Read The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story Online
Authors: Michael Lewis
The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story (30 page)
T
he sun shone brightly on the clear untroubled sea. When Allan Prior maneuvered
Hyperion
into the narrow channel leading to the shallow harbor on the south coast of Antigua, he probably knew that he would be fired. Not long after the boat reached the dock, Clark dismissed Allan as his captain. Clark had no one reason for replacing him. Allan just wasn’t well suited to managing the crew of a computerized sailboat. By the time, six months later, that
Hyperion
sailed beneath the Golden Gate Bridge and into the San Francisco Bay, Jaime, too, would be gone.
Hyperion
’s captain and half of its crew would be new.
But for that one, final moment Allan Prior was still Jim Clark’s captain. He guided
Hyperion
skillfully toward the shore, without so much as a glance at the computer screen beneath the wheel. The computer offered up all sorts of useful information: the depth of the sea, the speed of the ship, the subtle shifts in the wind’s strength and direction. Allan snorted and said, “I never look at the computer—I don’t trust it,” then returned to the business of guiding the boat toward the shore. Slowly, he turned into the harbor; and when he did, Simon, standing on the bow, gave a whoop. Behind a stand of dismasted sailboats was the boat Simon was working on when Clark stole him away to learn all about computers:
Juliet
. By then the crew knew that
Juliet
was the reason
Hyperion
existed—that after he had boarded
Juliet
in the San Francisco Bay, Clark had decided he wanted one like it, only bigger and smarter.
Juliet
had led to
Hyperion
and
Hyperion
had led to Netscape’s IPO and Netscape’s IPO had triggered the Internet boom. Of course, the boom probably would have happened without
Juliet
, or for that matter, without Netscape. But I doubt it would have happened quite the same way. Clark’s first sighting of
Juliet
was one of those small perturbations that radically altered the world we inhabit.
Now
Juliet
felt small and insignificant. The crew of
Hyperion
waved to her crew in the same spirit that the winner of a beauty pageant hugs the runner-up. Clark waved, too. Once he had the biggest mast and the finest boat, he didn’t care to rub it in. He was a good winner; poor losers often are. The joy of winning was only slightly diminished by the sighting of Larry Ellison’s much bigger power boat (this was a curiously small world). We docked right beside it, and then left quickly for Clark’s plane.
But before we did I went down to Clark’s cabin. I wanted to hear whatever he’d concluded about the crossing—and whether he thought there was a business in the boat’s software. I found him hovering over an architectural drawing. It was neatly spread out on his desk, beside his computer. It looked very much like a drawing of a boat, I said, coming up behind him. It is a boat, he said. He’d asked the man who had designed
Hyperion
to draw the lines for a sailboat half again as big as
Hyperion
, or a bit longer than 250 feet. He’d already spoken to Wolter Huisman about it, and Wolter was willing to build it, even if it meant building a new building that could hold it. The drawing was what Clark thought of as his “new boat.”
I suppose he must have seen me flinch, because pretty quickly he was explaining why he needed to be thinking about building another boat. He’d spent the last five years, and upended the U.S. economy, to get his hands on the one we’d just sailed across the Atlantic Ocean. “
Hyperion
is a beautiful boat,” he said, and I knew when he said it what the next word would be. “But…” His finger traced the lines of his new boat, which was still no more than a figment of his imagination. Pure possibility. A smile lengthened across his face.
Hyperion
was nice, but this…this was the perfect boat.
Andy Kessler and Fred Kittler introduced me to the Valley, and helped make this book what it is. Jim and Nancy Rutter Clark put up with a writer in ways that no one should have to. Clark has made a career of taking risks others avoid. He took another when he let me talk my way into his life, and I’ll always be grateful for that. I’d also like to thank Pham Nguyen for checking my facts and Chris Wiman for checking my sentiment. Eric Ver Ploeg read the manuscript for technical illiteracy; Paul Romer read it for economic illiteracy; Patricia Chui read it for just plain old-fashioned illiteracy. Any mistakes they failed to detect are obviously their fault; indeed they can be blamed handily for anything the reader might disapprove of. A special thanks to my editor Starling Lawrence, who navigates rough drafts, as he navigates life, with great grace. It’s good to be back on board.
More Praise for
The New New Thing
A
New York Times
Notable Book
Named One of the Best Books of the Year by
Businessweek
,
Christian Science Monitor
,
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
, and
Industry Standard
“A splendid, entirely satisfying book. . . . Resolutely skeptical but not at all cynical, brimming with fabulous scenes as well as sharp analysis. . . .
The New New Thing
may be to Silicon Valley what Pepys’s diary was to 1660’s London or Twain’s
Roughing It
to the American West of the last century.”
—
New York Times Book Review
“Lewis . . . is America’s poet laureate of capital. No one writes more fluently about the art of making money.”
