FEED: The New New Thing has an intense focus on one guy, Jim Clark.
Why did you choose him? Were you exploring other ideas for a Silicon Valley
book, or was it that you wanted to write about Jim Clark -- and that turned
into a Silicon Valley book?
LEWIS: It started very generally as a Silicon Valley project. I wasn't even
sure there
was a book in it at first. I spent six months running around the Valley
getting the lay of the land. It became pretty clear that the character who
was the most interesting was the character who was groping for the new new
thing, or the next big thing, or whatever you want to call it. The kind of
person who was looking to invent the future, who was an entrepreneur. It
wasn't the venture capitalists. It wasn't these packs of engineers. It was
this character who started things. He had this quality of an active
ingredient ... The venture capitalists threw the money at him and the
engineers went to build what he said.
I had been hanging out in the NASA incubator in San Jose, with fifty
24-year-olds. When I would talk to these young people and ask them
who they wanted
to be, a number of them said they wanted to be Jim Clark. I didn't really
know who
Jim Clark was. I knew he'd started Netscape. When I met Clark six months
after moving to Palo Alto, I realized that if he wasn't the center of the
book he was somewhere near it. So I just started hanging out with him. At
first I thought maybe he's one of several main characters. But he was like
kudzu vine. He took over the book. There was no reason to be anyplace else.
FEED: Yeah, he seems like a walking drama.
LEWIS: He is a walking drama. I realized, "If I can get this guy down on
the page, I
can get a lot more than this guy down on the page." I realized that what
I'd been looking
for all along was someone whose character rhymed with the environment --
that little personal things about him said things about Silicon Valley.
FEED: I'm glad you said that, because I think it's implicit in the book
that the character
study we're getting of Jim Clark is meant to be taken on some larger level
as indicating
what the Valley is about. And maybe even -- to be grandiose about it --
where American
capitalism is headed.
LEWIS: That's right. He did strike me as a uniquely American character. He
was
reprising the frontier experience. It was cowboys all over again, but
different because it was all this complicated conceptual work. All of a
sudden the business world was anarchic and this person who had a gift for
anarchy was exploiting that. This is what Americans do really well. We're
really good at producing people like Jim Clark.
Having said that, I think there were very few times in history where Jim
Clark would have been a success. I think he just collided with his moment.
Timing was everything. You couldn't have created Netscape 10 years ago.
FEED: What was it about that moment, that mid-'90s moment, that made it so
right for
that kind of anarchy?
LEWIS: I think there's several answers to that question. One is Moore's Law
and where
we were on that curve. We were getting to that interesting period where all
of a sudden the computer could do all sorts of things that it could never
have done before. Like being used as a communications device. Secondly,
there's the inexorability of Moore's law -- it's been going on for 20 years
and it's going to go on probably for another 20 years. It means that
there's going to be lots more change, and everybody understands that.
Then there are the capital markets. Think about what's happened in American
finance to make Jim Clark possible. Michael Milken had a lot to with it.
Certainly Wall Street in the '80s had a lot to do with it. There was -- for
lack of a better phrase -- a democratization of capital. The idea that
capital would be made available in such vast sums to people who just had an
idea, not necessarily even a track record.
FEED: I never thought of junk bonds in quite that way, but I guess that
makes sense.
You're able to float a bond issue at a high interest rate and fund lots of
different projects
rather than just safe A-list ones.
LEWIS: Michael Milken put money in the hands of people who never would have
gotten it. He persuaded capital into risky ventures. There was high risk,
high reward. We've evolved from there and the attitude has spilled over
into the equity markets.
The financial markets, historically, have been very fusty. A lot of
unthinking convention
has guided the way people handle money. There's a built-in risk averseness,
especially in
big banks. If you lost money on Wall Street you weren't invited back to try
a second time. And what's happened is a lot of fustiness has gone out of
the market. It's being looked at more rationally. People are saying, well,
if we devote five percent of our five billion dollar portfolio to venture
capital start ups that might never pan out, but if they do pan out they
might double the value of our portfolio, that makes sense. So the
allocation of capital to these sort of ventures has gone through the roof.
FEED: I worked for a hedge fund in '94, as an analyst. They were raising
money for new media and raised a couple of hundred million dollars. About a
year ago I spoke to someone who said they'd just raised another fund and it
took them half the time to raise five times the money.
