the new new thing

The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story

by Michael Lewis  · 29 Sep 1999  · 146pp  · 43,446 words

cover title: author: publisher: isbn10 | asin: print isbn13: ebook isbn13: language: subject publication date: lcc: ddc: subject: The New New Thing : A Silicon Valley Story Lewis, Michael. W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. 0393048136 9780393048131 9780585224183 English Clark, Jim,--1944- , Businessmen--United States-Biography, Computer software industry--

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, Jim,--1944- , Businessmen--United States-Biography, Computer software industry--United States-History. cover Page 1 The New New Thing Page 3 Also by Michael Lewis Liar's Poker The Money Culture Pacific Rift Trail Fever Page 4 Page 5 The New New Thing A Silicon Valley Story Michael Lewis Page 6 Copyright © 2000 by Michael Lewis All rights

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by Julia Druskin. Manufacturing by The Haddon Craftsmen Inc. 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. BusinessmenUnited States Biography. 3. Computer software industryUnited

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Could Go Either Way 189 15 At Sea in the Home of the Future 206 16 Chasing Ghosts 223 17 The Turning Point 238 18 The New New Thing 250 19 The Past outside the Box 262 Epilogue 267 Acknowledgments 269 Page 13 Preface This book is about a search that occurs on the

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no name for what he's looking for, which, typically, is a technology, or an idea, on the cusp of commercial viability. The new new thing. It's easier to say what the new new thing is not than to say what it is. It is not necessarily a new invention. It is not even necessarily a new

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ideamost everything has been considered by someone, at some point. The new new thing is a notion that is poised to be taken seriously in the marketplace. It's the idea that is a tiny push away from general

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acceptance and, when it gets that push, will change the world. The searcher for the new new thing conforms to no well-established idea of what people should do for a living. He gropes. Finding the new new thing is as much a matter of timing as of technical or financial aptitude, though both of those

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physical. They sink back in their chairs and try not to stumble upon any more difficult words. The person who makes his living searching for the new new thing is not like most people, however. He does not seriously want to sink back into any chair. He needs to keep on groping. He chooses

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the process was best illustrated by this character. After all, the greatest legal creation of wealth in the history of the planet came directly from the new new thing. When you asked, "How is it that an entire economy made this little leap?" you were really asking, "How is it that some person gave

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economy a little push?" Believe it or not, there are people, inside and outside of Silicon Valley, who consider it almost their duty to find the new new thing. That person may not be entirely typical of our age. (Is anyone?) But he is, in this case, representative: a disruptive force. A catalyst for

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poor, dropped out of high school, and made himself three or four billion dollars. It might even be said that he had a nose for the new new thing. But to my way of thinking these were only surface details, the least interesting things about him. After all, a lot of people these days

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now paid ninety dollars a square foot: they paid that money so that they could be near Clark, and people like Clark, when they announced the new new thing. The companies born on the Internet: Yahoo, Excite, @Home, eBay, and so on: they derived, one way or another, from Netscape, which Clark had founded

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of these people started coming up and wanting to be part of my project." That project turned out to be Clark's first experience with the new new thing. It was 1979. Silicon Valley was chiefly a place where chips were made, though this new company called Apple Computer was having some success mass

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. At the conference Clark predicted that this would happen once the computer became fun to use. For the preceding two years he had argued that the new new thing was computer games, like Nintendo. He was wrong, but in an interesting way. He was groping toward a mass market. "Jim always was looking to

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, there are many ways to describe this new role. But maybe the simplest is the way Clark described it to himself: the guy who finds the new new thing and makes it happen wins. The engineers who help him to do it finish second. The financiers and the corporate statesmen, the sucker fish of

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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

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. 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 Page 91 headlines in the newspapers. World Famous Huisman

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no plans to spend even a day in the Healthscape offices. He had ceased to be a businessman and become a conceptual artist. Having articulated the new new thing, Clark intended to return to the important work of teaching his computer to sail his new boat. Page 102 Amazingly, the question in his mind

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time. Time was the one commodity you could not waste if you wanted to make a billion dollars from the Internet. Once he had identified the new new thing, all he needed was some really smart, passionate engineers to chase after it and make it happen. After all, the idea was simple: eliminate the

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now with Clark and the venture capitalists who now sat on top of American capitalism, funding the many people newly engaged in the search for the new new thing. Clark was at best ambivalent about young men in suits who had gone to business school and never run a real risk in their lives

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people were claiming to have stumbled upon a great new business opportunity. To attract the smartest engineers you needed to persuade people that you had the new new thing. Clark figured that there were about three software cowboys who Page 111 could pull off what he had in mind, as quickly as it needed

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Clark. A system designed to churn out engineers for a Third World economy would soon be used to its greatest effect in the quest for the new new thing. The talent that the government had gone to such trouble to find and cultivate wound up being some of the most sought-after corporate employees

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. Not long after that he met Clark. And not long after that he found himself a kind of professional observer of Clark's quest for the new new thing. Jim Clark's mind was Kittu's hobby; Kittu was fascinated that such a technically minded person could be so happy groping blindly toward big

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Liroff was a short, bearded American man with big, clean-shaven manner. Stuart was open, relaxed, friendly, large-spiritedand eager to be a part of the new new thing. He had joined Silicon Graphics back in 1990, and gone to work building interactive television in April 1995, after the Orlando trials but before the

