Antonio Garcia-Martinez on the Hippie Influence over Silicon Valley, Behind the Scenes at Facebook, Writing ‘Chaos Monkeys’ and Founding Spindl

On this episode of Invested, Michael hosts Antonio Garcia-Martinez, CEO and founder of Spindl, and author of the book “Chaos Monkeys”. 

Garcia-Martinez started his career when he dropped out of a PhD in physics at Berkeley, cut off his ponytail, and became a pricing quant on the Goldman Sachs credit trading desk just in time for the 2008 credit crisis. Fleeing back to the Bay Area for an ad tech startup, he founded a Y Combinator startup with the co-founders he met in that first tech job, and sold the company to Twitter in 2011. This somewhat haphazardly landed him at Facebook, in charge of targeting on the ads team, where he shipped some of the company's first real ads targeting. His book about the experience, Chaos Monkeys, was a NYT and WSJ bestseller (though it did have some detractors). After a couple years of journalism and Substacking, he came back to tech, working (again) at ads and data related products at Branch and Apple. 

Currently, he's CEO and founder of Spindl, a venture-backed startup building many of the same attribution and measurement products natively in the blockchain world. 

Please rate this episode 5 stars wherever you stream your podcasts! 

KEY TOPICS 

[00:00] Intro 

[04:00] Personal Values

[05:24] “Chaos Monkeys”

[09:50] Working at Facebook

[14:00] How COVID Affected San Francisco

[16:20] How the Perspective on Tech Changed

[19:46] Progressivism and Tech

[23:00] Current State of San Francisco

[26:10] Civic Involvement of Tech

[28:30] Drug Culture in San Francisco

[30:28] Getting Canceled

[31:50] Progressivism and Christianity 

[34:15] Writing Career

[36:20] Converting to Judaism 

[44:20] Secularized Modernity

[51:42] Spindl

[57:38] Blockchain

[01:00:32] Web3 Social Media

[01:03:50] DC vs. Tech

[01:09:06] Rapid-Fire Questions

RESOURCES

Follow Antonio Garcia-Martinez on X: https://x.com/antoniogm 

To purchase the book “Chaos Monkeys” go to: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0062458205/ 

For show notes and past guests on Invested, please visit content.aleph.vc

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For the transcript of this episode, go to https://content.aleph.vc/podcast-episodes/antonio-garcia-martinez---episode-19

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CREDITS

Executive Producer: Erica Marom 

Producer: Sofi Levak

Video and Editing: Ron Baranov 

Music and Art: Uri Ar 

Design: Rony Karadi