LEWIS: Right. The problem now is people being offended because Kleiner
Perkins won't take their money. There's this weird thing that's been going
on in the Valley for a couple of years now. It's capitalism with too much
capital. All of a sudden the people who are doling out the money don't have
the same leverage over the process that they used to -- because you can get
money anywhere. The people like Clark, with ideas, are auctioning
themselves to the highest bidder. And Netscape was the trigger point. That
was the moment when it became clear that the capital markets were going to
behave differently than they'd been behaving before.
The other thing, and I haven't thought it through completely, is this New
Growth theory. The economics profession had swallowed and regurgitated the
idea that wealth is technological change -- that change and wealth
are one and the same.
One of the problems that Wall Street had in the '80s -- and Milken
understood this and
funded a lot of studies to try to prove that what he did was good for the
world -- was
political resistance to its business. Nobody quite believed this turmoil
that Wall Street
was creating was actually wealth-producing. Nobody doubts this now about
Silicon
Valley. No one doubts that Jim Clark is a wealth-producing machine. No
senator is going
to stand up and say, "Why should this guy be able to throw all of our lives
into turmoil?" -- because everyone understands this is why America's
economy is so strong. There's no intellectual resistance to it.
FEED: And that's the difference between '80s and '90s money?
LEWIS: '90s money doesn't have any sense of guilt about itself. There are a
lot of
differences between '80s money and '90s money, but that's one for sure. All
wrapped up in this is the idea that the best money is new money and the
newer the money the better.
Clark's Netscape money, when I met him two years after Netscape went
public, was
feeling kind of old. That his fortune was in Netscape made him feel a
little sheepish. He
needed to burnish it. On Wall Street, there was always some guilt
associated with the money. Everybody understood that if you made the money
on Wall Street you were supposed to instantly go and give some of it away
or get involved with the Metropolitan museum... The Valley is missing the
concept of nouveau riche. You never hear that because it never
occurs to anybody that it's wrong.
FEED: Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
LEWIS: It's a thing. Look, the obvious first answer is that it's a
bad thing -- that it
would be nice if all these people wanted to give away their money. But
that's just not
going to happen. It'd be great if these people were fully socialized, had
some sense
of their social obligation, and devoted half of what they made to
charitable works -- and
not only their money but their time, because I think that actually would be
important and useful to society -- if rich people were engaged with it
properly. But the
next question is, if they were those kind of people to start with, would
they generate the
money? I suspect they wouldn't. If they were balanced, socialized
creatures, there
wouldn't be these billions of dollars.
FEED: So what's going to happen with all the money? Even if the stock
market gets cut
in half there's still unbelievable amounts of wealth. What are they going
to do?
LEWIS: I don't know. It would follow, from my line of thinking, that
they're not likely to
build monuments to themselves; they don't care about history. They don't
think that way. What they want to do conspicuously is produce, not
consume. I suspect that people like Clark will always be trying to create
the next big pile of money. That's what interests him.
FEED: How much ego is involved?
LEWIS: Obviously it's huge. It's raw id.
FEED: That'd be a good name for a start-up.
LEWIS: [Laughs.] Have you spent any time out in the Valley?
FEED: Well, I've been out there on assignment and talked to some of the
players, and think I have some sense of what the ethos is. When I was last
out there I understood completely how irrelevant the East Coast had become.
It was not necessary at all. The last ingredient was the money -- and
that's there now. They had no need for anything except what was going on
right there.
LEWIS: That's very true and very interesting. The liberation of the West
Coast is the
story of our day. It's a curious thing. In the back of the minds of the
people who lived out
here 15, 20 years ago, the reference point was the East. To the upper
middle class, the
idea of sending your child to an Ivy League school meant something. Now
they all just
want to go to Stanford. There's a whole list of attitudes and social
predispositions that
people out here associate with the East that disgust them. Like
condescension, snobbery.
FEED: But there are people out there who are so condescending....
LEWIS: I'm not saying this is justifiable. It was just very revealing to
me. A Valley
person came up to me at a book party yesterday and said how much he loved
the book
and what he loved about it was there wasn't a trace of condescension. He
assumed
that this guy who came out from the East would be condescending. It didn't
occur to me
that that was something I had to avoid, but it was something he was looking
for.
FEED: I was reading Walter Kirn's (New York Magazine) review of the
book and
it tapped into something I was thinking about. He mentions The Great
Gatsby, which coincidentally I had just reread, immediately prior to
yours.
LEWIS: Really? It occurred to me about half way through that Gatsby
was a
reference point for me.
FEED: Partly, it's a look at Westerners' perspectives on East Coast money.
All those characters are originally from the Midwest, and....
LEWIS: What a book! It's just breathtaking. You can't believe that prose
can be so beautiful. I remember the last time I read it, about four years
ago and I couldn't believe what this man was able to do with the English
language. I thought that re-reading it I would think less of it than the
time before, that I'd outgrown it or something. But I think it just gets
better.
