The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story (10 page)

Most people don’t enjoy making huge gambles on the future. They would just as soon have someone else tell them what to do. And that is what Jim Clark did. From the moment Netscape made him a billionaire, he acquired a new form of power: the power of being Jim Clark. Half the engineers in the Valley wanted to work for whatever company he started, on the assumption that if anyone was going to predict the future it was Jim Clark. All Clark had to do was announce how he next planned to invent the future, and huge sums of money and vast reservoirs of engineering talent came pouring in, intent on proving him right. The question was: What would he do next?

In late 1995 a lot of Silicon Graphics engineers were asking that question. The company had the smartest engineers, and the smartest among them had just wasted two years of their time and hundreds of millions of dollars. From the moment Netscape went public, Silicon Graphics was officially unwell—a company of the past rather than the future. The company’s stock peaked at $44 a share the week after the Netscape share offering and then fell steadily for the next four years, right down to $8 a share. In 1997 Ed McCracken was fired from Silicon Graphics. He left Silicon Valley and took a job running a foundation in upstate New York. Many of the people who thought him a genius just a few years earlier now thought him a fool. “At the time I thought Jim was just brutal with Ed,” says Dick Kramlich, who negotiated McCracken’s golden handshake. “Now I think Jim was just right.”

A lot of the engineers at Silicon Graphics promised themselves that whatever Jim Clark did next, they would do it with him. Word spread that Clark was off building a new boat. A boat! His boat is where he always went when he was stewing on the new new thing! His old friend Forest Baskett, who had followed Clark from Stanford to Silicon Graphics, received a phone call from Clark. It was late 1995, just after Netscape went public and Clark became the Valley’s newest billionaire. Yet Clark did not sound satisfied. He sounded agitated, the way he did when something came between him and what he wanted. He wanted to talk to Forest about his new boat. As it happened, Forest had introduced Clark to sailing in the San Francisco Bay. Now, just a few years later, Clark was trying to figure out whether the boat he wanted to build could fit into the San Francisco Bay.

“Forest,” he asked, “how high is the Golden Gate Bridge?”

O
nce a month, sometimes more often, Clark would crawl out of bed at four in the morning, drive down to the private air terminal in San Jose, California, climb aboard his new jet, and fly to Amsterdam. The plane couldn’t make it without refueling. At some point he had discovered a strip of tundra north of the Arctic Circle with a tiny village that consisted of not much more than a tarmac, a gas pump, and an emergency medical station for Eskimos. He’d dive down out of the sky, pull up next to the pump, pull out his American Express card, buy two thousand gallons of gasoline from an Eskimo, and shove off. Once he arrived in Amsterdam, he’d drive an hour and a half north to Wolter Huisman’s boatyard in Vollenhove. Vollenhove felt only slightly less remote than the Eskimo town.

Clark made this trip sixty times between the Netscape public offering, in August 1995, and the launching of the boat that the Netscape public offering had paid for, in December 1998. One of those times came in late January 1998, five months before
Hyperion
was scheduled to be finished and eleven months before it actually was finished. The boat perched like a beached white whale on a dolly in the hangar beside Wolter Huisman’s office. There was, as usual on these visits by Clark, the tingle in the air that precedes bad news.

Inside the office Clark settled in at a conference table across from Wolter Huisman, several of Wolter’s underlings, and the captain of
Hyperion
, Allan Prior, and waited to hear what that news might be. Replicas of wooden boats and sepia-toned photographs of Wolter’s ancestors surrounded the table. It was a working office but also a shrine to the Huisman sailing tradition—a tradition that Clark now threatened.

A bookmaker not intimately familiar with the characters would probably say that the odds were against the challenger. Traditions are more easily preserved where the risks of changing things outweigh the rewards, and a sailboat is one such place. A sailboat built by Wolter in 1992 had a great deal in common with a sailboat built by Wolter in 1972 or a sailboat built by Wolter’s father in 1932 or a sailboat built by Wolter’s grandfather in 1892, for the very simple reason that the Huisman way of doing things had kept a lot of people dry. For better than a hundred years now, the Royal Huisman Shipyard had churned out lovely wooden boats not so very different from the original Dutch pleasure craft of the seventeenth century. Normally, the Glorious Dutch Boatbuilding Tradition was what Wolter was selling. When a rich man turned up in the Royal Huisman Shipyard, among the first things he was shown were the charming old black-and-white photographs of the thirteen-year-old Wolter building a dinghy with his father. The rich man was allowed to finger the lovely old wooden models of yachts built long ago, and to hear about the fires, and the floods, and the various occupying German armies that the Huisman Shipyard had survived.

