Other than that, Plainview seemed to have settled on an old idea of itself. It was staying pat, declining the dealer’s offer of another card. It had become one of those places defined by what they do not have rather than what they have, and by who has left, rather than who has stayed. The man whose departure defined the town with the most dreadful clarity was Jim Clark.
On that bright winter day I followed the directions Clark’s mother, Hazel McClure, had given me to her brick house, slightly bigger than the houses on either side of it. Waiting inside were Clark’s younger sister, Sue, and her husband, Roger. I had come to ask them some questions, but it turned out that Hazel had a question for me. “Do you know when Jim will come and visit next?” she asked, after we’d settled into our chairs.
On the rare occasions Clark visits Plainview, Texas, he lands at the airfield on the outskirts of town, has lunch with his mother, and then flies off to someplace else as quickly as he can. He seldom drives into the town and never visits home. He’s never seen the house his mother bought with the stock options he gave her in Silicon Graphics. The few stops he’s made have all been unscheduled. The flight path from Palm Beach to San Jose just happens to pass directly over Plainview, Texas, and every so often Clark drops out of the sky. Almost always he takes his mother by surprise. For instance, Hazel learned of Clark’s most recent visit, a year earlier, from her answering machine. She found a message on it from Jim saying he was right over her head, in descent, and intended to remain in Plainview just long enough to refuel. If she was around, he said, they could have lunch out at the airfield. “I just turned around and ran out the door to the airport,” recalls Hazel. Half the town followed her. The appearance of Clark’s jet in the Plainview sky was a public event. All of Plainview’s residents knew the plane by sight, and a hundred or so of them rushed out to the airfield, just to watch it land. “They just know that anything the size of Jim’s plane just got to be Jim,” said Roger, Clark’s brother-in-law, “because there is nothing else like that…. And, truth is, whenever he comes, Jim kind of buzzes the town.”
Hazel now said that most of what she knew about her son’s illustrious career she knew from having read it in magazines. She has difficulty squaring the boy she raised with the man she read about. She has no advanced theory why Clark became who he became. All she has is a few memories that might, or might not, offer clues to a person on a search for a character. She remembers him as a four-year-old, when she first suspected he might be smarter than the average little boy. He’d recite back entire nursery rhymes from memory, and boast, “Anything you tell me I can remember as long as I pay attention.” A bit later, when he was twelve, she recalls him accidentally shooting a hole through every toe on his left foot with a .22-caliber rifle. He lay in bed with his foot in a cast and built more model airplanes than she’d ever seen anyone build. She also remembers finding, later that year, just before Christmas, a sack of light bulbs tucked away in a closet. Hazel couldn’t afford Christmas lights. Yet here were hundreds of bulbs in a sack, waiting to be strung. It turned out that Jim had stolen them off other people’s houses.
The telephone rang. Clark’s sister, Sue, rose to answer it. In a clipped tone of poorly suppressed irritation she said, “Sorry, we’re not investing right now.” Pause. Then, more tensely, “I said we’re not investing.” She hung up. Returning, she explained that the shares in Netscape that Clark had given them had made them rich. “And you have to understand,” she said, “that when this happened, we were poor. I was ready to cook the cat.” I assumed this was a joke, and laughed. I assumed wrong. She had, in fact, been ready to cook the cat. The Netscape IPO had saved at least one life.
The deprivation Sue recalled occurred only four years ago. Now, all of Plainview thought of her and her family as these walking sacks of cash. People treated them differently. They asked for loans. They asked for stock tips. They asked what kind of company Jim might start next. They asked if they could invest in it. There was now a Clark-sized moat, filled with money, that separated his family from the rest of Plainview.
