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Michael Lewis was supposed to be writing about how Jim Clark, the founder of Silicon Graphics and Netscape, was going to turn health care on its ear by launching Healtheon, which would bring the vast majority of the industry's transactions online. So why was he spending so much time on a computerized yacht, each feature installed because, as one technician put it, "someone saw it on Star Trek and wanted one just like it?"
Much of The New New Thing, to be fair, is devoted to the Healtheon story. It's just that Jim Clark doesn't do startups the way most people do. "He had ceased to be a businessman," as Lewis puts it, "and become a conceptual artist." After coming up with the basic idea for Healtheon, securing the initial seed money, and hiring the people to make it happen, Clark concentrated on the building of Hyperion, a sailboat with a 197-foot mast, whose functions are controlled by 25 SGI workstations (a boat that, if he wanted to, Clark could log onto and steer--from anywhere in the world). Keeping up with Clark proves a monumental challenge--"you didn't interact with him," Lewis notes, "so much as hitch a ride on the back of his life"--but one that the author rises to meet with the same frenetic energy and humor of his previous books, Liar's Poker and Trail Fever.
Like those two books, The New New Thing shows how the pursuit of power at its highest levels can lead to the very edges of the surreal, as when Clark tries to fill out an investment profile for a Swiss bank, where he intends to deposit less than .05 percent of his financial assets. When asked to assess his attitude toward financial risk, Clark searches in vain for the category of "people who sought to turn ten million dollars into one billion in a few months" and finally tells the banker, "I think this is for a different ... person." There have been a lot of profiles of Silicon Valley companies and the way they've revamped the economy in the 1990s--The New New Thing is one of the first books fully to depict the sort of man that has made such companies possible. --Ron Hogan
From Publishers Weekly
While it purports to look at the business world of Silicon Valley through the lens of one man, that one man, Jim Clark, is so domineering that the book is essentially about Clark. No matter: Clark is as successful and interesting an example of Homo siliconus as any writer is likely to find. Lewis (Liar's Poker) has created an absorbing and extremely literate profile of one of America's most successful entrepreneurs. Clark has created three companiesASilicon Graphics, Netscape (now part of America Online) and HealtheonAeach valued at more than $1 billion by Wall Street. Lewis was apparently given unlimited access to Clark, a man motivated in equal parts by a love of the technology he helps to create and a desire to prove something to a long list of people whom he believes have done him wrong throughout his life (especially his former colleagues at Silicon Graphics). As Lewis looks at the various roles of venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and programmers and at how these very different mindsets fit together in the anatomy of big deals, he gives readers a sense of how the Valley works. But the heart of the book remains Clark, who simultaneously does everything from supervise the creation of what may be the world's largest sloop to creating his fourth company (currently in the works). Lewis does a good job of putting Clark's accomplishments in context, and if he is too respectful of Clark's privacy (several marriages and children are mentioned but not elaborated on), he provides a detailed look at the professional life of one of the men who have changed the world as we know it. (Oct.) Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Listeners are due for a thrilling ride through the strange landscape of computer geeks and billionaires, with a focus on the unique story of after-tax multibillionaire Jim Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI), Netscape, and the newly emerging Healtheon. Lewis (Liar's Poker) focuses on Clark's story as the key to comprehending the newly emerging Internet wealth, emphasizing his battles between Netscape and Microsoft; his almost immediate success with SGI; his emotional investment in his computer-driven sailboat, the Hyperion; leading up to his next new, new thing, Healtheon, Clark's Internet health site envisioned literally to transform the $1 trillion healthcare industry. Clearly, Clark's nonpareil personae is an excellent example of how vastly different it is doing business in the age of the Internet, but this is not so much an analysis of Clark's business successes as it is a sort of technobiography. The numerous lengthy anecdotal tales and scenarios, narrated by Bruce Reizen, enrich the understanding of this exemplary personality, a high-tech rags-to-riches tale of a poor boy from Plainview, TX, but add little to a full appreciation for the strategies around these companiesDa story yet to be told. Highly recommended for all public libraries.DDale Farris, Groves, TX Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From The Industry Standard
When it became clear that renowned nonfiction writer Michael Lewis was trolling Silicon Valley to gather material for the definitive Internet book, a lot of people took notice. After all, Lewis had written one of the seminal 1980s greedy Wall Street stories, Liar's Poker. While he's penned other books since then, how better to follow a book on the business story of the 1980s than with one about the business story of the 1990s (and maybe the century): the creation and explosion of the Internet?With apologies to Michael Wolff, no one has written the big Web business book yet, including Lewis. Maybe it's just too early in the game.But that's OK. The Web is just too damn big to encapsulate its creation in just one tome. Instead of chronicling the rise of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, America Online, Yahoo and others, Lewis focuses on the one man who is as close to the center as anyone, Jim Clark.Clark started three companies - Silicon Graphics Inc., Netscape and Healtheon - each worth more than $1 billion. His own personal fortune after Healtheon went public rocketed to over $2 billion.Clark is portrayed as a maverick who doesn't suffer fools gladly, a fanatic about making money and controlling his destiny. Most important, Clark as engineer is emphasized.This is not a small point. Before the technology business became what it is, the financiers, bankers and managers controlled everything. But after he started Silicon Graphics, Clark learned a valuable lesson.At SGI, Clark and his beloved engineers were effectively squeezed out of the equity they thought they deserved by venture capitalists. So when Clark started his next company, Netscape, he