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could take care of the messy details of turning Healtheon into a giant corporation. That's what he always said just after he had disgorged the new new thing, and the new new thing became, simply, the new thing. He was not finished, however. The one hard rule in Jim Clark's life was that he must always

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pursue the new new thing. Three multibillion-dollar companies was not enough for one lifetime. Once when I'd asked him how he planned to convert his wealth to leisure,

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, occasionally, he claimed he did, he couldn't stop trying to force the hand of the future. He was doomed to be forever searching for the new new thing. If nothing else, he now had an audience to play to. It was as if he had sold ten thousand tickets to a one-man

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people wanted to be around at sunrise, just to see where the light came from. They wanted to see Clark stand up and say, "Behold, the new new thing." The whole situation was preposterous, or would have been at any other time and any other place. But, as Clark himself realized, a number of

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sailed into them. Page 133 9 The Home of the Future? And so to the boat we went, at least until the time came for the new new thing. What links Clark maintained from there to the world outside ran through twenty-five computers manufactured by Silicon Graphics and an Internet browser created by

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the new enterprise might one day be as big as Microsoft. And they knew that they would also get shares in the new new thing, whatever that turned out to be, and that the new new thing would likely be even bigger. Like a lot of people who entered Clark World, the crew members of Hyperion suspected that

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, after all, need them: he needed them to translate his extraordinary ambition into the ordinary language understood by corporate America. The man who groped for the new new thing was in many ways ill suited for mainstream business. Clark knew that the time would come to put a smiley corporate face on his ferocious

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of the others at the table. The VCs could tolerate companies' going bustthey had so many of thembut they could not tolerate missing out on the new new thing. And so they Page 159 poured their money in. They threw good money after bad into an enterprise they suspected would fail. They had wanted

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of small talk. You could see him trying to find the string of phrases, or perhaps the mood, that would cause an American searcher for the new new thing to hand over his financial affairs to the Bank Julius Baer. He was like a man working his way through a ring of old keys

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in @Home, and made a quick $45 million. Other than that he sank his wealth in his newest company, and left it all there until the new new thing came into view. This gorgeous financial myopia was common in the Valley, and one of the chief sources of its success. The technologist's tendency

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Page 180 when it dawned on him, as it dawned on everyone else, how unlikely he was to sell anything to anyone, much less sell the new new thing to Europeans. The vision of a technology company rising up out of the miasma of the U.S. health care industry and changing the world

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man; certainly he had no further material needs. More to the point, he was not like im Clark, who was forever doomed to grope for the new new thing. He could have given up, then and there. Yet he didn't. The Serious American Executive had signed on for his tour of duty in

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, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, as "the worst" he'd ever seen, you could, if you looked closely enough, see the first glimpse of the new new thing. Clark's willingness to take risks others shunned was the source of his financial power. He was the guy who always won the game of

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was, "I'll be a billionaire again soon." And then he returned to the serious business of programming his boat, and to the search for the new new thing. Page 189 14 Could Go Either Way Clark said that Netscape "made anarchy respectable." Late at night, when no one else was around, he must

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screen. All Bill Gates wanted from the future was for it to look exactly like the present. To survive, Microsoft didn't need to discover the new new thing but to tame it. That is why Clark knew, from the moment he created Netscape, that sooner or later, and probably sooner, Microsoft would seek

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greatest antitrust trial of the era opened. The American legal system, in effect, would decide how well a man should be rewarded who gropes for the new new thing. By then pretty much everyone, including Clark, had forgotten the phone call to Gary Reback that set the trial in motion. Certainly no one saw

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courtroom, and he answered a few questions in a tone that suggested that people who worked as lawyers for Microsoft could not begin to understand the new new thing. "You obviously aren't a businessman," he said sarcastically at one point. Bidnessman. The law changes everything it touches, however, and it now did so

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to move again. That was the unofficial sequence: start it, sell it to the public, then announce the new new thing. The stock market collapse had forced him to put off the public side of his quest for the new new thing, though, of course, he had continued feverishly with his private search. Now the two were about

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Stanley in New York had no idea. Finally, Pavan announced that Clark was off on his boat. Of course, Clark had designed the search for the new new thing so that it could occur wherever he happened to be. At that moment he happened to be on his boat, docked in some Caribbean harbor

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was busy making the necessary adjustments. One of the many things Mike Long had learned in the transition from Serious American Executive to keeper of the new new thing was to keep the story moving along. Or, as he put it, "You have to stay ahead of the public road map." The minute investors

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done it. I've gone over to the dark side." The truth was it was time for him to move again. On the eve of the new new thing, the Netdex, as the brokerage analyst Keith Benjamin Page 249 described his index of all Internet companies, was worth $405 billion. That was up 654

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came to $3,200,000,000. He was a real after-tax billionaire. He had, as they say, achieved his financial goals. Page 250 18 The New New Thing Different people have used different phrases to describe the path Clark's mind took as he wandered along the top of the cliff overlooking the

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young economist whose work on New Growth Theory had stressed the importance of technology in economic growth and, by implication, conferred a magnificent importance on the new new thing, hinted at another, deeper reason technological change was so unsettling. In a digression from his otherwise rigorous analysis, in a 1994 issue of the Journal

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out of him. He wasn't even sure he wanted to keep his investment in Healtheon. Healtheon was the past. The time had come for the new new thing. In the spring of 1999 Clark started thinking seriously about his money. Actually, he was always thinking seriously about his money, and so I Page

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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

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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

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