way here.

Liar’s Poker was meant to serve as a warning; it’s remembered for being an arousal. Chaos Monkeys was intended to be an electrifying, divisive, no-holds-barred memoir. It will be remembered as an electrifying, divisive, no-holds-barred memoir.

View this review and others on my blog

It's a shame that Martínez is such an insufferable, sexist man, because he really does have a talent for entertaining nonfiction writing. This book was billed as inside look at Facebook, but it's really a memoir about Martínez's personal career in tech. The first half of the book concerns his short stint at the ill-fated tech company Adchemy, and then his efforts to start a company and go through Y Combinator with two of his buddies. He doesn't even begin work at Facebook until the halfway mark, around page 250, and what he does describe at Facebook is mostly related to the few teams he worked on as opposed to the organization as a whole.

Unfortunately, Martínez lacks the self-awareness and critical eye he claims to have to actually make this an insightful read. He says he's critical of the tech world, when in fact all 500 pages of this book are an exercise in how deeply he has bought into the Silicon Valley ethos. He may be disillusioned with Facebook specifically, but he still believes in the tech world, and most of all himself. His sexist, sometimes degrading comments towards female coworkers and bosses were untenable, and he generally came across as obnoxious, pretentious man who embodies basically every stereotype of tech bros you can think of.