The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story by Michael Lewis Read Free Book Online

ended up meaning very much to him. He was keen on things only as they happened; after they had happened he lost interest in them altogether.
    As a result, it sometimes felt that nothing had ever happened to him at all. Oh, every now and then he was seized by a sense that his past should matter, just as people who have lost a leg occasionally wake up thinking they feel it down there kicking. In one such moment he decided that since Netscape obviously had played some role in economic history he should record how it felt to create it. But almost as soon as he’d hired his ghost writer, he lost interest. It bored him to sit around answering questions about what had happened. His little contribution to economic history—called Netscape Time —though not without interest, wound up sounding as if it was written by someone else. Which, of course, it was.
    As a practical matter, Clark had no past, only a future. That’s when he really came alive: when you got him on the subject of what was going to happen next . Then he was full of ideas, and they would change from one moment to the next. This process bore no relation to the clichéd version of it offered up by more ordinary business people. Clark never used the words and phrases that we all have come to expect from the technology types who pretend to see the future. Vision, the challenge of the next century, the new millennium, the road ahead. That sort of grand talk struck him as perfect bullshit. In all the time I spent with him, I never once heard him refer to his ability to see the future. He couldn’t see it—that’s why he had to grope for it. He would be seized by some overwhelming enthusiasm—say, his ambition to create a new field of study that he wanted to call biocomputing, or his newest idea for snaring more billions in the World Wide Web—and he would be off and running down some long, dark tunnel leading God knew where. With him, enthusiasm was a physical event. He stood six feet three inches tall and weighed maybe two hundred pounds, but when he became excited about something he grew three inches and put on fifty pounds. It was as if someone had injected him with growth hormones.
    Usually, after a week or two, Clark would decide there was something wrong with his new idea, and drop it. Moments after he’d exploded with his latest plan to create another multibillion-dollar industry, he would have forgotten about it. But every now and then the long, dark tunnel didn’t come to a dead end. Whatever radar Clark possessed told him that it was okay to sprint into the dark. That’s when he was most dangerous. It was also when he was at his best.
    Anyway, it took some months before I realized that I was never going to hear about his past from him, at least not in the usual way that information changes hands. The few times I asked him directly how he had got from there to here—which, it was becoming clearer, was the same as asking how the modern world had got from there to here—he would offer some perfunctory reply and wave me away. “That’s boring,” he’d say. When I pressed he might say, “That’s the past. I really don’t give a shit about the past.”
    Then one day I discovered the cardboard boxes. They were stacked up in a closet in the guest bedroom of his house. It was, like most guest rooms, one of those rooms that looked as if they had been cleaned a thousand times and never inhabited. Since he first started out in Silicon Valley back in 1979 Clark had the same secretary, a woman named D’Anne Schjerning. After Netscape went public, in August 1995, she made so much money from her stock in various Clark-inspired enterprises that she bought herself a long gold Cadillac and retired. Up until then, bless her heart, she squirreled away Clark’s notes and papers, and stuffed them into cardboard boxes. She kept the boxes at Netscape until the company outgrew its space, at which point she shipped them to Clark’s home. The boxes had never been