The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story (4 page)

From above we could just make out the rescue squad climbing the tree. They reached the door of the crashed plane. They opened it.

“It’s empty,” crackled the voice on the radio.

The cockpit was empty. An airplane upside down at the top of a tall oak tree. Eight, maybe nine, miles from the nearest road or house. And there was no one inside of it. Or, for that matter, anywhere to be seen.

I
t wasn’t until the next day that we learned what had happened. A few hours before we took off in Clark’s helicopter, two guys had set out in their small white four-seater airplane, looking for goats to chase. Apparently people do this. They chase after goats in airplanes. They find themselves a big herd, come in low behind it, and frighten it into running off a cliff. Or something. Anyway, that morning the pleasure went out of goat chasing almost immediately, when the two men crashed into an oak tree, upside down. By some miracle of injustice neither one of them was killed, or even injured. The two men simply climbed down the oak tree and headed out to the highway to thumb a ride back to San Jose. They had some idea that they might return later with the necessary equipment and extract their airplane from the oak tree, real quiet-like. Unfortunately, almost as soon as they’d hit the ground, we’d shown up. The last thing the two men had wanted was to be saved. Rather than endure the embarrassment of explaining themselves to their would-be rescuers, they hid in the bushes until we left. Once the sky was clear they sneaked away.

We learned all that and more the next day. The afternoon after our helicopter ride, we hadn’t the faintest idea what had happened. And we drove back to Clark’s house in Atherton in radically different states of mind. I, for one, thought we had just had an unusual experience. We’d stumbled upon a plane crash, led a rescue effort, and wound up with a postmodern mystery: an empty cockpit. Here was the aviation equivalent of the authorless text. Clark, for his part, had little interest in any of it—not that day or any other. He never mentioned it again. When I said something about how strange it was to see an airplane sticking out of a tree, he said, “Oh, what did it look like?” For a full hour he had circled and dipped and swooped and plummeted over the wreck without once removing his eyes from the controls to glance at the crashed airplane. All of his attention had gone into learning to fly his helicopter.

At first I thought it was just coincidence that the most stupendously odd accidents befell Jim Clark. He was so wasteful of them, from a recreational point of view. Experiences from which most people could extract a life philosophy he glanced at once and discarded from his thoughts. He was the guy with a craving for sweets who’d been handed a huge bag of Snickers bars, which he worked his way through in an hour by eating a tiny corner off each one and chucking the rest. Eventually, I saw a kind of logic in his grazing: this was how he left himself open to accident. If nothing surprising or interesting was happening to him, he moved on until the situation corrected itself. This was as true of his work as of his leisure; indeed, it was hard to say where the work stopped and the leisure began. They formed a seamless, disturbing pattern of motion and change.

Clark’s inability to live without motion and change had gotten him to where he was. In his world change and motion begat money, which begat even more change and more motion, and so on. “Change” was another word for wealth, and “wealth” was another word for money, and money was what he was after, or said he was after. My own view was that he needed change even more than he needed the money that came from the change. Different people have different words for this need for constant motion and change. “Despair” is one of them. “Impatience” is another. Impatience might be a social vice but, to Clark, it was a commercial virtue. “If everyone was patient,” he’d say, “there’d be no new companies.” The impatient man kept his own life in such a constant state of upheaval that neither his experience nor his immediate surroundings ended up meaning very much to him. He was keen on things only as they happened; after they had happened he lost interest in them altogether.

As a result, it sometimes felt that nothing had ever happened to him at all. Oh, every now and then he was seized by a sense that his past
should
matter, just as people who have lost a leg occasionally wake up thinking they feel it down there kicking. In one such moment he decided that since Netscape obviously had played some role in economic history he should record how it felt to create it. But almost as soon as he’d hired his ghost writer, he lost interest. It bored him to sit around answering questions about what had happened. His little contribution to economic history—called
Netscape Time
—though not without interest, wound up sounding as if it was written by someone else. Which, of course, it was.

