The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story (Silicon Valley) | 
 enlarge | Author: Michael Lewis
Creator: Bruce Reizen
Publisher: Brilliance Audio Unabridged
Category: Book
List Price: $29.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  214 reviews
Sales Rank: 1494187
Format: Audiobook, Unabridged
Media: Audio Cassette
Edition: Unabridged
Number Of Items: 6
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.2 x 4.3 x 1.7
ISBN: 1567404464
Dewey Decimal Number: 338.7610053092
EAN: 9781567404463
ASIN: 1567404464
Publication Date: October 1, 1999
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Amazon.com
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
Product Description
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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 209 more reviews...
 What would you do if you researched a book and didn't find anything? October 18, 2007
11 out of 11 found this review helpful
I'm a big fan of Michael Lewis. He usually brings characters and situations to life and provides a perspective on a situation that introduces me to a new way of looking at things. That's not the case here.
I get the feeling when Michael Lewis got permission to follow Jim Clark around for several months to write about him he thought he'd hit the mother load of great book material. Here was a guy who had traipsed through the daunting world of technology with a seeming Midas touch. Heck, the man had started Silicon Graphics and Netscape.
As I read the book, however, something strange happened, I started wondering, "When did Michael Lewis realize he was following the most improbably boring man in the world?" Jim Clark should be fascinating; he starts huge companies and turns venture capitalists on their ears, he flies helicopters, rides motorcycles and builds ludicrously complex, large and expensive sailboats. Jim Clark is a man who is never satisfied and always striving for the "New, New Thing." Yet somehow, Jim Clark is also apparently stone cold dull.
In the course of the whole book, not one Jim Clark quote is interesting, entertaining, or insightful. It doesn't seem like Clark won't open up to Lewis, it's more like he's a one-dimensional guy. Lewis writes the book in a way that indicates that he's an author that knows he's got nothing but has invested far too much time in research to try to turn back. The book becomes focused on the attempt to get Clark's newest technology-laden boat ready for an Atlantic crossing; hardly what I'm guessing Lewis set out to write.
The crossing itself turns out to be a non-event and unfortunately the book does to. Don't despair though, read Moneyball or Liar's Poker or Blindside and you'll find that Michael Lewis can, and usually does, deliver the goods in spades.
 A distorted view of Silicon Valley technology startups October 1, 2007
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
"The New New Thing" tells two stories. The first is the story of Jim Clark, a technical entrepreneur who founded three companies -- Silicon Graphics, Netscape, and Healtheon -- that achieved phenomenal heights during the Internet boom of the 1990's. Clark is, to say the least, an interesting character; at least two of Clark's business associates are quoted in the book calling him a "maniac". Clark is driven almost entirely by an unending greed, so for me at least, he quickly became an unsympathetic character around which to hang an entire book. Another criticism I have is that far too many pages of the book are spent on Clark's quest to build and debug Hyperion, the world's largest computer-controlled sailboat. These sections were a distraction from the rest of the narrative. (By the way, it's pretty clear that although they may have been smart, the people writing the software for Hyperion -- including Clark himself -- were all pretty lousy software engineers.)
The second story is that of Silicon Valley, and it doesn't come off looking much better than Clark. Lewis seems to have been granted incredible access to Clark's life, which included the ability to interview and attend meetings with the Valley's top movers and shakers -- the engineers, senior managers, and venture capitalists who fund them. As a computer scientist who has lived and worked in the Valley since 1991, I found this material to be enlightening, and certainly the strongest part of the book. Perhaps most fascinating is the way the decisions of the venture capital (VC) firms and investment banks are based so much on perception rather than sound reasoning. For example, one minute the VCs are writing off their Healtheon investments as a total loss, but the next minute -- when Clark offers to invest $40M of his own money in the failing venture -- they all clamor to invest more in it. Sadly, during the "irrational exuberance" of the late 1990's, this was actually a winning strategy.
One danger in writing a book about the new new thing -- at the height of the Internet bubble no less -- is that it can quickly become old. And this book has not aged well. Yes, Jim Clark was the first person in Silicon Valley to have founded three companies with a market capitalization exceeding $1 billion, and yes, he made himself and many others around him obscenely rich. But most of the companies he started have not been lasting successes: as of this writing in 2007, Silicon Graphics is dying, having lost tens to hundreds of millions of dollars in each of the last four fiscal years; Netscape was acquired by AOL, whose subsequent acquisition by Time Warner nearly killed the latter company; Healtheon merged with WebMD, whose business model is substantially less ambitious than Clark's original concept for the company; and myCFO, the newest new enterprise mentioned at the end of the book, morphed into a company that offered illegal tax shelters to wealthy clients, came under investigation by the IRS, and was eventually sold for only one third of the original money poured into it. Toward the end of the book, Lewis also wryly mocks John Doerr's VC firm Kleiner Perkins for paying $25M for a 33% stake in Google, which he writes "consisted of a pair of Stanford graduate students who had a piece of software that might or might not make it easier to search the Internet." Poor Kleiner Perkins. Their Google investment was obviously a terrible mistake.
Michael Lewis is a great writer, but I enjoyed two of his other books far more: Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street and Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game.
