Chaos Monkeys

From Wall Street to Silicon Valley

Antonio García Martinez spent five years working on his doctorate in physics at Berkeley, where his annual stipend was $19,000. At Goldman Sachs, where he created models and prices for credit derivatives, he found a land where lacrosse-playing graduates of Penn and Cornell pulled down six-figure salaries and seven-figure bonuses. Compared to the high-earning traders, “quants were eunuchs at the orgy.” García Martinez earned a front-row seat to Wall Street’s great debauch. Traders once saw as “basically the traders’ little bitches,” but by 2007, quants had all but replaced traders on Wall Street. In 2008, as the financial crisis deepened, García Martinez ditched Wall Street for Silicon Valley. He joined Adchemy. He found that the tech industry, at its heart, is “a mad scramble of money, data and pixels.” In traditional media, the ads marketers use a rectangle on a page to sell cars or houses. In new media, advertisers target consumers according to such traits as age, gender and location. When you visit Facebook, CNN or any other site, your attention becomes a commodity, much like a share of stock. This new model offers two...