The New New Thing : A Silicon Valley Story

The New New Thing : A Silicon Valley Story
By Michael Lewis


Product Description
The book that does for Silicon Valley what "Liar's Poker" did for Wall Street.

In the weird glow of the dying millennium, Michael Lewis sets out on a safari through Silicon Valley to find the world's most important technology entrepreneur, the man who embodies the spirit of the coming age. He finds him in Jim Clark, who is about to create his third, separate, billion-dollar company: first Silicon Graphics, then Netscape-which launched the Information Age-and now Healtheon, a startup that may turn the $1 trillion healthcare industry on its head.

Despite the variety of his achievements, Clark thinks of himself mainly as the creator of "Hyperion," which happens to be a sailboat . . . not just an ordinary yacht, but the world's largest single-mast vessel, a machine more complex than a 747. Clark claims he will be able to sail it via computer from his desk in San Francisco, and the new code may contain the seeds of his next billion-dollar coup.

On the wings of Lewis's celebrated storytelling, the reader takes the ride of a lifetime through this strange landscape of geeks and billionaires. We get the inside story of the battle between Netscape and Microsoft; we sit in the room as Clark tries to persuade the investment bankers that Healtheon is the next Microsoft; we get queasy as Clark pits his boat against the rage of the North Atlantic in winter. And in every brilliant anecdote and character sketch, Lewis is drawing us a map of markets and free enterprise in the twenty-first century.


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Product Details
Amazon Sales Rank: #391938 in Books
Published on: 1999-10
Released on: 1999-10-20
Number of items: 1
Binding: Hardcover
268 pages

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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Michael Lewis was supposed to be writing about how Jim Clark, the founder of Silicon Graphics and Netscape, was going to turn health care on its ear by launching Healtheon, which would bring the vast majority of the industry's transactions online. So why was he spending so much time on a computerized yacht, each feature installed because, as one technician put it, "someone saw it on Star Trek and wanted one just like it?"

Much of The New New Thing, to be fair, is devoted to the Healtheon story. It's just that Jim Clark doesn't do startups the way most people do. "He had ceased to be a businessman," as Lewis puts it, "and become a conceptual artist." After coming up with the basic idea for Healtheon, securing the initial seed money, and hiring the people to make it happen, Clark concentrated on the building of Hyperion, a sailboat with a 197-foot mast, whose functions are controlled by 25 SGI workstations (a boat that, if he wanted to, Clark could log onto and steer--from anywhere in the world). Keeping up with Clark proves a monumental challenge--"you didn't interact with him," Lewis notes, "so much as hitch a ride on the back of his life"--but one that the author rises to meet with the same frenetic energy and humor of his previous books, Liar's Poker and Trail Fever.

Like those two books, The New New Thing shows how the pursuit of power at its highest levels can lead to the very edges of the surreal, as when Clark tries to fill out an investment profile for a Swiss bank, where he intends to deposit less than .05 percent of his financial assets. When asked to assess his attitude toward financial risk, Clark searches in vain for the category of "people who sought to turn ten million dollars into one billion in a few months" and finally tells the banker, "I think this is for a different ... person." There have been a lot of profiles of Silicon Valley companies and the way they've revamped the economy in the 1990s--The New New Thing is one of the first books fully to depict the sort of man that has made such companies possible. --Ron Hogan

From Publishers Weekly
While it purports to look at the business world of Silicon Valley through the lens of one man, that one man, Jim Clark, is so domineering that the book is essentially about Clark. No matter: Clark is as successful and interesting an example of Homo siliconus as any writer is likely to find. Lewis (Liar's Poker) has created an absorbing and extremely literate profile of one of America's most successful entrepreneurs. Clark has created three companiesASilicon Graphics, Netscape (now part of America Online) and HealtheonAeach valued at more than $1 billion by Wall Street. Lewis was apparently given unlimited access to Clark, a man motivated in equal parts by a love of the technology he helps to create and a desire to prove something to a long list of people whom he believes have done him wrong throughout his life (especially his former colleagues at Silicon Graphics). As Lewis looks at the various roles of venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and programmers and at how these very different mindsets fit together in the anatomy of big deals, he gives readers a sense of how the Valley works. But the heart of the book remains Clark, who simultaneously does everything from supervise the creation of what may be the world's largest sloop to creating his fourth company (currently in the works). Lewis does a good job of putting Clark's accomplishments in context, and if he is too respectful of Clark's privacy (several marriages and children are mentioned but not elaborated on), he provides a detailed look at the professional life of one of the men who have changed the world as we know it. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Acclaimed journalist Lewis does for Silicon Valley in the Nineties what his previous best seller, Liar's Poker, did for Wall Street in the Eighties. The book is threefold in scope. First, it offers an insightful look at the life and career of Dr. Jim Clark, the eccentric but brilliant visionary who thus far has created three multi-billion-dollar ground-breaking enterprises--Silicon Graphics, Netscape, and Healtheon. Second, it gives an insider's look at how the concept of the "new new thing" has been translated into an actionable product by key players in the game. Finally, it presents a social history of Silicon Valley, which has become the primary driver for worldwide social, economic, and political change. Although a little slow at times, this book is a great read and tells a compelling story. Highly recommended for both academic and public libraries.
---Norman B. Hutcherson, Beale Memorial Lib., Bakersfield, CA
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


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Customer Reviews
What would you do if you researched a book and didn't find anything?
I'm a big fan of Michael Lewis. He usually brings characters and situations to life and provides a perspective on a situation that introduces me to a new way of looking at things. That's not the case here.