Then, in 1993, the odds shifted dramatically, when a new kind of sailboat customer showed up. He was American. An entrepreneur, from San Francisco, a friend of Jim Clark. He wanted a yacht bigger than any Huisman had ever built, 142 feet. To make certain he got exactly what he wanted, he made dozens of trips to the Dutch village of Vollenhove. Occasionally he slept on the floor of Wolter Huisman’s office. He was, in the way that the English disapprove of, aggressive. In late 1993 the boat was finished. It was christened
Juliet
.
Juliet
marked a shift in the demand curve, at least in Wolter’s newly unsettled mind. His business, which had been 60 percent German, became 75 percent American. The rich, and especially the new American rich, suddenly acquired a taste for obscenely big boats and for the high technology required to run them. The boats had ceased to be merely boats. They were tiny floating city-states. Wolter kept his objections to his customers’ tastes to himself, at least until they were out of shouting range. But after they left, he’d explode. “Always, bigger, bigger, bigger!” he’d shout. “If someone has duh 90-foot boat, dey want a 95-foot boat. If someone else has duh 95-foot sailboat, dey want a 100-foot sailboat. It is normal, ya?” He left it open whether he was making a simple statement or asking a question.

Either way, Wolter was not entirely at ease in the new climate. Before
Juliet
the official slogan of the Royal Huisman Shipyard had been “If you can dream it, we can build it.” Now a new sign hung in one of Wolter Huisman’s offices: “Their Dream Is Our Nightmare.”

At his most pessimistic, Wolter could have had no idea what strange forces
Juliet
would unleash. When she left the Huisman Shipyard, she made her way back to San Francisco Bay, where she was seen and admired by technically minded people poised to create one of the loudest explosions of wealth in economic history. In the summer of 1995 the first of these people walked into Wolter’s office at the Huisman Shipyard. He said his name was Jim Clark, and he had just created a new Internet company called Netscape. To buy the yacht of his dreams, he explained, he had persuaded his board of directors to take Netscape public—that is, sell shares in the enterprise to investors. (He often did the right things for the wrong reasons.) Wolter called around to find out whether Clark’s money was real and…he came up empty. No one he knew had ever heard of Netscape. It turned out the company had existed for a bit more than a year, had made huge losses, and had no concrete plans to make profits, and…well, Wolter couldn’t begin to say what it actually did. Then, a few months later, Wolter found himself reading magazine articles about Jim Clark. Netscape had made Clark a billionaire.

Wolter’s role in the creation of Clark’s computerized yacht had been to suffer ironically. It was a role for which he was poorly suited. Clark and his new ideas were actually very stressful to Wolter. He’d spent two and a half years with this contradiction squarely in the middle of his life: a customer who wanted to grope for the new new thing in his old old place. Wolter woke up in the middle of the night imagining the headlines in the newspapers. World Famous Huisman Yacht Sinks! Huisman Owner Unable to Explain Computer Boat! He’d aged visibly—a few months into the work on
Hyperion
his heart went bad, and he was taken away to a hospital bed. After a few days he emerged with a doctor’s order to take it easy…and found Jim Clark and his computer programmers waiting for him in his boatyard.

On this particular visit of Clark’s, Wolter opened the conversation with one of his pet themes, the wisdom of letting a computer sail the boat. A recent article in one of the yachting magazines pointed out that Jim Clark’s new sailboat would “learn” to sail itself, in all conditions.
Hyperion
was, in fact, a learning machine. It contained thousands of electronic sensors capable of measuring everything from the pressure on the sails to the temperature in the fridges. They would feed a continuous stream of data into twenty-five industrial-strength computers. Over time the computers would acquire the information they needed to cope with every possible sailing condition. If he wished, Clark could connect to
Hyperion
over the Internet from his living room back in California, seize the computer from the captain, and sail it from a keyboard. That particular point had caught Wolter Huisman’s eye. “I don’t believe in that,” he said, brusquely. “You need a captain on board, ja?”

“I don’t believe in it either,” said Clark. In the past year, perhaps as a concession to Wolter’s weak heart, Clark had taken to claiming that never in a million years would he try to sail his boat from his computer back in California. “But,” he continued, “it’s a nice thing to have cruise control on a car, you have to admit. You may or may not use it. But it’s a nice thing to have.”

Wolter thought about that for a second or two as if deciding whether Clark had conceded his point. He concluded that he had. “The boat is just another thing for Yim to write software for,” he said to the others, with a great big laugh.

“Well,” said Clark, pressing. “You wouldn’t want to do any accidental jibes in a boat this big.” This was an understatement. Clark was building the world’s tallest mast. The world’s tallest mast supported the world’s largest sail. The world’s largest sail implied the greatest wind ever collected in one place. By eliminating the problem of handling the sails manually, the computer had made this ambition feasible.

“Ja,” said Wolter, “this is true.”

“And you wouldn’t mind having the boat set off an alarm to warn you when you are sailing dangerously close to the wind,” said Clark, running down his mental list of the many feats the computer might pre-form better than a fallible human being.

“Ja,” said Wolter, less happily, “this also is true.”

