The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story (29 page)

Clark took his seat in the sun and explained all about the wealthy masses, and his plans to organize them into a fighting unit. One of the Kleiner partners asked about his business model. “Business model” is one of those terms of art that were central to the Internet boom: it glorified all manner of half-baked plans. All it really meant was how you planned to make money. The “business model” for Microsoft, for instance, was to sell software for 120 bucks a pop that cost fifty cents to manufacture. The “business model” for Healtheon was to add a few pennies to every bill or order or request that emanated from a doctor’s office. The “business model” for Netscape was a work in progress; no one ever did really figure out how to make money from Netscape; in its brief life Netscape had lost money. The “business model” of most Internet companies was to attract huge crowds of people to a Web site, and then sell others the chance to advertise products to the crowds. It was still not clear that the model made sense.

The “business model” for myCFO, such as it was, was curiously old-fashioned. Indeed, it marked a departure from the now common approach to creating a business on the Internet. Rather than maximizing the number of people who viewed his Web site, Clark would set out to maximize the number of dollars. myCFO would charge the wealthy masses, on the average, fifty thousand dollars a year each to use the service. They’d pay it because the service would save them at least as much again. Clark figured he might ultimately attract 100,000 wealthy customers; right there you had five billion a year in revenues. He put it another way: an accountant with an established practice who demanded a salary of about two hundred thousand dollars a year brought in nearly two million a year in revenues. Within a year, Clark figured, he’d have hired 400 accountants, mainly from the big accounting firms, who already advised rich people. In exchange for leaving their stable jobs with their big companies, the accountants would receive stock options. They’d come because, like everyone else in America, they were frantically eager to participate in the Internet boom. “How often do accountants have the chance to get rich?” Clark asked the Kleiner partners, rhetorically.

It was a business model even a Graham and Dodd investor could love—which meant it was relatively immune to stock market reversals. It would have profits, lots of them. With companies called Google going for $75 million, Clark did not see much point in selling air: everyone else was already doing that. The revolution had consumed the revolutionary. The revolutionary responded by setting out to consume the revolution. “Old Internet thinking” is how he dismissed the hundreds of companies modeled on Netscape. He then went on to explain what did not need explaining to partners at Kleiner Perkins: the power of a trillion or so dollars pooled into a kind of cartel. There was no end to what might be done with it, once it was collected. He concluded by saying what the Kleiner partners had already figured out: that he had “a much, much better idea how I’m going to make money than I did when I sat here five years ago and told you about Netscape.” He called it “one of the biggest opportunities I’ve ever seen.”

When Clark finished, John Doerr took over the meeting. Doerr was wonderful, in the literal sense of the word: he was full of wonder. In Silicon Valley, as in every highly strung status culture, there was a tendency for people to know it all. Doerr retained an almost childlike capacity for curiosity and awe. His feelings for Clark were a case in point. Even in the dark periods of their relationship, he spoke of Clark, behind his back, as “a national treasure.” That’s what he told his fellow Kleiner partners, who sometimes wondered why Doerr took so much trouble to keep Clark sweet—Jim Clark was a national treasure. He understood exactly how deep and mysterious was this force seated on the other side of the Kleiner Perkins conference room table.

Normally, Kleiner partners deliberated for a few days before deciding whether to invest in a new company. They didn’t do that with Netscape, Doerr now reminded Clark. He’d called Clark an hour and a half after he had explained that particular new new thing and agreed to the most onerous terms ever demanded from venture capitalists. The terms were even more onerous this time, but Doerr wanted to move even faster. He turned to Clark and said, “Would you like us to have a show of hands right now?” Clark said that wasn’t necessary; in any case, the decision was a formality. An hour and a half later Doerr called him and said that Kleiner wanted to buy as much of myCFO as Clark was willing to sell and that he would like to sit on its board of directors.

For the next few weeks Clark went back and forth on how much Kleiner should be permitted to invest, or whether they should be permitted to invest at all. “I don’t need them,” he said one day; the next day he said, “If I don’t let them invest, they’ll start a competitor.” Finally, he decided to let Doerr buy a 12 percent stake in myCFO. At the same time he leaked word of the new venture to the press. He’d once told me that he didn’t understand why business journalists thought that businessmen would tell them the truth about their affairs. A good businessman was obliged to manipulate public opinion, especially now that public opinion was so important to the future of the business. In the summer of 1999 he demonstrated the point. He presented to reporters a distorted, slimmed-down version of his ambition. The idea was to get the word out to the accountants he wanted to hire and to create a buzz about the company, without alerting the competition. Once again, he was fairly clear in his mind who the competition was. “I want to avoid waving a red flag to Microsoft,” he explained to me, “so instead of ‘the wealthy masses’ I’ve been saying ‘high net worth individuals,’ and instead of laying out the whole idea I just say we’ll be doing tax planning.”

