The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story (Silicon Valley)

The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story (Silicon Valley)
by Michael Lewis

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Book Summary Information

Author: Michael Lewis
Reader: Bruce Reizen
Edition: Audio Cassette
Format: Audiobook, Unabridged
Published: 1999-10-01
ISBN: 1567404464
Publisher: Brilliance Audio Unabridged
Accessories:

Sony WMFX479 Walkman

Book Reviews of The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story (Silicon Valley)

Book Review: Why Good Stories Are Better Than Bad Management Books
Summary: 5 Stars

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.

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All The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story (Silicon Valley) Customer Reviews

Summary of The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story (Silicon Valley)

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

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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