The yachting magazine had pointed out, too,
Hyperion
would not have only a brain but also a voice. Rather than sound an alarm, the computer would actually holler at the captain. If the captain ignored the warning, the computer would shout at him again. “Watch out, you bloody fool!” was Clark’s suggestion for a second-warning sound.

“Yes,” said Captain Allan Prior, uneasily, “I heard there will be a voice.”

“A millennium voice,” grumbled Wolter. Wolter was not entirely comfortable with the idea of a talking boat.

“A
German
voice,” said Clark, laughing at the idea of it. He put on his best Third Reich accent and boomed, “Allan! Zee boat is zinking! Get out uff your bunk!”

Clark enjoyed the joke more than Wolter, and Wolter enjoyed the joke more than Allan, but then Allan had heard why Clark had decided to computerize a sailboat in the first place. This particular brain wave washed over Clark back in 1991, when, in despair over what was happening at Silicon Graphics, he had retired to the high seas to stew over the telecomputer. No matter where he turned, however, he had trouble with his captains. The captain of the boat Clark then owned had sailed one evening from St. Bart’s to Anguilla. On the way back he ran the boat quietly up onto a coral reef; just as quietly he slipped the boat off of it. He never told Clark, who spent that night ashore, of the mishap. But Clark’s wife, Nancy Rutter, who was aboard, was partially awakened by the sound of the scraping. That his captain kept this piece of data from him five years before has infuriated Clark
to this day
. From this he drew the lesson: the captain needs to be watched. And from this he had the idea to write a computer program to watch him. A computer could monitor everything that happened on board the boat. Clark had only to keep an eye on his screen and he’d know most of what his captain got up to when he was away.

Allan Prior knew the story. And so he also knew that the computer software was aimed at
him
.

Putting the computer to one side, Wolter then finally broke the bad news. “Yim,” said Wolter, “this boat they are building in New Zealand. It will have a mast that is maybe bigger than yours.”

Clark leaned back in his chair.

“Maybe more than 200,” said Wolter.

“More than 200 feet?” asked Clark.

Wolter nodded.

“And we’re only 197,” said Allan. Sometimes they said it was 189 feet, other times 197. Whatever. It was big.

Actually, one hundred and ninety seven feet was an important number, in Clark’s mind. It was the maximum height for any boat that wished to pass at high tide beneath the Balboa Bridge in the Panama Canal. Clark assumed that any boat big enough to support a 197-foot mast would want to be able to pass through the Panama Canal. If he was right, his 197-foot mast would be not merely the tallest built to date but the tallest built
for all time
.

“How tall exactly is this other mast we are dealing with here?” asked Clark, but before they could answer he was up and pacing. I take that back. He wasn’t actually standing and walking around. I call it pacing because I can think of no other way to get across the effect he had on everyone else in the room. In fact, he merely altered his facial expressions. His mouth squinched up into its tiny pucker, his face reddened slightly, and his head bobbed like a boxer’s between punches. But to judge from the faces across the table from him he might as well have risen from his chair and marched back and forth across Wolter’s office while hollering at the top of his lungs. Wolter looked stricken.

Soon enough, Clark actually was on his feet and leading the others out of Wolter Huisman’s office. They left the back way and crossed the catwalk that snaked around
Hyperion
, four stories off the ground. At that point
Hyperion
was a skeleton of its future self, and you could see all of its baffling complexity. There were twelve refrigerators, a water maker, a sewage treatment plant, three generators, an engine the size of a Volkswagen beetle, an endless number of hydraulic-powered winches, and several thousand electronic sensors affixed to everything that could be measured by a computer. There were sixty
miles
of electrical wires running from the sensors to twenty-five Silicon Graphics computers, which stored and manipulated the data. They collected and analyzed forty thousand separate pieces of information. The boat had been reduced to the sum of its digital data.

Clark and Wolter and Allan and the Royal Huisman executives walked past all this marvelous complexity, down the steps of the catwalk, and through a shop floor teeming with the fifty woodworkers crafting the boat’s teak and mahogany furnishings. These people were as different from Clark as Maori tribesmen. Many of them had learned their craft in the Huisman Shipyard from their fathers, who in turn had learned their craft in the Huisman Shipyard from their fathers. Generations of Dutch boatbuilders lived and died without giving a passing thought to leaving. There was never a question when they got out of bed in the morning what they would do that day, or the next, or the next. They were the tiny figures in the middle ground of the Dutch landscape who, after digging a few canals and erecting a dike or two, were content to leave the world as they had found it.

The group of executives, led by Clark, entered the shed at the end of the yard. Before Clark arrived on the scene, there was no building in the Huisman Shipyard that could house a 197-foot mast. Clark had waved that objection to one side, and said he would pay for a new building. The new building in the old boatyard was long and low and light. From a distance it appeared to be an enormous greenhouse. It wasn’t. It was an oven.