Hazel resumed the mining of her memory—and she had a lot of material to mine. The most chilling of it concerned Clark’s father, who apparently drank all day and beat Hazel up all night. Hazel put up with the routine for years; it became, in a way, normal. She hoped only that Charles—Clark’s father—would hit her someplace where people at work couldn’t see the bruises. Charles became more and more brutal, however, and Hazel divorced him when Jim was fourteen. Charles moved out onto the streets of Plainview. From there he terrorized his family with an ingenuity he showed in no other aspect of his life.
One episode still stood out brightly in Hazel’s mind. She glanced out the window of her office one day and spotted Charles standing in front of her car. He’d raised the hood and was tinkering with the engine. She ran down and hollered; Charles ran off. After that she parked in front of a car repair shop and asked the owner to keep an eye on it for her. One evening after work she found a man from the auto shop waiting for her. He told her he’d just seen a man, resembling her ex-husband, working on her transmission. Hazel opened the transmission and discovered steel shavings. The man from the auto shop helped her clean them out. Thinking they’d fixed the problem Hazel set out with her baby daughter (Sue) to visit friends in Amarillo. On the road the car broke down. Whoever had put the steel shavings in the engine had also put sand in the oil. Fixing the engine cost Hazel two months’ pay.
That night she told her son what had happened. Clark had just turned sixteen. “Jim got up and left the house,” said Hazel, “and went to find his father. When he came back he was crying.”
“I never found out what happened,” said Sue, who was clearly feeling left out.
“I never knew what happened,” said Hazel.
“But I tell you what,” said Sue. “After that my father never bothered my mother again.”
It turned out that Hazel also remembered the tuba—how could she forget it? The tarnished brass instrument propped in the corner of Clark’s guest bedroom had struck me as doubly odd, and I now said as much. It was the only artifact of his past that he thought worthy of display; it was also, for someone as willful and individualistic as Clark, a poor choice of instrument. The job of the tuba player is to blend with the orchestra. No one who wanted to stand out from the crowd would choose it for himself.
The tuba had come as a surprise to Hazel. “One day Jim came home from school with it,” she said, “And he could play a little. He used to go into the bathroom where he could hear himself better and sit on the commode—with the seat down, you know—and practice. I never knew where he got the tuba from. I guess the school gave it to him. I could never have afforded to buy any instrument.” Hazel supported a family of four on the $225 a month she took home from the hospital, where she worked as a doctor’s assistant. After she had paid the bills, she had $5 a month to spend on groceries. Clark was obviously well aware of their situation from a very young age. He had chosen to play the tuba because the tuba was the one instrument supplied to the pupil by the school, free of charge. Hazel never knew that, but it was true. Clark’s old band director, O. T. Ryan, said as much. At the Plainview middle school the students who wished to play flutes, clarinets, trumpets, and trombones were required to buy their own instruments. The tuba players alone received a loaner from the school.
Not long after he’d come home in tears, from what turned out to be his final meeting with his father, Clark quit playing his tuba. Soon after that he was expelled from school, and left town. Once he’d left, he became a stranger to his family. He’d turn up every now and again, and the family now recalled something about each visit. One time not long after he’d left, for instance, he came home talking about nothing but computers. “No one in Plainview had seen a computer, except in the movies,” said Hazel. Another time he came home with financial ambition. “When Jim came home from the Navy,” Hazel recalled, “he told his uncle that someday he was going to make fifty thousand
dollars a year.”
Sue hooted and clapped, “He done a bit better than that!”
Hazel continued, “I remember him telling me when he came back from the Navy, ‘Mama, I’m going to show Plainview.’”
Epilogue
The sun shone brightly on the clear untroubled sea. When Allan Prior maneuvered Hyperion into the narrow channel leading to the shallow harbor on the south coast of Antigua, he probably knew that he would be fired. Not long after the boat reached the dock, Clark dismissed Allan as his captain. Clark had no one reason for replacing him. Allan just wasn’t well suited to managing the crew of a computerized sailboat. By the time, six months later, that Hyperion sailed beneath the Golden Gate Bridge and into the San Francisco Bay, Jaime, too, would be gone. Hyperion’s captain and half of its crew would be new.