FEED: The reason I bring it up is that I think Gatsby is Nick's
book, not
Gatsby's. And by analogy, in New New Thing, you're Nick. You are the
narrator.
LEWIS: I'm watching this person who's an extraordinary character.
FEED: We see him through your eyes. And we relate to him and what's going
on generally through your sensibility. So while on one level it seems like
Gatsby or Jim Clark is the protagonist of the book, I think on another
level, Nick, or Michael Lewis is the protagonist.
LEWIS: Well, there's no getting around that. It's true. It's the nature of
the device. I mean
it's the nature of the genre, which is non-fiction with a very strong voice.
FEED: So what did you intend to write about Michael Lewis -- or what do you
think you
ended up writing about Michael Lewis?
LEWIS: Oh, well, that's a little different. Because Nick actually tells you
about himself.
He tells you a lot about himself in that book. And he's involved with
somebody, he has
Jordan, right?
FEED: It's true, you have more of a journalist's distance.
LEWIS: Because it's a non-fiction book. If it had been a novel I think I'd
be obliged to tell you more about myself. I can get away with not doing
that. In fact, it would have been an encumbrance to do that in a
non-fiction book.
There were things about me that I thought would work for the reader. One of
them was
that I am technically inept. It would help a reader who wasn't of Silicon
Valley to know
that his narrator didn't understand any of this stuff either. I was
watching a technical man
and I'm not a technical man. Clark and I have different views of life.
Walter Kirn put
his finger on it: Clark is a utopian. I'm closer to a fatalist.
I was touched by Clark's hopefulness, especially in view of his own
experiences. This
business of insisting that if he just changed something everything was
going to be good
when he changed things over and over and everything still wasn't good. There
was something
about that I found very poignant.
FEED: Are you from the East Coast originally?
LEWIS: I grew up in New Orleans. That flitted through my brain as I wrote
this -- that I
grew up in this very traditional place that I loved and watched crumble
because it was
incapable of change, and yet I loved it because it was incapable of change.
That I had
some discomfort with this speeded-up capitalism out here. Or with the lack
of respect for the past.
Silicon Valley's all about patricide. You start the company that destroys
that other company. That bothered me. It frightened me a bit, because I saw
the effect that it had on this thing that was actually very precious to me,
this place where I grew up. There's no question that that informed the book and
informed the way I watched Clark. So yes, there
were things about me that informed the way I went about it. Also my
cynicism about
Wall Street. That's all over the book. [Laughs].
FEED: What do you think you might have missed by focusing so hard on Clark?
LEWIS: I left out Yahoo!. Yahoo! is shorthand for the picture that the
Valley likes to put forward of itself as this sunny, upbeat, bright,
untroubled place where everybody's just nifty, and Yahoo! is the word that
sums it up. I don't believe that. It's this kind of phony optimism.
FEED: I've spent a little time at Yahoo! and every one there seemed pretty
happy to me...
LEWIS: I'm not saying that everyone in the Valley's depressed. But there's
something
shallow about it. Jim Clark is always going to be Jim Clark, but if the
markets go down a
lot, the people at Yahoo! will find normal things to do. They aren't as
deeply a part of the
place, I feel.
FEED: What about Jim Clark doesn't represent the Valley?
LEWIS: Overt greed. Other people say it's not about the money; he's just
overt about it,
about everything. He's atypical in that he lacks the mechanism that most
people have
between their brains and their mouths to make themselves seem okay to other
people. There's an awful lot of pretense and artifice in the Valley. He
will lie, but he knows when he's lying. He's not pretending to himself.
FEED: Towards the end of the book, you raise a fascinating rhetorical
question -- "Why do people perpetually create the condition for their own
dissatisfaction?" The context is Clark's saying he'll be satisfied only
when he has more money than [Oracle CEO and California's richest person]
Larry Ellison. But it's a question that pertains to so many other
situations as well.
LEWIS: I don't have a great answer, which is why I put it that way. Some
people think that dissatisfaction is necessary to their survival; if
they're satisfied, something's wrong. I think in Clark's case that's partly
true. He has moments of real pleasure. But I don't think he'll ever be a
happy man.
FEED: So, to the extent that he's a symbol for the Valley, and for
capitalism...
LEWIS: One of the questions I wanted the readers to answer for themselves
is: Is this a good life? This is a successful, American, capitalist life.
It's a wealth-creating life. But is it a good life? In answering that
question, they're answering a lot more.