made sure that wouldn't happen again. The terms for investment in Netscape that he secured with Kleiner's John Doerr were revolutionary. Instead of being able to buy into Netscape at the same price at which Clark funded the company, Doerr paid three times that amount, and Clark retained 25 percent of Netscape for himself.That's the big idea of Lewis' book. Since Netscape, giving out equity in a Net company has become central to attracting and retaining key engineering talent. Clark also did the unthinkable when, over CEO Jim Barksdale's initial objections, he took Netscape public in August 1995; the company was only 18 months old and had no profiits. But what was unthinkable then is now commonplace. In part, that's due to Jim Clark.In the end, Clark seems to be an idea man only. He has little patience for running his businesses. Yet, that's where some of the Clark magic comes in: He attracts the best people to run his companies. Whether it's Mike Long, the CEO of Healtheon, or Jim Barksdale of Netscape, Clark gives the reins to an experienced executive and goes on to the next big thing.He can also viciously turn on the chosen executive, as Lewis recounts in hilarious detail. Take Ed McCracken, the former CEO of Silicon Graphics. McCracken was brought in from Hewlett-Packard to run SGI when it became apparent that Clark was not born to be a manager. The problem with McCracken was that he was the Valley's version of an Organization Man, or a manager with a taste for conformity. In Clarkspeak, Ed McCracken became "Ed McMuffin" or "Fucking Ed McCracken."Disdain for authority is a common thread throughout the book. Clark doesn't think much of venture capitalists and bankers, either. To him, they're parasites who take advantage of engineers. Lewis seems to adopt the same stance. In a passage in which Clark, Healtheon CEO Long and a banker from Morgan Stanley are flying to Europe for Healtheon's IPO road show, Lewis never names the banker. He writes: "Clark let the Wall Street people sell his companies to the public and make him billions of dollars, but only because he hadn't yet figured out a way to get rid of them."Clark seems dedicated to getting rid of people who complicate his life. He started Healtheon to get rid of health-care professionals who only add to red tape in the medical world. With his latest startup, MyCFO.com, Clark hopes to get rid of a layer of accounting management with whom the ultra-rich deal every day.Lewis, of course, understands Clark and as illustration tells of a boating trip he took with him across the Atlantic. Clark built the boat so it could be sailed by computer, with the help of 24 SGI workstations. The boat, or rather its computers, performed marginally. But Lewis, in the end, realizes that it wasn't so much the sailing of a computerized boat that was important - it was the idea that such a thing could be done. - Jim Evans
The New York Times Book Review, front-page review, Kurt Andersen, 31 October 1999
[A] splendid, entirely satisfying book, intelligent and fun and revealing and troubling in the correct proportions, resolutely skeptical but not at all cynical, brimming with fabulous scenes as well as sharp analysis....[R]eads, for most of us, like fiction in the best sense, providing character revelation and narrative surprises all along the way....Lewis conveys with a rare combination of wisdom and glee both the thrill and absurdity of late-20th century business.
Wall Street Journal, Fred Moody, 22 October 1999
[R]emarkable....Clark proves to be a character as enthralling as any in American fiction or non-fiction....Lewis tells a great story in this book, with prose that ranges from the beautiful to the witty to the breathtaking.
The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani, 26 October 1999
[Lewis] does for the late 1990s world of techno-geeks and software cowboys what he did in Liar's Poker for the 1980s Wall Street world of traders and arbitrageurs.
Los Angeles Times Book
[Lewis] is America's poet laureate of capital. No one writes more fluently about the art of making money.
Boston Globe
The most significant business story since the days of Henry Ford... Lewis achieves a novelistic elegance.
From AudioFile
According to this slight, entertaining tome, Silicon Valley is a very silly place and Jim Clark, founder of Netscape, a very silly guy. Youthful-sounding Bruce Reizen sails through the risible true-life adventure in a travelogue singsong. He fully voices characters, a dubious deed considering that they're actual living persons whom he may or may not have ever heard. Otherwise he is quite listener-friendly. Y.R. © AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
From Booklist
Lewis, in his eye-opening and best-selling Liar's Poker (1989), told tales on himself: about his meteoric rise from trainee at Salomon Brothers investment firm to very successful trader. Now he tells tales on someone else: Jim Clark, who created Netscape and thus "triggered the Internet boom." To write this profile, Lewis more or less shadowed Clark for a while, and dogging him meant participating in Clark's transatlantic journey in his obsessively designed, totally computerized sailing ship, Hyperion. Lewis' book, in effect, provides a look at the whole computer industry, for the more we learn about Clark, the more we learn about the industry as a whole. Silicon Valley, referred to as "the greatest legal creation of wealth in the history of the planet," is the Wall Street of the 1990s, and Clark is a primary mover and shaker. He is strictly an idea man, coming up with new ideas of how to make millions and leaving his engineers to arrive at workable details. Clark, as we follow and marvel at his career, invents his life as he goes along. What drives him is his abiding need to pursue new concepts and experiences. He is protypical of the superwealthy leadership in Silicon Valley: "the geek holed up in his basement all weekend discovering new things to do with his computer." That's the point of the Silicon Valley computer industry: people don't have to build new computers to make a fortune, they just have to devise new things for the computer to do. This book will prove very popular, not only with readers interested in business and computers but also with those who are simply curious about "the new new thing." Brad Hooper
From Book News, Inc.
A character study of Jim Clark, the founder of Silicon Graphics, Netscape, and Healtheon. The narrative discusses Clark's entrepreneurial ideas and sheds light on the history of the Internet, all in the midst of exploring the creation and travels of Clark's high-tech computer-controlled single-mast sailboat Hyperion.Book News, Inc.®, Portland, OR
Kurt Andersen, The New York Times Book Reivew
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.
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