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November, 1999

The New New Thing By Michael Lewis W.W. Norton Click on the title to buy the book

The author's mother warned Jim Clark not to talk to her son, and when the storied entrepreneur finally saw the galley for The New New Thing, he wished he had listened to her. Michael Lewis had told Clark that he was writing about Silicon Valley. That was true, strictly speaking. It would have been more accurate, however, if Lewis had said he was writing about Silicon Valley as reflected through the remarkable life and singular times of Clark---a 55- year-old digital anarchist cum computer cowboy with a proclivity for creating software programs that blew up the U.S. economy. But this admission might have prompted Clark to limit the hospitality he extended toward the wickedly humorous author, whose kiss-and-tell account of his days as a bond salesman, the best-selling "Liar's Poker", exposed the underbelly of Wall Street. Instead, Clark welcomed Lewis into his life, allowing him to rummage through unopened boxes of personal effects and inviting him on a transatlantic voyage.

Lewis spent 18 months observing Clark's efforts to build the world's largest single-mast sailboat and to construct an Internet company, called Healtheon, that would revolutionize the American health care industry. At some point, Clark learned that Lewis was, in fact, writing a book about him. "I thought, well, that's strange, I didn't know that," Clark recalls. He asked Lewis about it. "He said, ŒIt's really about other things, other than you. But you are the central character.'" In retrospect, that remark should have tipped Clark off about Lewis' intentions. Nevertheless, this most prescient of engineers, credited by many for starting the Internet stampede with the development of the Netscape browser, did not foresee how Lewis would describe the role he played in the Silicon Valley funhouse. That, perhaps, is to Clark's credit.

"I basically was kind of shocked when I read it," Clark remembers. "He allowed me to read it---not to edit it---because I was only allowed to change one word inaccuracies, like a name." Though the book is a spritely read at only 274 pages, it left Clark exhausted. "My first impulse was: I've got to hurry up and hire a CEO for MyCFO [his latest multibillion-dollar venture] because after this book comes out I won't be able to hire anybody."

If Lewis had not written such a wonderful book, we might be tempted to hold this small act of deception against him. But even Clark---a man whose list of past hurts is meticulously kept and spectacularly avenged---forgives the author. This is not because Lewis' portrait is flattering, balanced, or well-rounded. But it is immensely entertaining and stunningly insightful. More parable than profile, Lewis sets out to explain how technogeeks like Clark irrevocably transformed the economy and in the process accumulated fantastic wealth. In the hands of a lesser writer, the topic would have been soporific. At its heart, after all, are the tough sinews of software code connected to the dry bones of servers and silicon wafers. However, Lewis' book is not about the physical attributes of the digital revolution, it is about its soul.

Why did Lewis focus on Jim Clark rather than Bill Gates or Andrew Grove or any of hundreds of lesser-known cyber-caudillos? On one hand, it can be argued that few have Clark's track record---he has created four multibillion dollar companies, three of which are public. Clark is either uncannily lucky or preternaturally perceptive. Still, one suspects that the reason Lewis chose Clark is less for his accomplishments than for his character. To explore Silicon Valley's animating force, Lewis needed someone whose feelings and emotions were accessible, not guarded behind a wall of insecurity and fear. Why do people like Clark push for radical change when so many of us are content with the way things are? There are no easy answers, but Clark's complicated---and transparent---psyche provides some clues.

"Clark had one of these faces that virtually screamed what he was feeling," Lewis writes. "The pucker was its way of letting you know he was irritated Š His face would redden, and his mouth would twist up into a mouth-of-the-volcano pucker as if it were trying to suppress the inevitable lava. The mood in the air once his mouth went into its pucker was a bit like the feeling you might get when, climbing what you thought was a mountain, you looked up and saw smoke billowing from the top. When you spotted the pucker, you froze, turned, and scrambled back down to safety. You found another place to pass the afternoon."

Clark is an impatient man. Not impatient in the sense of someone who hates to wait, but impatient in the sense of someone who suspects there is something hugely important he should be doing. Unlike most people to whom that adjective is attached, Clark does not necessarily shed nervous energy. When he speaks, he drawls. His impatience is a metaphysical event. He needs change the way other people need sleep. Clark attributes this impulse to outside forces---the desire to prove himself to those who have humiliated him, a hankering for money, a craving for achievement. Yet, as Lewis follows Clark across oceans and into boardrooms, chronicling his amazing amassment of treasure, it becomes clear that he is propelled by more inchoate energies. In one scene, Lewis watches Clark struggle to fill out a questionnaire that requires him to state his occupation. "There was no name for what he did," Lewis writes. "For that matter, there is no name for what he is looking for." Lewis settles for calling the objective of Clark's impatience the "new, new thing."

The "new, new thing" is the bomb that explodes reality as it is conventionally perceived. For Lewis, Clark is the guy who "sits with the detonator between his legs." Instead of gunpowder, Clark ignites ideas---not necessarily new or complicated concepts, but notions that somehow pack the cognitive equivalent of Little Boy. Of course, more than a few are duds. And others are attached to a timing device, imperceptibly gathering power over months or years until they suddenly blow away cultural constructs like a tornado. For example, can anyone remember a time when we lived without the Internet?

Of all his accomplishments, Netscape Communications, founded by Clark and boy-wonder Marc Andreeson, is the most well-known. To learn about others, one has to dip into Silicon Valley lore. For example, the Geometry Engine © 1979---an advanced computer chip designed by Clark---led to the formation of his first company, Silicon Graphics, and to the technology used to make Jurassic Park. Clark conjured Healtheon, his third company, out of words arranged in a diamond on a piece of paper. They were: payers, doctors, consumers, and providers. With these four words, Clark figured he would take over the $1.5 trillion health care industry. Nearly four years later, Healtheon is a leading Internet health company with $48.8 million in annual revenue. Clark's vision of his own private banking empire, dubbed MyCFO, hasn't even launched yet but it has already lined up customers with a combined $20 billion in assets, and it seems likely to shake up the financial services world.

Nonetheless, what is truly amazing about Clark is not his knack for transforming ideas into wealth. It is his ability to transform himself from an unhappy boy born into the despair of America's underclass into a leading oracle of economic change. "I grew up in black and white," Clark tells Lewis. "I thought the whole world was shit, and I was sitting in the middle of it." Growing up in Plainview, Texas, Clark had an alcoholic dad who would drink by day and beat his mother by night. He dropped out of high school after a string of practical jokes---exploding a small bomb on the school bus, smuggling a skunk into a school dance, setting off firecrackers in a fellow student's locker---made him unwelcome there. In the Navy, Clark was steered onto a track for juvenile delinquents. Shipped out to sea, he recalls officers who called him stupid and bullies who tossed their plates on the floor just to watch him clean up the mess.

Clark's first transformation was from galley boy to mathematics star. That act of self-reinvention was followed by others, in seemingly endless succession, as Clark moved through the roles of college student and professor, business entrepreneur and technological seer. In Silicon Valley, Clark's ability to remake himself anew is now a given, one of the few things that can be counted on in the ever-shifting panorama of technical innovation. He has thus been anointed the status of chief explorer, leading engineers deeper and deeper into the digital frontier.

"I don't think Michael knew [that the book] was going to be about me until he started writing," Clark guesses. If so, Lewis was acting in the spirit of the age. Whether we realize it or not, we are all following adventurers like Clark. Just as the first Lewis and Clark team charted the Northwestern part of the United States, this modern-day reincarnation of that great American exploring duo maps the digital landscape we will soon inhabit. Read it and pack your gear. The adventure has only begun.