Sure enough, not long after Clark leaked his new story to the press, the accountants began to call. In just a few weeks several hundred people Clark had never heard of came looking to be a part of the new enterprise. The sheer volume of the calls suggested that the accountants at the big accounting firms were spreading the word among themselves. Like everyone else, they’d become attuned to the frequency of the new new thing. A financial adviser at the accounting firm of Price/Waterhouse/Coopers, for instance, called Harvey, whom Clark had installed temporarily as CEO of myCFO, and asked if what he’d read in some business publication was accurate. Harvey said it was. “You guys will control all the financial data,” said the accountant, “and if you control the data, you can control everything else. Can I come work for you?” The accountant was making half a million dollars a year, and he was calling to inquire about a job with a start-up. In his voice Clark was able to detect the creaking sound of the American professional class capitulating to a new order.

O
ne evening as we sat in his kitchen I reminded Clark that he had said that once he became a real after-tax billionaire he’d retire. He said, without missing a beat, “I just want to make more money than Larry Ellison. Then I’ll stop.”

This was news. I pointed out that he’d never before mentioned this ambition. “I just want to have more money than Larry Ellison,” he said again. “I don’t know why. But once I have more money than Larry Ellison, I’ll be satisfied.” Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle, the biggest software company in the Valley, was worth about nine billion dollars; Clark was worth a bit more than three billion. On the other hand, Ellison’s wealth was completely tied up in Oracle stock, which had mostly missed out on the boom. At the rate Clark’s wealth was growing, he’d pass Ellison within six months. I pointed this out and asked the obvious question: “What happens after you have more than Larry Ellison? Would you want to have more money than, say, Bill Gates? “Oh, no,” Clark said, waving my question to the side of the room where the ridiculous ideas gather to commiserate with each other. “That’ll never happen.” A few minutes later, after the conversation had turned to other matters, he came clean. “You know,” he said, “just for one moment, I would kind of like to have the most. Just for one tiny moment.”

It was one of those tiny moments when it was good to have a record of our conversations. Just a few months before, when he was worth a mere $600 million, Clark had said, “I just want to have a billion dollars, after taxes. Then I’ll be satisfied.” Back further, before he started Netscape, he’d told Mark Grossman, one of the young engineers who had helped him create Silicon Graphics, something similar. Grossman recalled, “Jim came into my office just before he left to start Netscape and said SGI is okay but I’d really like to have $100 million.” Back even further, before he’d started Silicon Graphics, he’d told Tom Davis “that what he really wanted was to have ten million dollars.” The numbers! They kept moving! And, yet, he was earnest about them. What Clark meant when he said, “I’d really like to have,” was “I will do what I need to do to get.” It was not exactly wishful thinking. A world in which Larry Ellison had more money than he did was suddenly unacceptable.

Why do people perpetually create for themselves the condition for their own dissatisfaction? Listening to Clark talk about how much money he needed to make was like watching the racing dog who had the wit to grab hold of the remote device that controls the mechanical rabbit. Rather than slow it down, however, he speeds it up. Clark played these little tricks on himself so that he would have an excuse, however flimsy, to keep running as fast as he could. It was the same way with his resentments. He treated those who had done him wrong in much the same way he treated those he did not like who had more money than he did. They were all motives. Plainview, the Navy, Glenn Mueller, Ed McCracken, various venture capitalists: he needed people or places to doubt him so that he could prove them wrong.

Obviously, Clark couldn’t stop using technology to change the world, and so he needed an excuse not to stop. The reasons he couldn’t stop were ultimately unknowable; but I assumed that the best and most lasting motive for wanting to change the way things are is to be unhappy with the way things are. People who are unhappy with the way things are tend to remain unhappy even after they have changed them. The nature of their unhappiness is such that change does not slake it. The difference with Clark is that he continued to believe in the endless possibilities of change, even after he’d experienced its limitations. He was the least happy optimist there ever was. No matter how well Jim Clark did for himself, it was always two in the morning in his heart, and he was lying awake.

Above all, one thing was clear: his pursuit of the new new thing depended on his curious amnesia. His ability to forget what he said he would do next, or what he’d thought would make him happy, was the mortar on which he laid his endless tiers of self-renewal. He’d made a kind of religion of keeping only those parts of his past he needed for fuel, on his journey into the future.