—
Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Besides the echoes of Fitzgerald, there’s a lot of Tom Wolfe in Lewis’s book—a vintage New Journalism verbal snazziness and a Wolfe-ish profusion of exclamation marks.”
—
New York
“Lewis does a sprightly job of conjuring up the heady world of Silicon Valley and its reigning ethos of innovation.”
—
New York Times
“Lewis is a gifted storyteller. . . . While many writers will try to bring this fantasyland to life, few will do it as vividly as Michael Lewis.”
—
Fortune
“Brilliant report from Silicon Valley. . . . Not even all Jim Clark’s money can buy him Michael Lewis’s talent.”
—
The Atlantic
“Lewis has written a book to go on the shelf alongside Tracy Kidder’s 1980 classic about the computer business,
The Soul of a New Machine
.”
—
Boston Globe
“More than anything else you could read right now, Michael Lewis’s book will help you understand how Silicon Valley has turned Wall Street—and the American economy—on its head.”
—
Christian Science Monitor
“Michael Lewis’s
The New New Thing
is the best book ever written about Silicon Valley. . . . He has absolutely captured what Silicon Valley is like at this moment in history. . . . Very few people have Lewis’s ability to capture something deep with a few deftly written scenes.”
—
Slate
“Lewis provides a look that is as penetrating as anything written so far.”
—
Businessweek
“Like all Lewis’s writing,
The New New Thing
is funny. It is funny in a wry, carefully observed way. . . . It is funny also in a slashing, profane way. . . . Yet what makes
The New New Thing
an exceptional book is not how funny it is, but how closely it sticks to a mission of investigating the mythic properties of Clark’s singularly mercurial character.”
—
Salon
“Lewis has the gift of making boardroom financial negotiations both thrilling and funny. . . . There are many acutely observed comic vignettes and anecdotes.”
—
Times Literary Supplement
“Lewis manages to accomplish something rare in the oeuvre of high-tech tales: He makes it funny and unusual. This might be the first Internet book that will entertain people who know everything about the Net, as well as those who know nothing.”
—
Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Lewis does a terrific job profiling Clark.”
—
San Diego Union-Tribune
“Lewis . . . is unquestionably one of the most articulate business writers around. He’s a great storyteller.”
—
Daily Deal
“[Clark’s] continuous quest for what Lewis calls ‘the new new thing’ makes for an epic tale.”
—
Baltimore City Paper
“In relating the story of Jim Clark, Lewis uses a sort of Tom Wolfe approach, enlivening his account of complicated financial deals and even more complicated engineering feats with snappy cameo portraits, exclamatory descriptions and lots of subjective judgments.”
—
Indianapolis Star
“In engaging narrative that even non-computer-savvy readers will enjoy . . . [Lewis] gives us an entertaining and often biting behind-the-scenes look at the movers-and-shakers in California’s Silicon Valley.”
—
New Orleans Times-Picayune
“Lewis is a hilarious and savvy eyewitness to the entity he calls ‘Clarkworld.’”
—
Techweek
“It may seem odd for a Silicon Valley story to focus on shipbuilding, but Lewis is entertaining enough to pull it off.
New New
turns out to be a Thackerayan character study of Clark and his cronies, and that’s enough to carry the tale. Any conclusions one draws about Silicon Valley are icing on the cake.”
—
Seattle Times
“Lewis’s book is a high-tech
Moby-Dick
in which Clark plays Ahab and the white whale has been replaced by programming glitches.”
—
Time Out New York
“With
The New New Thing
, Michael Lewis becomes the first to hang it all on one man: Jim Clark. . . . Many in the Valley will be furious that their habitat has been winnowed down to a single individual. But Lewis pulls it off.”
—
Talk
“A rip-roaring profile of the high-rolling technology entrepreneur Jim Clark, and the strange Silicon Valley subculture in which he thrives, from one of our best business journalists. . . . Funny, feverishly romantic business reporting in which the American lust for wealth becomes a Byronic quest for the next dream that will change the world.”
—
Kirkus Reviews
, starred review
Boomerang
The Big Short
Home Game
The Blind Side
Coach
Moneyball
Next
Losers
The Money Culture
Pacific Rift
Liar's Poker
Panic
Copyright © 2000 by Michael Lewis
All rights reserved
First published as a Norton paperback 2014
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue,
New York, NY 10110
Composition by Julia Druskin.
Book design by Chris Welch.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lewis, Michael (Michael M.)
The new new thing: a Silicon Valley story / Michael Lewis.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-393-04813-6
1. Clark, Jim, 1944–. 2. Businessmen—United States Biography. 3. Computer software industry—United States—History. I. Title.
HD9696.63.U62C585 1999
338.4'70053'092—dc21
[B]
99-43412
CIP
ISBN 978-0-393-34781-4 pbk.
eISBN 978-0-393-06621-0
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT