Chaos Monkeys

Antonio Garcia Martinez's own career supplies the material for this autobiography, which follows him from quantitative work at Goldman to an existing startup, then his own company, which was sold to Twitter, and on to Facebook's early advertising team before the IPO. He was forced out of Facebook after an internal product war over how the company should make money. The title borrows an engineering idea, software that causes random failures to test whether online services survive, and applies it to tech entrepreneurs as disruptors. Along the way he tries to explain how ad technology, venture capital and startups work, and portrays the visionaries, opportunists and money cowboys of the tech world.

Ramit Sethi included it in his list of 50 books he recommends. Button co-founder Mike Dudas called it a fun read on mergers and growing a business in Silicon Valley.