His escape from the past was necessarily incomplete. The drug hasn’t been invented that permits people to forget as perfectly as they would sometimes like to forget. He still had his tuba, for instance. The tarnished old instrument sat mysteriously in the corner of the guest room upstairs—the one that stored the cardboard boxes filled with the scraps of paper his former secretary had rescued from Clark’s past. It was such an odd thing to stumble across in a house that otherwise said so little about who its inhabitant was, or where he was from, that I had asked him about it. He’d played the tuba as a child, he’d said. Twenty years before, just after he’d founded Silicon Graphics, and made his first millions, he’d been seized by the desire to play again. And so he bought this tuba. He soon found he’d lost interest in it. Only the idea of playing his tuba pleased him now. So he propped it in the corner of the guest bedroom, and left it there, as a lone reminder of something he couldn’t quite explain.

A
large aquifer beneath the flatlands between Amarillo and Lubbock supplies Plainview with more water than any other town in West Texas. The water was discovered not long after the Civil War. By the end of the nineteenth century Plainview tilled the most fertile cotton farming land in the United States. The local economy was premised on the family farm—a premise called into doubt in Clark’s boyhood, when the modern high-tech farm moved in. Since then all news for Plainview has been bad news. Such is the economic history of Plainview, Texas.

I drove into the town one bright winter morning. Poor places are slower to change than rich places; perhaps poor people are slower to change than rich people, too. The neat brick school, the tiny house, the church, the people who, as Clark had once said, “watched the outside world as if it was a television program” were pretty much as he must have left them back in the early 1960s. The sound at the center of town was the sound of the inside of a conch shell. The wind howled. The irredeemably beige buildings perched low across the flat yellow grass as if designed to diminish the human imagination. The skyline was unmarked either by windbreaks or by ambition; the lone exception was the water tower on the edge of town. Plainview was built on water, and the tower that held that water was painted proudly. Only it didn’t say Plainview; it said Rust Water. In 1992 Paramount Pictures used Plainview as a movie set for a comedy called
Leap of Faith
, about a prairie evangelist, played by Steve Martin. The Hollywood people came for a few weeks, got everyone worked up, and left behind more money than the town had seen in a long time. In the bargain they repainted the Plainview water tower with the name of the fictional town in the movie. Plainview never bothered to repaint it.

Other than that, Plainview seemed to have settled on an old idea of itself. It was staying pat, declining the dealer’s offer of another card. It had become one of those places defined by what they do not have rather than what they have, and by who has left, rather than who has stayed. The man whose departure defined the town with the most dreadful clarity was Jim Clark.

On that bright winter day I followed the directions Clark’s mother, Hazel McClure, had given me to her brick house, slightly bigger than the houses on either side of it. Waiting inside were Clark’s younger sister, Sue, and her husband, Roger. I had come to ask them some questions, but it turned out that Hazel had a question for me. “Do you know when Jim will come and visit next?” she asked, after we’d settled into our chairs.

O
n the rare occasions Clark visits Plainview, Texas, he lands at the airfield on the outskirts of town, has lunch with his mother, and then flies off to someplace else as quickly as he can. He seldom drives into the town and never visits home. He’s never seen the house his mother bought with the stock options he gave her in Silicon Graphics. The few stops he’s made have all been unscheduled. The flight path from Palm Beach to San Jose just happens to pass directly over Plainview, Texas, and every so often Clark drops out of the sky. Almost always he takes his mother by surprise. For instance, Hazel learned of Clark’s most recent visit, a year earlier, from her answering machine. She found a message on it from Jim saying he was right over her head, in descent, and intended to remain in Plainview just long enough to refuel. If she was around, he said, they could have lunch out at the airfield. “I just turned around and ran out the door to the airport,” recalls Hazel. Half the town followed her. The appearance of Clark’s jet in the Plainview sky was a public event. All of Plainview’s residents knew the plane by sight, and a hundred or so of them rushed out to the airfield, just to watch it land. “They just know that anything the size of Jim’s plane just got to be Jim,” said Roger, Clark’s brother-in-law, “because there is nothing else like that…. And, truth is, whenever he comes, Jim kind of buzzes the town.”

Hazel now said that most of what she knew about her son’s illustrious career she knew from having read it in magazines. She has difficulty squaring the boy she raised with the man she read about. She has no advanced theory why Clark became who he became. All she has is a few memories that might, or might not, offer clues to a person on a search for a character. She remembers him as a four-year-old, when she first suspected he might be smarter than the average little boy. He’d recite back entire nursery rhymes from memory, and boast, “Anything you tell me I can remember as long as I pay attention.” A bit later, when he was twelve, she recalls him accidentally shooting a hole through every toe on his left foot with a .22-caliber rifle. He lay in bed with his foot in a cast and built more model airplanes than she’d ever seen anyone build. She also remembers finding, later that year, just before Christmas, a sack of light bulbs tucked away in a closet. Hazel couldn’t afford Christmas lights. Yet here were hundreds of bulbs in a sack, waiting to be strung. It turned out that Jim had stolen them off other people’s houses.

