The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story (Silicon Valley) | 
 enlarge | Author: Michael Lewis
Creator: Bruce Reizen
Publisher: Brilliance Audio Unabridged
Category: Book
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Avg. Customer Rating:  215 reviews
Sales Rank: 1652980
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 Review
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 210 more reviews...
 Why Good Stories Are Better Than Bad Management Books July 2, 2008
This book could easily be transposed as an academic study in a scholarly journal or as a "how to" article in one of those business school reviews that cater to the deep anxieties of high-powered executives. The same material that Michael Lewis has collected could be used by an academic to formulate hypotheses, validate theories, and construct models of business behavior. In fact, a growing subset of management science deals with the phenomenon that Lewis describes in his narrative and that is known in the academic literature as serial entrepreneurship.
In this respect, one could very well transform the portrait of Jim Clark into a diagram of the five abilities that a serial entrepreneur needs to cultivate:
- the ability to repeatably recognize a market. Jim Clark is after markets worth billions of dollars, and strives to stay ahead of the curve by identifying business opportunities that Microsoft has not yet seized.
- the ability to repeatably create a product or service. Jim Clark started with a chip that allowed computer to do 3D graphics, then moved on to pioneering the browser business with Netscape, then his attention turned to the healthcare market and then again to personal finance, markets for which he offered innovative business models.
- the ability to repeatably motivate individuals/teams and build an entire organization to follow in his/her pursuit. People joined the bandwagon because Jim Clark offered them the promise to become incredibly rich, but also because his ventures were simply the place to be in the Silicon Valley.
- the ability to delegate and surround themselves with talent that complements their own. Jim Clark is compared to a conceptual artist who comes up with the idea and let the other do all the actual work.
- the ability to reinvent oneself. As the author notes, "other people grew old, he stayed new".
Or the article could list the lessons that one learns from creating more than three successful ventures:
- Don't Draw Business Plans. Jim Clark's notion of a business plan is to identify a trillion dollar-worth market, gather enough bright people and throw them at the problem so that something good will come out of it.
- Don't Fall In Love With The Product. It doesn't really matter what the company is trying to sell, so long as it is identified as an Internet company. When Clark assembled a team of engineers to "fix the US health care system", as the team leader acknowledges, "no one knew a fucking thing about health care".
- Stick To Your Guns. As an observer remarks, this is clearly a bad trait if you stick to your guns when you're clearly wrong, but Jim Clark and his team of bright engineers were "almost always right".
- Leave When the Party Starts. Jim Clark becomes disinterested as soon as his ventures take off the ground, and very soon moves on to the next challenge.
- It's OK to Fail. Jim Clark predicted that the future of information technology laid in interactive TV, then let others face disaster on the basis of his failed diagnosis. The same engineers who spent months designing an unmarketable device could then be drawn into his next venture.
- Never Look Back. "I don't give a shit about the past", says Clark.
- When to Stop. That is precisely the lesson that a serial entrepreneur like Jim Clark never learns.
But of course Michael Lewis' book has very little in common with a business review article. Readers who find management books profoundly boring and uninteresting can still be attracted to this story, which evokes at times Moby Dick or The Great Gatsby. Michael Lewis is to the dot-com era what F. Scott Fitzgerald was to the Jazz Age. As the internet boom has now receded into the past, this book will remain as a monument to the follies and hopes of the internet bubble era.
 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....
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