Summary of Antonio Garcia Martinez's Chaos Monkeys

Summary of Antonio Garcia Martinez's Chaos Monkeys is a memoir of Antonio Garcia Martinez’s time working as a coder at Goldman Sachs, as a startup employee and founder, and as a product manager at Facebook.

Martinez began working at Goldman Sachs after college as a pricing quant, which is industry slang for a programmer who builds models for pricing credit derivatives. Quants had low status at the firm and Martinez became disillusioned with employees’ reliance on the annual bonus and the gambling-heavy culture of the workplace. In late 2007, he applied for and was offered a job at Adchemy, a startup in California that was developing tools to buy advertising on Google’s real-time bidding engine, the system Google uses to determine which bidder gets advertising space for every Google search.

By 2010, Martinez considered Adchemy, which was led by Chief Executive Officer Murthy Nukala, to be approaching failure. Leadership turnover was high and the company’s…