The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story
Author: Michael Lewis
In the weird glow of the dying millennium, Michael Lewis sets out on a safari through Silicon Valley to find the world's most important technology entrepreneur, the man who embodies the spirit of the coming age. He finds him in Jim Clark, who is about to create his third, separate, billion-dollar company: first Silicon Graphics, then Netscape - which launched the Information Age - and now Healtheon, a startup that may turn the $1 trillion healthcare industry on its head.
Despite the variety of his achievements, Clark thinks of himself mainly as the creator of Hyperion, which happens to be a sailboat - not just an ordinary yacht, but the world's largest single-mast vessel, a machine more complex than a 747. Clark claims he will be able to sail it via computer from his desk in San Francisco, and the new code may contain the seeds of his next billion-dollar coup.
On the wings of Lewis' celebrated storytelling, the listener takes the ride of a lifetime through this strange landscape of geeks and billionaires. We get the inside story of the battle between Netscape and Microsoft; we sit in the room as Clark tries to persuade the investment bankers that Healtheon IS the new Microsoft; we get queasy as Clark pits his boat against the rage of the North Atlantic in winter. And in every brilliant anecdote and character sketch, Lewis is drawing us a map of markets and free enterprise in the twenty-first century.
Fortune
Lewis is a gifted storyteller...[he] makes his case through a series of beautifully rendered set-pieces....While many writers will try to bring this fantasyland to life, few will do so as vividly as Michael Lewis.
Business Week
[Lewis's] incisive and entertaining volume largely succeeds in getting past the glitter of money to identify the real key to the Valley's vibrancy: new ideas....Lewis provides a look that is penetrating as anything written so far.
Industry Standard - Jim Evans
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.
Slate
Michael Lewis' The New New Thing is the best book ever written about Silicon Valley. There. I've said it. Said it to you (wondering, to be sure, whether you agree—do you?); said it to the readers of Slate ; but most of all, I've said it to myself. Michael Lewis' The New New Thing is the best book ever written about Silicon Valley. There. I've said it again.
Los Angeles Times Book Review
Lewis brilliantly describes Clark's intensity and passion, his genius for technology and leadership and his impatience with convention. He also faithfully chronicles Clark's ruthlessness, willingness to exact revenge on opponents and ability to casually upset people's lives. The fact that these last qualities are described in almost complimentary terms reflects a Silicon Valley sensibility that they're laudable.
Industry Standard
The author got famous in the 1980s with his tale of Wall Street. Now he's turned his glance toward Silicon Valley.
By Michael Lewis
(W.W. Norton & Co.)
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
Newsweek, 25 October 1999 - Steven Levy
Lewis has a natural talent for spinning hilarious scenes and uncovering wicked details.
Fred Moody
Remarkable....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 b, 22 October 1999
Jeffrey Klein
The New New Thing is bound to become the big big book of the fall season, and deservedly so.
San Jose Mercury News 10 October 1999
Time, 25 October 1999 - Joshua Quittner
A superb book....Lewis makes Silicon Valley as thrilling and intelligible as he made Wall Street in his best-selling Liar's Poker.
The New York Times Book Review - Kurt Andersen
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.
Wired
...Michael Lewis takes readers inside the now-familiar world of Silicon Valley excess, the frantic deal making, the absurdly hyped expectations, the phenomenal wealth. But the 39-year old best-selling author of Liar's Poker and The Money Culture brings something genuinely exotic to the mix: near-total access to one of the Valley's biggest and most enigmatic players.
Forbes, 18 October 1999 - Rich Karlgaard
A great book....The New New Thing is the best Silicon Valley book to come out yet.
The New York Times ,26 October 1999 - Michiko Kakutan
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.
Salon , 22 October 1999 - Mark Gimein
Like all Lewis' writing, The New New Thing is funny. It is funny in a wry, carefully observed way -- "Gibagibagibagiba," babbles a baby unfortunately brought to a gathering of investment bankers. It is funny also in a slashing, profane way: "Clark's friends who did not know Ed McCracken," writes Lewis of Clark's early nemesis, "came to believe the man's name was Fucking Ed McCracken." 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.
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 companies--Silicon Graphics, Netscape (now part of America Online) and Healtheon--each 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 Cahners Business Information.
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 companies--a story yet to be told. Highly recommended for all public libraries.--Dale Farris, Groves, TX Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.
Booknews
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 . Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
Newsweek
Just reading about this dynamo is exhausting — and inspiring.
The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani
[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.
Wall Street Journal - Mood
[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.
Wired
Michael Lewis takes readers inside the now-familiar world of Silicon Valley excess, the frantic deal making, the absurdly hyped expectations, the phenomenal wealth. But the 39-year old best-selling author of Liar's Poker and The Money Culture brings something genuinely exotic to the mix: near-total access to one of the Valley's biggest and most enigmatic players.