But for that one, final moment Allan Prior was still Jim Clark’s captain. He guided Hyperion skillfully toward the shore, without so much as a glance at the computer screen beneath the wheel. The computer offered up all sorts of useful information: the depth of the sea, the speed of the ship, the subtle shifts in the wind’s strength and direction. Allan snorted and said, “I never look at the computer—I don’t trust it,” then returned to the business of guiding the boat toward the shore. Slowly, he turned into the harbor; and when he did, Simon, standing on the bow, gave a whoop. Behind a stand of dismasted sailboats was the boat Simon was working on when Clark stole him away to learn all about computers: Juliet. By then the crew knew that Juliet was the reason Hyperion existed—that after he had boarded Juliet in the San Francisco Bay, Clark had decided he wanted one like it, only bigger and smarter. Juliet had led to Hyperion and Hyperion had led to Netscape’s IPO and Netscape’s IPO had triggered the Internet boom. Of course, the boom probably would have happened without Juliet, or for that matter, without Netscape. But I doubt it would have happened quite the same way. Clark’s first sighting of Juliet was one of those small perturbations that radically altered the world we inhabit.
Now Juliet felt small and insignificant. The crew of Hyperion waved to her crew in the same spirit that the winner of a beauty pageant hugs the runner-up. Clark waved, too. Once he had the biggest mast and the finest boat, he didn’t care to rub it in. He was a good winner; poor losers often are. The joy of winning was only slightly diminished by the sighting of Larry Ellison’s much bigger power boat (this was a curiously small world). We docked right beside it, and then left quickly for Clark’s plane.
But before we did I went down to Clark’s cabin. I wanted to hear whatever he’d concluded about the crossing—and whether he thought there was a business in the boat’s software. I found him hovering over an architectural drawing. It was neatly spread out on his desk, beside his computer. It looked very much like a drawing of a boat, I said, coming up behind him. It is a boat, he said. He’d asked the man who had designed Hyperion to draw the lines for a sailboat half again as big as Hyperion, or a bit longer than 250 feet. He’d already spoken to Wolter Huisman about it, and Wolter was willing to build it, even if it meant building a new building that could hold it. The drawing was what Clark thought of as his “new boat.”
I suppose he must have seen me flinch, because pretty quickly he was explaining why he needed to be thinking about building another boat. He’d spent the last five years, and upended the U.S. economy, to get his hands on the one we’d just sailed across the Atlantic Ocean. “Hyperion is a beautiful boat,” he said, and I knew when he said it what the next word would be. “But…” His finger traced the lines of his new boat, which was still no more than a figment of his imagination. Pure possibility. A smile lengthened across his face. Hyperion was nice, but this…this was the perfect boat.
Acknowledgments
Andy Kessler and Fred Kittler introduced me to the Valley, and helped make this book what it is. Jim and Nancy Rutter Clark put up with a writer in ways that no one should have to. Clark has made a career of taking risks others avoid. He took another when he let me talk my way into his life, and I’ll always be grateful for that. I’d also like to thank Pham Nguyen for checking my facts and Chris Wiman for checking my sentiment. Eric Ver Ploeg read the manuscript for technical illiteracy; Paul Romer read it for economic illiteracy; Patricia Chui read it for just plain old-fashioned illiteracy. Any mistakes they failed to detect are obviously their fault; indeed they can be blamed handily for anything the reader might disapprove of. A special thanks to my editor Starling Lawrence, who navigates rough drafts, as he navigates life, with great grace. It’s good to be back on board.
More Praise for
The New New Thing
A New York Times Notable Book
Named One of the Best Books of the Year by Businessweek, Christian Science Monitor, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and Industry Standard
“A splendid, entirely satisfying book. . . . Resolutely skeptical but not at all cynical, brimming with fabulous scenes as well as sharp analysis. . . . The New New Thing may be to Silicon Valley what Pepys’s diary was to 1660’s London or Twain’s Roughing It to the American West of the last century.”
