Inside Silicon Valley
In the 1980s, Liar's Poker captured the heart and soul of Wall Street as well as a spot on best-seller lists around the country.
Now the author, Michael Lewis, has taken on Silicon Valley in his latest book The New New Thing, The Early Show reports.
What is the new, new thing? Has Silicon Valley replaced Wall Street as the money machine of the 1990s?
What drove Jim Clark to create three separate billion-dollar companies? How does this one man embody the Internet boom? These are some of the questions that Lewis tries to answer in his latest book The New New Thing.
"I started to notice back in 1986 that Silicon Valley had come and had clearly stolen Wall Street's thunder. Wall Streeters were complaining the geeks out West were making all the money," he says.
"They felt robbed so many of the Wall Street guys started drifting West," says Lewis.
It also became clear that Silicon Valley was about more than just money; it was about a whole different way of life, he adds.
It illustrated a new set of phenomena. For example, whoever is doing it best sets the way of life, and that came with a whole new value system: The newer the money, the better, Lewis explains.
Capitalism was speeding up. New companies were being spawned faster and faster, and these new companies were eating away at the heart of old institutions in America, he adds.
"I moved to Silicon Valley to do research for the book. Six months into my reporting, I bumped into Jim Clark. I had been looking for a character that rhymed with his environment, and Jim Clark was it," says Lewis.
This is perhaps the only man who founded three separate billion-dollar companies. And his companies wreaked chaos in the world around them. Everything had a revolutionary quality to it, he notes.
"Clark had many Silicon Valley qualities, mainly impatience. He'd wake up wanting to do one thing and end up doing six others. He was really impatient but impatience was a virtue," he adds.
As a person, Clark had a complete distaste for the past even if the past included some of his great triumphs, Lewis notes.
"What defined him was his combination of extreme intelligence and animal impulses; he smelled opportunity. And he had a huge amount of testosterone," Lewis adds.
"I tried to think at what other times in history would Clark have been a success? And I decided this was it for him," says Lewis.
Even though, the book gives the impression Clark is so self-absorbed with his latest brainstorm of the minute, he absorbs all sorts of things, Lewis says; when he doesn't look like he is listening, he is listening very hard.
"Clark is an anarchist, a sort of bomb thrower. And his company Netscape made anarchy respectableÂ….I didn't think of him as a businessman, but more of an artist, always groping for something new," says Lewis.
There have always been people searcing for something new. Now it's just a lot faster, he notes.
"I knew he was regarded as a commercial genius, taking Netscape public before it had profits, selling an idea to the U.S. stock markets, etc. But that's the trigger point. That was not business genius," says Lewis.
Clark forced the issue because he wanted to buy a new boat. It's the desire for things that drove him to build what he did, Lewis adds.
"The boat was a great metaphor. Jim Clark specialized in foisting new technology on people," he says. (That's what he did with Netscape and that's what he did with the boat.)
"At the same time, you felt like you were inside a jewelry box aboard Clark's boat; it housed $30 million worth of precious art," he notes.
Clark's boat, Hyperion, was the largest single-mast vessel ever built at the time. It also has 25 computers onboard that sail it.
"The boat was terrifying because it was a prototype of a new type of life. Normally on a boat, you can see who's running the boat. This time you couldn't," Lewis explains.
"The sailors were completely dependent on the geeks who were programming machines. Clark's boat took the heart of sailing away from the sailors," Lewis says.
"The new, new thing is a notion that is poised to be taken seriously in the marketplace. It's an idea that is a tiny push away from general acceptance, and, when it gets that push, will change the world," says Lewis.
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So what's next for Clark after Silicon Graphics, Netscape, Healtheon? Lewis says Clark wants to take myCFO.com public next year. His goal is to be richer than Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, he adds.