Lewis - The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story

T his book is about a search that occurs on the frontiers of economic life. Maybe the best way to introduce it is to explain why I bothered to write it.

In the second part of the 1990s Silicon Valley had the same center-of-the-universe feel to it as Wall Street had in the mid-1980s. There was a reason for this: it was the source of a great deal of change. Up until April 4, 1994, Silicon Valley was known as the source of a few high-tech industries, and mainly the computer industry. On April 4, 1994, Netscape was incorporated. Suddenlyas fast as thatSilicon Valley was the source of changes taking place across the society. The Internet was a Trojan horse in which technogeeks entered all sorts of markets previously inhospitable to technogeeks. Wall Street, to take just one example, was turned on its head by new companies and new technologies and new social types created just south of San Francisco. The financial success of the people at the heart of this matter was unprecedented. It made 1980s Wall Street seem like the low-stakes poker table. As yet, there is no final reckoning of the wealth the Valley has created. Hundreds of billions of dollars, certainly; perhaps even trillions. In any case, the greatest legal creation of wealth in the history of the planet, as one local capitalist puts it.

The money was only part of what I found interesting. I really do think, and not just because I happen to be writing a book about it, that the business of creating and foisting new technology upon others that goes on in Silicon Valley is near the core of the American experience. The United States obviously occupies a strange place in the world. It is the capital of innovation, of material prosperity, of a certain kind of energy, of certain kinds of freedom, and of transience. 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.

Within this unusual place some people were clearly more unusual than others. Many of those who sought and found fortune in Silicon Valley in the 1990s could just as easily have found it on Wall Street in the 1980s or in London in the 1860s. But a certain type of person who has recently made it big in Silicon Valley could have made it big at no other time in history. He made it big because he was uniquely suited to this particular historical moment. He was built to work on the frontier of economic life when the frontier was once again up for grabs. He was designed for rapid social and technological change. He was the starter of new things.

Oddly enough, this character at the center of one of historys great economic booms, who, in effect, sits with the detonator between his legs, could not describe what he did for a living. When a person sets out to find the new idea or the new technology that will (a) make him rich and (b) throw entire industries into turmoil and (c) cause ordinary people to sit up and say, My God, something just changed, he isnt doing science. He isnt engaged in what any serious thinker would call thought. Unless he makes a lot of money, he isnt even treated as a businessman, at least not by serious businessmen. He might call himself an entrepreneur, but that word has been debased by overuse. Really, theres no good word for what he does. I first noticed this problem when I watched one of these peoplea man who had made himself a billion dollarstry to fill in a simple questionnaire. On the line that asked him to state his occupation, he did not know what to write. There was no name for what he did. Searcher? He couldnt very well put down that.

For that matter, there is no name for what hes looking for, which, typically, is a technology, or an idea, on the cusp of commercial viability. The new new thing. Its easier to say what the new new thing is not than to say what it is. It is not necessarily a new invention. It is not even necessarily a new ideamost everything has been considered by someone, at some point. The new new thing is a notion that is poised to be taken seriously in the marketplace. Its the idea that is a tiny push away from general acceptance and, when it gets that push, will change the world.

The searcher for the new new thing conforms to no well-established idea of what people should do for a living. He gropes. Finding the new new thing is as much a matter of timing as of technical or financial aptitude, though both of those qualities help. The sensation that defines the search is the sweet, painful feeling that you get when you cant think of a word that feels as if its right on the tip of your tongue. For most people the relief they experience upon finding it is almost physical. They sink back in their chairs and try not to stumble upon any more difficult words. The person who makes his living searching for the new new thing is not like most people, however. He does not seriously want to sink back into any chair. He needs to keep on groping. He chooses to live perpetually with that sweet tingling discomfort of not quite knowing what it is he wants to say. Its one of the little ironies of economic progress that, while it often results in greater levels of comfort, it depends on people who prefer not to get too comfortable.

From the start of my investigation of Silicon Valley, I knew I was trying to describe a process: how this fantastic wealth got created. It just so happened that the process was best illustrated by this character. After all, the greatest legal creation of wealth in the history of the planet came directly from the new new thing. When you asked, How is it that an entire economy made this little leap? you were really asking, How is it that some person gave an entire economy a little push? Believe it or not, there are people, inside and outside of Silicon Valley, who consider it almost their duty to find the new new thing. That person may not be entirely typical of our age. (Is anyone?) But he is, in this case, representative: a disruptive force. A catalyst for change and regeneration. He is to Silicon Valley what Silicon Valley is to America. And he has left his fingerprints all over the backside of modern life.

What Ive tried to write, in a roundabout way, which is the only way I could think to write it, is a character study of a man with the gift for giving a little push to Silicon Valley, and to the whole economy. To do this I had to follow him on his search. I hope the reader will, too. At any rate, I hope he or she gets a sense of what it feels like to be so oddly, and messily, engaged. Progress does not march forward like an army on parade; it crawls on its belly like a guerrilla. The important events in capitalism no longer occur mainly in oak-paneled offices, if indeed they ever did. They can happen in the least likely of places. On a boat in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, for instance.

As it turned out, the main character of this story had a structure to his life. He might not care to acknowledge it, but it was there all the same. It was the structure of an old-fashioned adventure story. His mere presence on a scene inspired the question that propels every adventure story forward: What will happen next? I had no idea. And neither, really, did he.

T he original plan, which Lord knows didnt mean very much when that plan had been made by Jim Clark, was that we would test the boat quickly in the North Sea and then sail it across the Atlantic Ocean. If nothing went too badly wrong, it would take us six days to sail down to the Canary Islands and another ten to the Caribbean. I had seen Clark in so many different situations that I felt sure I knew him, and the range of behavior he was capable of. But there is nothing like sixteen days on the high seas with a small group of people who have a lot of doubts about each other to test ones assumptions about human character. On the Atlantic crossing Hyperion would carry only the captain and his seven crew members, one or two computer programmers, Clark and me.