Forget geeks, nerds, and dweebs. Guys like Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, and now Jim Clark have inherited the mantle of the All-American Cowboy.
The icons of the Internet revolution are no longer socially inept, myopic men, but red-blooded daredevils, pushing the frontiers of the brave, new world of technology.
From the 19th century robber barons to the Wall Street kings of the '80s, Americans have had a continuing love affair with the image of the merchant-pirate. Each new era brings with it new sources of wealth, and new heroes to worship. The captains of the New Economy are now being recast in this rich tradition of capitalist adventurers.
Michael Lewis' new book, The New, New Thing (W. W. Norton, 1999), is just the latest contribution to this changing image of the geek billionaire.
At least Jim Clark, the hero of his book, has all the basic qualifications for the job: greed, vaulting ambition, and a complete absence of fear. Lewis records Clark's adventures as he rushes around founding one billion-dollar company after another, from Silicon Graphics to Netscape to Healtheon.
To Lewis, Clark is the epitome of the Internet entrepreneur, a restless searcher always on the lookout for the next new thing. And through Clark, he hopes to capture the underlying narrative that explains the miraculous phenomenon called Silicon Valley.
The book continually emphasizes Clark's role as a visionary in a relentless quest for theidea that will change the face of tomorrow. The image Lewis uses most frequently is that of Clark "running down some long, dark tunnel," usually with a horde of engineers and venture capitalists in tow. And that some of these tunnels turn out to be blind alleys, while others lead to riches, just adds to Clark's eccentric charm.
Clark himself doesn't seem to be particularly interested in the outcome of his wild expeditions. His job is to think of the future. Execution is a chore he leaves for lesser men.
Others often pay the price for Clark's mistakes. Silicon Graphics engineers were left in a lurch when Clark championed an interactive television project, then left to form Netscape without seeing it through. Interactive television proved to be a white elephant, and the failure marked the beginning of a financial decline for SGI. And then there's Healtheon: Clark seemed to lose interest in the company the moment he got everyone to jump on board.
But Lewis implies that this seemingly callous indifference is almost a corollary of genius. Besides, didn't Jim Clark single-handedly renegotiate the terms of power between engineers and their financiers?
Lewis can barely restrain himself from portraying Clark as the free-market Lenin leading the vanguard of revolutionary engineers intent on overthrowing their capitalist masters. In fact, Lewis attributes almost every significant aspect of the Internet economy to Jim Clark, from generous stock options to early IPOs. And yet the over-inflated rhetoric only serves to emphasize Clark's towering egotism. For example, a large part of the book is devoted to Clark's yacht Hyperion, the world's first fully computerized sailboat. The boat is supposed to be a symbol for Clark's insane yet relentless ambition to achieve the impossible.
In page after page, harassed programmers and befuddled sailors struggle to meet Clark's unreasonable demands, while they battle endless software bugs and bad weather. In fact, Lewis does such a great job of capturing the hapless misery of the crew that you just want the darn tub to sink -- with Clark aboard.
The biggest problem with Lewis' book is that the more he tries to elevate Clark, the less attractive Clark becomes. All the personality traits that seem so appealing to Lewis soon become annoying to the reader.
The real disappointment is that when Lewis is not focusing on Clark, the reader gets a glimpse of the book that might have been. From describing the stealing of talent to the bargaining with VCs, Lewis is at his best dealing with the actual mechanics of getting a Silicon Valley company together. He has an unerring eye for comic detail and revealing cameos, which bring to life the people who inhabit the strange world of Internet startups.
Lewis wanted to use Jim Clark to tell the tale of Silicon Valley, but sadly for him, the subject of his book gets in the way of the story. Perhaps the value of a book like The New, New Thing is that it reflects our fascination with money, and the people who possess ludicrous amounts of it.