All in all, "The New New Thing" does a good job of exposing the underbelly of Silicon Valley capitalism. But its focus on Clark and companies born out of the Internet bubble gives a distorted picture of the challenges in founding and running a technical startup. For a more accurate depiction, I recommend Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure.
Classic Michael Lewis on Silicon Valley October 18, 2006
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
If you have read any of Michael Lewis's other books and found them enjoyable (either writing style or topic), you will find this a good read, worthy of your time. You will learn a little about the atmosphere of Silicon Valley during the height of the bubble / late 90s as well as about a very unique figure who helped (over exagerated, per Economist) start it all.
How Silicon Valley Was Built and the Next Gen Entrepreneur! July 30, 2006
1 out of 6 found this review helpful
A must read for any entrepreneur or intrapreneur(someone within a company who must innovate). Lewis opens with stories about Jim Clark -- reknown Silicon Valley entrepreneur and innovator and his boat that 'built Netscape"...the book talks about Netscape which Lewis says launched the Information age (it may or may not have but it certainly ushered in the IPO era and online businesses. Interesting what has since happened to Silicon Graphics and Healtheon that was supposed to turn the health care industry 'on it's head'. The inside cover talks about --- what else-- Paradigm shift in American culture-- from conventional business models (the old economy) to the new economy. Yet in retrospect we know that a mix of the best of both is really probably the way to go. The titles of the chapter are more clever than the chapters themselves. I personally would have liked to see more about different innovators not just Clarke but then I didn't write the book. The chapter titles include "Pasts in a Box" Disorganization Man, Home of the Future God Mode -- How Chickents Become Pork, Cheese Sandwiches for Breakfast, Chasing Ghosts, The Turning Point and The New New Thing....
 A Fascinating Insight into Silicon Valley January 27, 2006
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
The July 1999 issue of Forbes magazine makes the astonishing observation that there are now 465 people who have a billion or more dollars. Incredibly, as this book notes, there are an estimated 180,000 Americans who are deca-millionaires (over ten million dollars in assets). An inventor or entrepreneur, upon reading these statistics, may note that not only has a great amount of wealth been created, but that it is not in the hands of just a handful of people.
This book tells how one man, Jim Clark, starting out as a thirty-eight year old unsuccessful college professor and whose second wife just left him, went on to create, in succession, three billion-dollar corporations. These creations were Silicon Graphics, Netscape, and Healtheon. In the process of achieving this hat trick, he also reinvented the social order. The "Organization Man" and conformity have been replaced by brilliant engineers and nonconformity. Bitter at how little the actual creators of Silicon Graphics received and how much the venture capitalists profited, Jim Clark made sure in his next two ventures that, by such means as stock options, his creative people prospered very well indeed.
One of Clark's great strengths has been to rapidly change directions. As the book notes, "A stunning ignorance of mass tastes was a common problem in high technology." For example, Honeywell, in the 1960's, created The Kitchen Computer and assumed housewives would welcome the monster size computer in their kitchens and would know how to program it. "Neiman Marcus failed to sell a single unit." When Marc Andreesen mentioned 25 million people were then using the Internet, Jim Clark saw the potential of Marc's Mosaic code and formed Mosaic Communications (which became Netscape). This time around, Clark cut a deal with venture capitalists that was unprecedented. When the initial public stock offering was made, "It was one of the most successful share offerings in the history of U.S. stock markets and possibly the most famous." In the past, shares were not sold to the investing public until four consecutive quarters were profitable. Now it was the future potential, the rapid growth, that lured investors. Also, the young engineers profited. Inventor Marc Andreesen, at twenty-four, was now worth eighty million dollars! Stock options were now the name of the game for engineers.
The author compares the changes in the Silicon Valley value system to the changes that have taken place in Hollywood's value system. He notes "The stars seized power and once they'd seized power they raised their price and demanded the right to direct their own picture." He compares Jim Clark to Marlon Brando.
A fascinating insight into Silicon Valley is that almost half of the companies there have been founded by Indian entrepreneurs. The book tells how Nehru set up an educational system that found the very best young minds among 900 million people and brought them to the Indian Institute of Technology. They all spoke English and America offered the highest pay and the most opportunity.
Another informative bit in the book is the origin of the word "debug." It turns out that back in the 1960's a computer problem was found to be literally due to a large moth trapped inside. The word become the standard term for removing errors from programs.
This book is so up to date you may feel you are reading your daily newspaper. How Microsoft attempted to achieve complete domination over the world's 500 million computers is explained. Netscape informed the U.S. Department of Justice of Microsoft's threats. Together with information furnished by other firms, this led to the Justice Department's antitrust action.
The author observes that, generally speaking, stock market investors now fall into two categories: Those who follow the Graham and Dodd's system of careful analysis and those who are "kamikaze investors." It will be interesting to see which of these two opposing financial philosophies has the last laugh.
Considerable book space is devoted to Jim Clark's obsession with building his completely computer controlled world's largest sailboat. A sad observation made by sailors is that when approaching an island a land bird, such as a hawk, may appear, but it may be too far out and it will perish in the sea. The author notes how this is "The first bird, like a man ahead of his time, a tragic figure." It is a reminder that all inventors and entrepreneurs are not Jim Clarks.
A highly readable book and, if you delight it) the thought that bankers and venture capitalists should not rule the business world; you will enjoy Jim Clark's triumphs.
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