As a practical matter, Clark had no past, only a future. That’s when he really came alive: when you got him on the subject of what was going to happen
next
. Then he was full of ideas, and they would change from one moment to the next. This process bore no relation to the clichéd version of it offered up by more ordinary business people. Clark never used the words and phrases that we all have come to expect from the technology types who pretend to see the future.
Vision, the challenge of the next century, the new millennium, the road ahead.
That sort of grand talk struck him as perfect bullshit. In all the time I spent with him, I never once heard him refer to his ability to see the future. He couldn’t see it—that’s why he had to grope for it. He would be seized by some overwhelming enthusiasm—say, his ambition to create a new field of study that he wanted to call biocomputing, or his newest idea for snaring more billions in the World Wide Web—and he would be off and running down some long, dark tunnel leading God knew where. With him, enthusiasm was a physical event. He stood six feet three inches tall and weighed maybe two hundred pounds, but when he became excited about something he grew three inches and put on fifty pounds. It was as if someone had injected him with growth hormones.

Usually, after a week or two, Clark would decide there was something wrong with his new idea, and drop it. Moments after he’d exploded with his latest plan to create another multibillion-dollar industry, he would have forgotten about it. But every now and then the long, dark tunnel didn’t come to a dead end. Whatever radar Clark possessed told him that it was okay to sprint into the dark. That’s when he was most dangerous. It was also when he was at his best.

Anyway, it took some months before I realized that I was never going to hear about his past from him, at least not in the usual way that information changes hands. The few times I asked him directly how he had got from there to here—which, it was becoming clearer, was the same as asking how the modern world had got from there to here—he would offer some perfunctory reply and wave me away. “That’s boring,” he’d say. When I pressed he might say, “That’s the past. I really don’t give a shit about the past.”

Then one day I discovered the cardboard boxes. They were stacked up in a closet in the guest bedroom of his house. It was, like most guest rooms, one of those rooms that looked as if they had been cleaned a thousand times and never inhabited. Since he first started out in Silicon Valley back in 1979 Clark had the same secretary, a woman named D’Anne Schjerning. After Netscape went public, in August 1995, she made so much money from her stock in various Clark-inspired enterprises that she bought herself a long gold Cadillac and retired. Up until then, bless her heart, she squirreled away Clark’s notes and papers, and stuffed them into cardboard boxes. She kept the boxes at Netscape until the company outgrew its space, at which point she shipped them to Clark’s home. The boxes had never been opened. They looked as new as everything else in the room. Clark had no idea what was in them (“It must just be some boring old stuff,” he said), but he did not mind if I opened them.

At the top of the first box there was a yellowing clipping from the local newspaper in Plainview, Texas, where Clark grew up. The paper wanted to let the townspeople know that one of their own had gone to California and created a big company called Silicon Graphics. It played it as a straightforward local-boy-makes-good story, and made light of Clark’s boyhood failure. It mentioned that he’d been expelled from the local public high school in his junior year. He’d been an indifferent student and a cutup—one of those great bad examples to youth who prove that if you really want to be a success in American life you have to start by offending your elders. The offense that got Clark tossed out for good was telling an English teacher to “go to hell.” Before that he had exploded a small bomb on a school bus, smuggled a skunk, inside a horn case, into a school dance, and set off a string of firecrackers inside another student’s locker, among other tricks. Once he left school—or school left him—he fled town.

The next clue folded neatly inside the cardboard boxes was a photograph of Clark circa 1970, having just received his master’s degree in physics from the University of New Orleans, on his way to a Ph.D. program at the University of Utah. He wore thick dark-rimmed glasses, a crew cut, and an expression that approached, but did not quite achieve, innocence. In under eight years this person, considered unfit to graduate from public high school in Plainview, Texas, had earned himself a Ph.D. in Computer Science.

