Michael Lewis: The New New Thing

Coronet

$24.95

Review: Mark Cubey*

How's this for a career path?

Dirt-poor beginnings in the tiny town of Plainview, Texas. Expulsion from high school at age 15. A Navy sign-up. Discovery of an aptitude for mathematics; night classes; a master's degree in physics and a PhD in computer science.

A job as professor at Stanford University in California at the end of the 70s, among the best computer-science students in the world.

Then the real fun starts. Design a revolutionary computer chip, crash your motorbike and during convalescence get the idea for a telecomputer. Grab some graduate students and start a company to make it.

This is the first of a series of great ideas that will make Jim Clark one of the richest men in the world.

Clark is an entrepreneurial, engineering, machine-loving enigma and start-up trifecta king, the only man to start three billion-dollar companies. His ceaseless quest for new new things - concepts that force huge paradigm shifts on existing industries and change the face of traditional business - powers through the heart of this enthralling and hugely revealing study of the emerging new economy in the late 20th century.

What took place at that time in Silicon Valley, California, was "the greatest legal creation of wealth in the history of the planet," comparable to 1860s London or Wall St in the 80s (an era also superbly documented by Michael Lewis in Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street, a saga of the NYC money game).

It's a story of hardware, software and wetware (people) - and of the high-stakes gambling mentality that allows mad money to be made in an economy driven by the internet and its worldwide web (the interlinked, chaotic and fast-growing network of more than a billion pages that is radically and permanently changing the nature of human endeavour).

Clark became wealthy by thinking up ideas for profitable companies and turning these into reality.

His story runs through Silicon Graphics Inc (maker of the 3D imaging workstations that power The Lord of the Rings film), Netscape (the internet browser company that rewrote the rules on venture capital and put control in the hands of the creatives who generate the ideas that make wealth), and Healtheon (designed to shred the layers of red tape adding billions in costs to the trillion-dollar US health-care industry).

Sailing an interlocking thread through the story is Clark's yacht Hyperion, the world's largest single-mast vessel that's powered by 25 SGI computers. It's his passionate folly, and speaks volumes about an ideas guy who realised that to make a fortune people just had to devise new things for the computer to do.

As Lewis says, "He had ceased to be a businessman, and become a conceptual artist."

Along the way, The New New Thing delves into the role of venture capitalists, why Microsoft will always seek to dominate any industry which threatens its monopolistic dominance of the US economy, and why it's a good thing when sailing not to leave everything to computers and lines of code.

In an era where millionaires don't matter any more (there are now so many of them in the US that the magazine Millionaire has changed its title to Opulence), and the old rules don't apply, this fast and frequently funny read is illuminating.

No, the rich are not like us. But joining them has never seemed so easy - or so speedy.

* Mark Cubey edits (and has equity in) the integrated media publication LOOP.