[...] An adjoining minikitchen, like so many that littered the campus, stocked plenty of lemon-lime Gatorade, Zuck's official beverage.

[...] In one year in Facebook Ads, I had seen the famously micromanage-y founder and CEO in the Ads area precisely once: when he was walking around the building in a circle to get in his ten thousand daily steps. [...]

Engineers can be so smart about code, and yet so dense about human motivations. They'd be better served by reading less Neal Stephenson and more Shakespeare and Patricia Highsmith.

Meritocracy is the propaganda we use to bless the charade.

[...]

Capitalism is an amoral farce in which every player--investor, employee, entrepreneur, consumer--is complicit.

But hey, look at these shiny iPhones. Right?

At Harvard it's "Baker Scholar", at Stanford it's "Arjay Miller Scholar"; this is the added frosting on the MBA cake if you graduate within the top 10 percent gradeswise. It's the people who took their MBA classes seriously and thought that the content actually meant something rather than assuming that the entire point of an elite MBA was the curated network and the jump-starting of a new career direction [...]

What was one more child in the mix? I'd have the heir and the spare. A little redundancy, whether in technology or heredity, never hurt.

An error at the hour of signing a big contract, or negotiating an acquisition, could easily cost you millions, or be the deciding factor between summers in Ibiza with your model girlfriend or taking a consolation-prize job as product manager at Oracle instead (look, you get pretax commuter cost benefits there!).

Here's another truth about tech life: anyone who claims the Valley is meritocractic is someone who has profited vastly from it via nonmeritocratic means like happenstance, membership in a privileged cohort, or some concealed act of absolute skulduggery.

They won't hold it against you if you're a no-show at their wedding, and they'll step right over a homeless person on their way to a mindfulness yoga class. It's a society in which all men and women live in their own self-contained bubble, unattached to traditional anchors like family or religion, and largely unperturbed by outside social forces like income inequality or the Syrian Civil War. "Take it light, man" elevated to life philosophy. Ultimately, the Valley attitude is an empowered anomie turbocharged by selfishness, respecting some nominal "feel-good" principals of progress or collective technological striving, but in truth pursuing a continual self-development refracted through the capitalist prism: hippies with a capitalization table and a vesting schedule.

After an all-night high-stakes game, Chamath walks out fifty thousand dollars ahead. Deciding he needs some German rolling iron stat, he goes to a BMW dealership. The salesman, spotting a badly dressed kid, gives him the cold shoulder, and refuses a test drive. So Chamath heads over to the Mercedes dealership across the street. There, they don't ignore him, and he buys a car for cash on the spot. Then he drives back to the BMW dealership with his new Benz, finds the sales guy who blew him off, and shows him the sale he lost. That's who we were dealing with here.