The New New Thing

Michael Lewis’s book The New New Thing tells the story of James Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics, Netscape, Healtheon and myCFO. More accurately, it tells the tell of James Clark trying to programme his boat Hyperion, while in his spare time becoming a billionaire.

It is a strange story. Clark is almost certainly something special having made a huge amount of money with all this companies. He saw the future again and again. And he capitalised on this without actually making proper businesses.

Silicon Graphics was a business success. However, Netscape never was and was ultimately flogged to AOL (for shares) while Healtheon is a company I had not even heard of and had to look up on Wikipedia. There there is a short article to be found about how it merged with WebMD.

Clark’s skill seems to be creating an idea and giving it a spectacular IPO without ever really building a business. And he is very, very good at it.

The New New Thing

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This entry was posted on Friday, February 6th, 2015 at 10:49 am and is filed under Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.