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The following review is from Amazon.com.
Michael Lewis's first book, the 1989 international bestseller "Liar's Poker," offered a sharp insider's view of the '80s Wall Street scene. There's more to separate that environment from the Silicon Valley that Lewis explores in "The New New Thing" than a continent's distance and decade's time. The success story of Jim Clark (the founder of Silicon Graphics, Netscape, and Healtheon), Lewis discovered, is representative of an entirely different sort of economy. Telling Clark's story, though, proved to be a unique challenge, as Lewis explained to Amazon.com's Ron Hogan in a September 1999 telephone conversation.
The New New Thing by Michael Lewis
The New Breed of Tycoon
Michael Lewis: There had been lots of different books about the Valley; they all read like collections of magazine pieces or technical manuals. People were reluctant to settle on a single character--the place is so diffuse that there's this kind of fear of not being inclusive, if you're going to write, say, "The Silicon Valley Story."
It took about a year for me to find Clark and discover that it was this type of person who really was important about the place, who was distinctive about the place, who was sufficiently interesting to carry a book. It was clear that, to do it right, I essentially had to move into his life, to be at his side, spending the night in his house and essentially hitching rides on his plane to Amsterdam. His m.o. was to get up in the morning with Plan A, which was just Plan A. And signals would start coming in--via cell phone, e-mail, his brain--about a better plan than Plan A, so he'd be off and running on Plans B, C, D, and E. This usually involved some fast machine; you were forever hopping on his airplane or in his sports cars, going places he wasn't, just a few minutes earlier, even thinking about going.
Amazon.com: As you say in the book, if you're traveling with Jim Clark, forget about making advance reservations.
Lewis: The book cost a fortune to report, for that reason. Here we are in Amsterdam all of a sudden and we're going to the Amstel Hotel, and he didn't have time to make reservations. So, guess what? The only vacancy they have is the suite for $600 a night.
Amazon.com: Being a journalist herself, how sympathetic was your wife [Tabitha Soren] to all this?
Lewis: Tabitha's more understanding than most people would be, in some ways. On the other hand, I can't fool her. She knew that what I was doing was not just ordinary journalism, that it was an extreme pain in the neck, not just for me but for her. She's slow to be irritated with the demands of this sort of project, but once she's irritated, she can be really irritated, because she knows this is not a normal thing.
Several times, I threw her into the mix. We went down and saw Clark and spent four or five days in Florida with him. And she got to know Jim and Nancy--Nancy is Jim's wife--and it was really useful to have another set of eyes on the whole scene. It's hard to have perspective on what you're going through and what you're seeing, so she helped me maintain that perspective. I'd have to come home and say, "This isn't normal, is it?" And she'd look at me and say, "Are you crazy? This is nuts!"
Amazon.com: One particular challenge in writing about Clark is that he's not a guy who's particularly interested in looking back at his past.
Lewis: At first, it was a big problem for me, because when you have a character like this, what you think you want is someone who can tell us stories, a great collection of yarns that you can replay. But he didn't have any interest in any of that. He was not a character in his own imagination in this way; he had no interest in telling his own story.
But the fact that he's not interested in any of this is actually part of the story. It's why he's so focused on the future, and maybe why he's so good at what he does--because he doesn't waste his time with the past. In Silicon Valley, the past has no value. The past is an encumbrance; what matters is the future. Americans are famous for going on about the future, but within America, Silicon Valley is the place where that tendency is at its most extreme. And within this place, it's people like Clark who got this feeling that what happened to them is irrelevant; what matters is what's going to happen next, because that's where all the money is--in what's going to happen next. And it's not because he's in Silicon Valley that he's this way; he was actually this way, anyway. He gravitated to the place where that attitude toward the world is considered normal. And he's very comfortable there, as a result.
Amazon.com: Yet you point out that, for a man seemingly unconcerned with his past accomplishments, much of his drive in founding Netscape seemed aimed at getting revenge against the people he thought screwed him over at Silicon Graphics.
Lewis: It's almost as though his disinterest in the past trumps his ego when you're talking to him about what he's accomplished. Typically, people [as powerful as Clark] build monuments to themselves, but he doesn't have any use for monuments. His ego finds other outlets, and the outlet it finds is essentially imposing his will on the present. Winning, right now. It's the new breed of tycoon, the power seeker.
Amazon.com: So powerful that all he has to do is come up with the basic idea for Healtheon to attract millions from investors. I love your phrasing: "He had ceased to be a businessman and become a conceptual artist."
Lewis: Think of it this way: I was interested in the way his character rhymes with his environment. All of these companies, when they present themselves to the world, have no past--unlike companies that before 1994 were sold to the public--in that they have no track record. They have no revenues. They certainly have no profits. So they can't stand up and say, "Invest in us, because look what we've done." Instead they say, "Invest in us, because guess what we might do."
It's very different from the way the capital markets have historically worked. Historically, they say, "Here are our past profits. Here is a project of our immediate future profits, which make an awful lot of sense, because they look a lot like our past profits, and the value of our company should therefore be some multiple of that." Instead, these companies are saying, "The past doesn't matter. What matters is the future. And we see the future with us in this position. Buy that."
And guess what? American capital markets have bought it. And God knows how long it lasts, but I do think that one day people will look back on this period and say, "Wasn't that a little miracle, what this culture spawned for this period of time? How did it ever happen?" And I think that the answer to that is, again, buried in the psyches of people like Clark.
Amazon.com: People who can take an industry such as health care, draw a diamond around it, and point at the center and say, "That's where our company is going to be."
Lewis: It's unbelievable! I mean, you watch him do it. I did my best to convey the energy of this, but when you're watching him do it, when you're with him, the ambition is breathtaking. There's no obstacle, no part of his mind that says, "No, that's implausible" or "I can't do that." In his imagination, he can do whatever he wants.
The Internet was designed to network people. This whole health-care system desperately needs to be networked. If you network it, you get rid of, say, between $250 billion and $500 billion in waste. If you keep 20 percent of that as profit, you've got the biggest company in America. Bingo! That he's able to say this, and be plausible, is to me the most extraordinary thing. If you go to conferences now--conventions filled with doctors or healthcare people--this will be Topic A. He has managed to put the whole health-care industry in turmoil. Obviously, at this point, it's not just him; there are all these other companies that have started up subsequently. It's a free-for-all. But how did the free-for-all start? It started with that diamond. It just blows your mind when you think about it.
Amazon.com: And, after all that, when he's made himself into a billionaire, what he says to you is, "Now I want to have more money than Larry Ellison."
Lewis: And I bet he does actually get more money than Larry Ellison. So, then you're going to be sitting at that table with him and he's going to have, say, $15 billion, and you'll tell him, "Great, you've got your $15 billion; now you can take it easy." And he'll say, "You know, it really annoys me that Bill Gates, that little worm, has $150 billion and I have only 15."
Featured in this review:
The New New Thing,
by Michael Lewis
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