Forbes - Rich Karlgaard
[A] great book....The New New Thing is the best Silicon Valley book to come out yet.
Time - Arnold Quittner
[A] superb book....[Lewis] makes Silicon Valley as thrilling and intelligible as he made Wall Street in his best-selling Liar's Poker.
Talk Magazine - Po Bronson
Lewis Pulls it off. He convinces the reader by using the same technique that Jim Clark employed to sell his visionary enterprises: He asserts his ideas boldly, and pretty soon people start to believe them.
New York - Walter Kirn
It's an adventure story, full of peril, full of miscalculations and reversals, both at sea and on the stock exchange, but one that stops short of catastrophe. Which makes it all the more suspenseful, finally.
Business 2.0
Michael Lewis's latest, The New New Thing is at once a rollicking, rip-roaring tale of an industry gone wild, and a pull-no-punches portrait of one of high tech's most willful, fascinating, and colorful characters, Jim Clark...While Lewis cuts deep, he never cuts off more than ge can handle. It's simply the best book about high tech to come along since Michael Hiltzik's Dealers of Lightning.
Fortune - Andrew Ferguson
Lewis is a gifted storyteller...[he] makes his case through a series of beautifully rendered set-pieces....While many writers will try to bring this fantasyland to life, few will do so as vividly as Michael Lewis.
Slate - Joe Nocera
Michael Lewis' The New New Thing is the best book ever written about Silicon Valley. There. I've said it. Said it to you (wondering, to be sure, whether you agree--do you?); said it to the readers of Slate; but most of all, I've said it to myself. Michael Lewis' The New New Thing is the best book ever written about Silicon Valley. There. I've said it again.
Los Angeles Times Book Review - Alex Soojung Kim-Pang
Lewis brilliantly describes Clark's intensity and passion, his genius for technology and leadership and his impatience with convention. He also faithfully chronicles Clark's ruthlessness, willingness to exact revenge on opponents and ability to casually upset people's lives. The fact that these last qualities are described in almost complimentary terms reflects a Silicon Valley sensibility that they're laudable.
Business Week - Robert D. Hof
[Lewis's] incisive and entertaining volume largely succeeds in getting past the glitter of money to identify the real key to the Valley's vibrancy: new ideas....Lewis provides a look that is penetrating as anything written so far.
Kirkus Reviews
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. Michael Lewis, the petulant sprite whose Liar's Poker (1989) hilariously exposed the venalities of Wall Street investment bankers, vies for Tom Wolfe's ice cream suit with an effortlessly glib account of how the last decade turned Jim Clark, a middle-aged, chronically depressed Texas-born physicist whose futuristic concepts earned him little more than ridicule, into a Promethean, globe-trotting billionaire vainly searching for the next new thing that might make him happy. Like Ken Kesey in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Clark is, for Lewis, a romantic American outlaw, as well as a trickster who avenges himself on starched-shirt capitalists by creating wildly risky, money-losing hi-tech businesses that may never become profitable—Silicon Graphics, Netscape, Healtheon—but that nevertheless make billions for Clark when they go public. What brings in the bucks is Clark's no-nonsense appeal to the brilliant engineers who do the real work, his insufferable egotism, and his pie-in-the-sky imagination, which is not always as prescient as he would like. (When Clark's concept of a $1 million computerized yacht that can sail itself around the world without human hands doesn't survive the transition to working prototype, it isn't clear whether the yacht's engine died in the middle of the Atlantic because the computer thought the boat was in the African Sahara, or simply because of a faulty sensor.) Lewis also notes in passing the famous Microsoft antitrust suit, which Clark originated when he leaked to theUS Justice Department a Microsoft executive's threat to put Netscape out of business if the company refused to let Microsoft in as a partner. The result? Clark got even richer when Netscape merged with America Online, and invited Microsoft to be a partner in his next, new new thing. Funny, feverishly romantic business reporting in which the American lust for wealth becomes a Bryonic quest for the next dream that will change the world. (Author tour)
See also: Jackie Style or Leadership
The Complexity Crisis
Author: John Mariotti
Many companies today are in crisis. In the quest to grow their business in flat or declining markets, they have created dozens of new products and services while increasing their customer, vendor, and marketplace relationships. But even as top-line revenues go up, this rising tide of complexity is drowning bottom-line profits.
The Complexity Crisis shows you how to streamline your business for greatest efficiency, effectiveness, and profitability. You'll learn how to:
- Target complexity in your organization and reduce or eliminate it
- Build a simple, effective corporate structure
- Add value to your business by avoiding complexity traps
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