I get the feeling when Michael Lewis got permission to follow Jim Clark around for several months to write about him he thought he'd hit the mother load of great book material. Here was a guy who had traipsed through the daunting world of technology with a seeming Midas touch. Heck, the man had started Silicon Graphics and Netscape.

As I read the book, however, something strange happened, I started wondering, "When did Michael Lewis realize he was following the most improbably boring man in the world?" Jim Clark should be fascinating; he starts huge companies and turns venture capitalists on their ears, he flies helicopters, rides motorcycles and builds ludicrously complex, large and expensive sailboats. Jim Clark is a man who is never satisfied and always striving for the "New, New Thing." Yet somehow, Jim Clark is also apparently stone cold dull.

In the course of the whole book, not one Jim Clark quote is interesting, entertaining, or insightful. It doesn't seem like Clark won't open up to Lewis, it's more like he's a one-dimensional guy. Lewis writes the book in a way that indicates that he's an author that knows he's got nothing but has invested far too much time in research to try to turn back. The book becomes focused on the attempt to get Clark's newest technology-laden boat ready for an Atlantic crossing; hardly what I'm guessing Lewis set out to write.

The crossing itself turns out to be a non-event and unfortunately the book does to. Don't despair though, read Moneyball or Liar's Poker or Blindside and you'll find that Michael Lewis can, and usually does, deliver the goods in spades.

A distorted view of Silicon Valley technology startups
"The New New Thing" tells two stories. The first is the story of Jim Clark, a technical entrepreneur who founded three companies -- Silicon Graphics, Netscape, and Healtheon -- that achieved phenomenal heights during the Internet boom of the 1990's. Clark is, to say the least, an interesting character; at least two of Clark's business associates are quoted in the book calling him a "maniac". Clark is driven almost entirely by an unending greed, so for me at least, he quickly became an unsympathetic character around which to hang an entire book. Another criticism I have is that far too many pages of the book are spent on Clark's quest to build and debug Hyperion, the world's largest computer-controlled sailboat. These sections were a distraction from the rest of the narrative. (By the way, it's pretty clear that although they may have been smart, the people writing the software for Hyperion -- including Clark himself -- were all pretty lousy software engineers.)

The second story is that of Silicon Valley, and it doesn't come off looking much better than Clark. Lewis seems to have been granted incredible access to Clark's life, which included the ability to interview and attend meetings with the Valley's top movers and shakers -- the engineers, senior managers, and venture capitalists who fund them. As a computer scientist who has lived and worked in the Valley since 1991, I found this material to be enlightening, and certainly the strongest part of the book. Perhaps most fascinating is the way the decisions of the venture capital (VC) firms and investment banks are based so much on perception rather than sound reasoning. For example, one minute the VCs are writing off their Healtheon investments as a total loss, but the next minute -- when Clark offers to invest $40M of his own money in the failing venture -- they all clamor to invest more in it. Sadly, during the "irrational exuberance" of the late 1990's, this was actually a winning strategy.

One danger in writing a book about the new new thing -- at the height of the Internet bubble no less -- is that it can quickly become old. And this book has not aged well. Yes, Jim Clark was the first person in Silicon Valley to have founded three companies with a market capitalization exceeding $1 billion, and yes, he made himself and many others around him obscenely rich. But most of the companies he started have not been lasting successes: as of this writing in 2007, Silicon Graphics is dying, having lost tens to hundreds of millions of dollars in each of the last four fiscal years; Netscape was acquired by AOL, whose subsequent acquisition by Time Warner nearly killed the latter company; Healtheon merged with WebMD, whose business model is substantially less ambitious than Clark's original concept for the company; and myCFO, the newest new enterprise mentioned at the end of the book, morphed into a company that offered illegal tax shelters to wealthy clients, came under investigation by the IRS, and was eventually sold for only one third of the original money poured into it. Toward the end of the book, Lewis also wryly mocks John Doerr's VC firm Kleiner Perkins for paying $25M for a 33% stake in Google, which he writes "consisted of a pair of Stanford graduate students who had a piece of software that might or might not make it easier to search the Internet." Poor Kleiner Perkins. Their Google investment was obviously a terrible mistake.

Michael Lewis is a great writer, but I enjoyed two of his other books far more: Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street and Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game.

All in all, "The New New Thing" does a good job of exposing the underbelly of Silicon Valley capitalism. But its focus on Clark and companies born out of the Internet bubble gives a distorted picture of the challenges in founding and running a technical startup. For a more accurate depiction, I recommend Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure.


Classic Michael Lewis on Silicon Valley
If you have read any of Michael Lewis's other books and found them enjoyable (either writing style or topic), you will find this a good read, worthy of your time. You will learn a little about the atmosphere of Silicon Valley during the height of the bubble / late 90s as well as about a very unique figure who helped (over exagerated, per Economist) start it all.