The New New Thing - Softcover

Lewis, Michael J.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140296468 ISBN 13: 9780140296464

Publisher: Penguin, 2015

Synopsis

The strange, unlikely story of Silicon Valley is told through the life of one of it's greatest achievers--Jim Clark, who founded Silicon Graphics and Netscape and may be on the verge of another trillion-dollar miracle company. By the author of Liar's Poker. Reprint.

About this title

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 computerised 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 start-ups 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-footmast, 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 humour 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 10 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,Amazon.com

Review

You cannot help trusting Lewis. Sometimes maniacally funny, sometimes mournful, this is a fascinating journey into the Wild West of American capitalism (Daily Telegraph)

Brilliantly entertaining and informative (Sunday Telegraph)

If you want to understand the phenomenon that was California's Silicon Valley in the 1990s, you won't find a better book that this ... hugely enjoyable (Charles Handy)

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 (New York Times)

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0140296468
• ISBN 13: 9780140296464
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 288