Actually, the story was more remarkable than that. His father abandoned the family when Clark was a small child. His mother should have taken welfare, but it never occurred to her. The home Clark went back to after a day of turning his school on its head was situated somewhere below the poverty line. When I asked him about the article in the Plainview paper, all he said was “I grew up in black and white. I thought the whole world was shit and I was sitting in the middle of it.” At the minimum age of seventeen and a half Clark asked his mother to sign the piece of paper that permitted him to join the Navy. In September 1961, when the rest of his high school class returned for its senior year, he left Plainview for basic training just outside of New Orleans.

His career in the Navy started as badly as his career in high school ended. When he arrived at training camp, he was given, along with every other new recruit, a multiple-choice aptitude test. He had never seen a multiple-choice test, and he didn’t know how to take one. To most of the questions several different answers struck him as at least partially correct. Instead of picking the one that seemed most correct, he just circled them all. The Navy assumed that he knew that circling more than one answer fooled the computer that graded the tests. They charged him with cheating, took him off the ordinary slow track for enlisted men, and put him on an even slower one for juvenile delinquents. Thus the first time Jim Clark ever heard of computers was when he was accused of trying to fool one into thinking he was smarter than he was.

The other recruits who took the multiple-choice test went into a classroom and obtained their high school equivalency diplomas. Clark alone found himself shipped out to sea. There he spent the next nine months, performing the most disgusting chores that need doing on a ship. Those nine months at sea have filled a lot of Clark’s memory. He recalls officers telling him that he was stupid, and bullies tossing plates full of food on the floor just so that he would have to clean them up. He returned to the Navy’s classroom convinced that Plainview, Texas, just might not be the world’s capital of shit. He took his first math test and scored the highest grade in the class. He was unaware that he had any particular aptitude for math and didn’t quite believe the result. Neither did anyone else. The Navy gave him another test. Same result. Six weeks later Clark was assigned to teach basic algebra to incoming recruits. A few after that, one of the instructors told him that it had been a long time since he’d seen someone so naturally gifted in mathematics. He suggested that Clark enroll in night classes at Tulane University with a view to getting a college degree after he’d finished his tour of duty. Within eight years Clark had his college degree, plus a master’s in physics, plus a Ph.D. in computer science.

In the Navy, Clark said, he learned that his desire for revenge could lead to success. He was propelled in the classroom by his anger about the humiliation he’d suffered at sea. Thus success, for him, became a form of revenge.

I returned to the cardboard boxes. They suggested a turbulent early career. There were hints that between 1970 and 1978 Clark had married at least twice, sired at least two children, moved back and forth across the country at least three times, and held at least four different jobs, mainly at universities. He did postgraduate work at the University of Utah with the forefather of computer graphics, Ivan Sutherland. In 1978 he was fired for insubordination from a post at the New York Institute of Technology, at which point a wife, not his first, left him. “I remember her saying that she couldn’t live the way I lived anymore,” he recalled when asked. “She just wanted a more settled life.”

When he said this, he was standing outside of his house, near his hill. Just a few years back, before the Internet boom, Clark’s house in Atherton had been surrounded by empty fields. Now he was surrounded by new houses, many of them bigger than his own. One morning he looked up from his kitchen table and saw the neighbors looking back. He requested, and was denied, a permit to build a fence tall enough to screen them from his view. The city of Atherton, California, had strict rules about fences, and the fence Clark wanted to build was declared too high. So Clark built a hill, and put the fence on top of the hill. It did not occur to him that there was anything unusual about this.

As he stood beneath his self-made hill, he tried to explain this extraordinary leap in his career from thirty-eight-year-old unsuccessful college professor with a warning label on his forehead to a founder of a multibillion-dollar corporation. “It was one of those times when the whole fucking world went berserk,” he said. “After my wife left I went into this spiral…six months of counseling. Then I said fuck counseling; it wasn’t helping anything. There was all of this self-actualization stuff around, est and that kind of thing. I thought I don’t need some guru to tell me how to find my way out.”

“So it was as simple as that?”

He laughed. “No. For a year and a half I was in this kind of down-beat funk. Dark, dark, dark.”