The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story

Michael Lewis “The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story, W.W.Norton, 2000, 268 pp. 

The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story is a book by one of my favorite authors,  Michael M. Lewis an author well-worth reading.  The New New Thing focuses on James H. Clark and the entrepreneurial culture that dominated the dot.com era.  James Clark belongs in the entrepreneurial class as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and, amazingly, I never heard of him before reading this book.  Clark’s achievements include the founding of three separate billion-dollar companies, all related to the Internet during the dot.com boom: first Silicon Graphics, then Netscape—which launched the Information Age—and, lastly, Healtheon that began the digitizing and consolidation of medical records.  For entertainment, Clark began in 1998 working on automating the sailboat Hyperion; a 155’ vessel more complex than a 747.

My Notes:

Pg. 14:  Silicon Valley is to the United States what the United States is to the rest of the world.  It is one of those places, unlike the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but like Las Vegas, that are unimaginable anywhere but in the United States.  It is distinctively us.

Pg. 85:  The frenzy created by the IPO of Netscape resulted in the suspension of the old rules of capitalism.  For instance, it had long been a rule of thumb with the Silicon Valley venture capi8talists that they didn’t peddle a new technology company to the investing public until it had had at least four consecutive profitable quarters.  Netscape with nothing to show but massive losses but rapid growth now became the new dot.com standard.  In August 1995 Netscape rose from its offering price of $18 per share to a high of $171.