In this event, you’ll learn

How Google ads work – and make the company billions on autopilot

Why early startup investors always get disproportionately better deals

How both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates played dirty in their early days

Where Antonio learned to refuse to give up

How Mark Zuckerberg rallied Facebook’s team to crush Google Plus

About the Author

Antonio García Martínez has been an advisor to Twitter, a product manager for Facebook, the CEO/founder of AdGrok (a venture-backed startup acquired by Twitter), and a strategist for Goldman Sachs. He is an Ideas Contributor for WIRED and lives on a forty-foot sailboat on the San Francisco Bay.

Overview

“The great source of both the misery and disorders of human life, seems to arise from over-rating the difference between one permanent situation and another. – Adam Smith”

“In all my experience in both startups and large companies, including and especially at Facebook, I would always prefer— a hundred times prefer— being subject to the rigors of the market, the fickleness of luck, and the whims of users than to navigate the popularity-contest politics of a large company, surrounded by the mediocre duffers who’ve succeeded in life through nothing more than guile and appearances. Scott Weinstein’s unfortunate example was the best advice he (or anyone else) has ever given me, and one that I ignored to my extreme peril.”

“One week into my new Silicon Valley life, and the lesson was this: if you want to be a startup entrepreneur, get used to negotiating from positions of weakness. I’d soon have trickier situations to negotiate than convincing a cop to let me take a cab. And so will you if you play the startup game.”

“The first sign of trouble was an externally visible one, a symptom that any suitably experienced startup practitioner could have detected: nobody from the early days of the company was still around other than Murthy.”

“As Vonnegut wrote in Bluebeard, never trust the survivor of a massacre until you know what he did to survive.”

“If you consider yourself a Gates or a Musk but aren’t seen as one, then you enter the realm of felt injustice. You assign yourself a certain value, but society ranks you at another. That difference between society’s perception and your own is the gap of injustice you feel. Multiply that gap times your ego, and you get the total balance of rage you’re to expend in your startup quest.”