Apple Rapid Hire-Fire: Antonio García Martínez
by Jean-Louis Gassée
The best-selling author of a Silicon Valley tell-all is hired by Apple…and quickly fired after insiders look more closely at the book.
On April 10th, Apple announces it has hired former Facebook Product Manager Antonio García Martínez to beef up its (re)nascent Advertising platform. Two days later, Apple announces that García Martínez has been fired.
What happened?
A group of Apple employees found some “offensive” passages in Chaos Monkeys, García Martínez’ 2016 autobiography that describes his navigation of the finance world, the tech start up scene, and, ultimately, Facebook. The offended employees gather about 2,000 signatures on a petition that they send to Sr. VP Eddy Cue. The petition starts thus [as always, edits and emphasis mine]:
“We are deeply concerned about the recent hiring of Antonio García Martínez. His misogynistic statements in his autobiography — such as “Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit” (further quoted below this letter) — directly oppose Apple’s commitment to Inclusion & Diversity.”
The full text of the (long) petition is available here and quotes García Martínez abundantly, unfortunately so.
Apple’s response was swift. On April 12th, García Martínez was gone, with this viaticum:
“At Apple, we have always strived to create an inclusive, welcoming workplace where everyone is respected and accepted. Behavior that demeans or discriminates against people for who they are has no place here.”
Curious, I downloaded Chaos Monkeys with its extensive 2018 Afterword and read the entire opus last week.
For a moment, I’ll set aside the offending passage quoted above (and the many other fragments cited in the petition) and focus on García Martínez’ description of his beginnings, when he dropped out of a physics PhD program and signed up as a “quant” at Goldman Sachs a few years before the financial meltdown of 2008. García Martínez treats us to a lucid explanation of a financial instrument called the Credit Default Swap, or CDS. In short (?), a CDS is an insurance contract written for a financial asset. As García Martínez explains, it’s similar to buying insurance for a car, but with an important difference: You don’t have to actually own the car. As an example, you can say “If you pay me $10 a month, I’ll give you $1K if this $100 Argentine bond defaults” even if neither you nor I own any Argentine bonds. It’s a bet written on electrons and, depending on the ups and downs of the Argentine economy, speculators will trade such CDS, sometimes just for gain, or for protection of bonds they own. For this, as the author makes clear, you need a culture fueled by brains and testosterone.
The book then takes a turn towards Silicon Valley as García Martínez explains how online advertising (any advertising, actually) is a bet. But the online version affords better ways to weigh and wage the bet, just as quants evaluate the fluctuating worth of a CDS:
“This is how online advertising works: Money turns into pixels and electrons in the form of ads, which turn into a scintilla of attention in someone’s mind, which after a few more clicks and electrons shuffling about, turns back into money. The only goal here is to make that second pile of money as large as possible relative to the first pile of money.
That’s it.”
The technique and deployment of online advertising has evolved drastically over the past ten years as monster servers and machine leaning software have been introduced, but García Martínez’ insight remains: The quant discipline of weighing probabilities fuels online advertising’s money pumps.
Our author signs up with an Internet Advertising startup called Adchemy, then proceeds to start his own venture, AdGrok, with two Adchemy colleagues, only to sell that venture to Twitter while peeling off to work as a Product Manager in Facebook’s advertising engine. After Facebook he became an adviser to Twitter — on advertising matters, of course — and signed up as VP of Products at Nanigans, a company that specializes in Social Advertising.
With a background like this, Apple’s interest made perfect sense and, according to García Martínez, someone from Apple sought him out, he didn’t have to apply.
But should Apple have hired the Chaos Monkeys author?
Definitely not.
First, as the long Eddy Cue missive makes clear with its abundant quotes from the book, there is no way to “contextualize” the objectionable paragraph, the author is a repeat offender in his ways of treating and objectifying females colleagues, and females more generally.
Second, while García Martínez mostly writes admiringly of Facebook and its leadership, he is, at times, savagely critical of his ex-employer. For someone who quotes Latin, Hebraic, and British sages at the start of most chapters, and who professes a worldly command of Silicon Valley Culture, this is surprising: Is he blind to the emotions this might arouse in a future employer? “Hmm… is he going to write like that about us after he leaves?”
Third, and most disturbingly, he writes this in the 2018 Afterword:
“Privacy is an illusion, a societal ruse we constructed only recently. The right to live as a stranger among strangers, with an inviolable sanctity of personal affairs against even government intrusion, is a relatively new concept. As with romantic love, we’ve situated privacy at the center of our lives, a much fussed-over “necessity” that for centuries humanity managed to mostly live without.”
García Martínez is well aware of the tentacles that the advertising technology pushes into our lives — he writes about them cogently in his book. His take on privacy — a fairly recent opinion — doesn’t jibe with the attitude that Apple loudly professes, and should have been a glaring red flag. (For a chilling take on the lack of “sanctity of personal affairs”, I recommend The Lives Of Others, a movie that deals with oppressive government intrusion in the East Germany of yore.)
This leaves us with a puzzle. Given the public, best-selling views of the Chaos Monkeys author, why was he hired in the first place?
An embarrassing but benign explanation is that an interested and friendly insider presented the recruiter in charge of vetting Antonio García Martínez with a surefire (pun unintended) hire. Exquisitely appropriate background, urgent need, harried recruiters, the gent interviews well, and off we run to the altar. Let’s just hope that, as in the lone cockroach question, such vetting blunder is but an isolated case.
The unconsummated marriage is quickly annulled and we’re left with a spurned individual complaining about the ills of mandatory Cultural Fit and, on the other side, a group of people who advocate for embracing Difference, but with respect.
In the meantime, I wholeheartedly recommend the book for its insights into the darker sides of our culture and its rapidly moving style.
— JLG@mondaynote.com