—New York Times Book Review
“Lewis . . . is America’s poet laureate of capital. No one writes more fluently about the art of making money.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Besides the echoes of Fitzgerald, there’s a lot of Tom Wolfe in Lewis’s book—a vintage New Journalism verbal snazziness and a Wolfe-ish profusion of exclamation marks.”
—New York
“Lewis does a sprightly job of conjuring up the heady world of Silicon Valley and its reigning ethos of innovation.”
—New York Times
“Lewis is a gifted storyteller. . . . While many writers will try to bring this fantasyland to life, few will do it as vividly as Michael Lewis.”
—Fortune
“Brilliant report from Silicon Valley. . . . Not even all Jim Clark’s money can buy him Michael Lewis’s talent.”
—The Atlantic
“Lewis has written a book to go on the shelf alongside Tracy Kidder’s 1980 classic about the computer business, The Soul of a New Machine.”
—Boston Globe
“More than anything else you could read right now, Michael Lewis’s book will help you understand how Silicon Valley has turned Wall Street—and the American economy—on its head.”
—Christian Science Monitor
“Michael Lewis’s The New New Thing is the best book ever written about Silicon Valley. . . . He has absolutely captured what Silicon Valley is like at this moment in history. . . . Very few people have Lewis’s ability to capture something deep with a few deftly written scenes.”
—Slate
“Lewis provides a look that is as penetrating as anything written so far.”
—Businessweek
“Like all Lewis’s writing, The New New Thing is funny. It is funny in a wry, carefully observed way. . . . It is funny also in a slashing, profane way. . . . Yet what makes The New New Thing an exceptional book is not how funny it is, but how closely it sticks to a mission of investigating the mythic properties of Clark’s singularly mercurial character.”
—Salon
“Lewis has the gift of making boardroom financial negotiations both thrilling and funny. . . . There are many acutely observed comic vignettes and anecdotes.”
—Times Literary Supplement
“Lewis manages to accomplish something rare in the oeuvre of high-tech tales: He makes it funny and unusual. This might be the first Internet book that will entertain people who know everything about the Net, as well as those who know nothing.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Lewis does a terrific job profiling Clark.”
—San Diego Union-Tribune
“Lewis . . . is unquestionably one of the most articulate business writers around. He’s a great storyteller.”
—Daily Deal
“[Clark’s] continuous quest for what Lewis calls ‘the new new thing’ makes
for an epic tale.”
—Baltimore City Paper
“In relating the story of Jim Clark, Lewis uses a sort of Tom Wolfe approach, enlivening his account of complicated financial deals and even more complicated engineering feats with snappy cameo portraits, exclamatory descriptions and lots of subjective judgments.”
—Indianapolis Star
“In engaging narrative that even non-computer-savvy readers will enjoy . . . [Lewis] gives us an entertaining and often biting behind-the-scenes look at the movers-and-shakers in California’s Silicon Valley.”
—New Orleans Times-Picayune
“Lewis is a hilarious and savvy eyewitness to the entity he calls ‘Clarkworld.’”
—Techweek
“It may seem odd for a Silicon Valley story to focus on shipbuilding, but Lewis is entertaining enough to pull it off. New New turns out to be a Thackerayan character study of Clark and his cronies, and that’s enough to carry the tale. Any conclusions one draws about Silicon Valley are icing on the cake.”
—Seattle Times
“Lewis’s book is a high-tech Moby-Dick in which Clark plays Ahab and the white whale has been replaced by programming glitches.”
—Time Out New York
“With The New New Thing, Michael Lewis becomes the first to hang it all on one man: Jim Clark. . . . Many in the Valley will be furious that their habitat has been winnowed down to a single individual. But Lewis pulls it off.”
—Talk
The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story Page 30