The telephone rang. Clark’s sister, Sue, rose to answer it. In a clipped tone of poorly suppressed irritation she said, “Sorry, we’re not investing right now.” Pause. Then, more tensely, “I said we’re not investing.” She hung up. Returning, she explained that the shares in Netscape that Clark had given them had made them rich. “And you have to understand,” she said, “that when this happened, we were poor. I was ready to cook the cat.” I assumed this was a joke, and laughed. I assumed wrong. She had, in fact, been ready to cook the cat. The Netscape IPO had saved at least one life.

The deprivation Sue recalled occurred only four years ago. Now, all of Plainview thought of her and her family as these walking sacks of cash. People treated them differently. They asked for loans. They asked for stock tips. They asked what kind of company Jim might start next. They asked if they could invest in it. There was now a Clark-sized moat, filled with money, that separated his family from the rest of Plainview.

Hazel resumed the mining of her memory—and she had a lot of material to mine. The most chilling of it concerned Clark’s father, who apparently drank all day and beat Hazel up all night. Hazel put up with the routine for years; it became, in a way, normal. She hoped only that Charles—Clark’s father—would hit her someplace where people at work couldn’t see the bruises. Charles became more and more brutal, however, and Hazel divorced him when Jim was fourteen. Charles moved out onto the streets of Plainview. From there he terrorized his family with an ingenuity he showed in no other aspect of his life.

One episode still stood out brightly in Hazel’s mind. She glanced out the window of her office one day and spotted Charles standing in front of her car. He’d raised the hood and was tinkering with the engine. She ran down and hollered; Charles ran off. After that she parked in front of a car repair shop and asked the owner to keep an eye on it for her. One evening after work she found a man from the auto shop waiting for her. He told her he’d just seen a man, resembling her ex-husband, working on her transmission. Hazel opened the transmission and discovered steel shavings. The man from the auto shop helped her clean them out. Thinking they’d fixed the problem Hazel set out with her baby daughter (Sue) to visit friends in Amarillo. On the road the car broke down. Whoever had put the steel shavings in the engine had also put sand in the oil. Fixing the engine cost Hazel two months’ pay.

That night she told her son what had happened. Clark had just turned sixteen. “Jim got up and left the house,” said Hazel, “and went to find his father. When he came back he was crying.”

“I never found out what happened,” said Sue, who was clearly feeling left out.

“I never knew what happened,” said Hazel.

“But I tell you what,” said Sue. “After that my father never bothered my mother again.”

It turned out that Hazel also remembered the tuba—how could she forget it? The tarnished brass instrument propped in the corner of Clark’s guest bedroom had struck me as doubly odd, and I now said as much. It was the only artifact of his past that he thought worthy of display; it was also, for someone as willful and individualistic as Clark, a poor choice of instrument. The job of the tuba player is to blend with the orchestra. No one who wanted to stand out from the crowd would choose it for himself.

The tuba had come as a surprise to Hazel. “One day Jim came home from school with it,” she said, “And he could play a little. He used to go into the bathroom where he could hear himself better and sit on the commode—with the seat down, you know—and practice. I never knew where he got the tuba from. I guess the school gave it to him. I could never have afforded to buy any instrument.” Hazel supported a family of four on the $225 a month she took home from the hospital, where she worked as a doctor’s assistant. After she had paid the bills, she had $5 a month to spend on groceries. Clark was obviously well aware of their situation from a very young age. He had chosen to play the tuba because the tuba was the one instrument supplied to the pupil by the school, free of charge. Hazel never knew that, but it was true. Clark’s old band director, O. T. Ryan, said as much. At the Plainview middle school the students who wished to play flutes, clarinets, trumpets, and trombones were required to buy their own instruments. The tuba players alone received a loaner from the school.

Not long after he’d come home in tears, from what turned out to be his final meeting with his father, Clark quit playing his tuba. Soon after that he was expelled from school, and left town. Once he’d left, he became a stranger to his family. He’d turn up every now and again, and the family now recalled something about each visit. One time not long after he’d left, for instance, he came home talking about nothing but computers. “No one in Plainview had seen a computer, except in the movies,” said Hazel. Another time he came home with financial ambition. “When Jim came home from the Navy,” Hazel recalled, “he told his uncle that someday he was going to make fifty thousand dollars a year.”

Sue hooted and clapped, “He done a bit better than that!”

Hazel continued, “I remember him telling me when he came back from the Navy, ‘Mama, I’m going to
show
Plainview.’”