“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.”
Michael Lewis, the New New Thing
Michael Lewis’ underrated book, the New New Thing, details the life of one of he pioneers of Silicon Valley, Jim Clark.
Jim Clark, an engineer prodigy, was a professor at Stanford who later went on to found Silicon Graphics, which was like being at early PayPal. In the life after, Clark created the Geometry engine that ignited the computer graphics industry and then co-founded Netscape with Marc Andreesen. Nothing short of a Silicon Valley legend.
But, why is his story interesting?
“Maybe the simplest is the way Clark described it to himself: the guy who finds the new new thing and makes it happen wins. The engineers who help him to do it finish second. The financiers and the corporate statesmen, the sucker fish of economic growth, finish a distant third. Clark intended to sit on top of Silicon Valley as surely as Microsoft sat on top of the personal computer. Of course, he was not the first engineer with a taste for money and power. He was just the one who finally said, “Now’s the time to take it.”
In 2018, the economics Nobel prize was given to Paul Romer, who works on New Growth theory. This theory is, in a nutshell, the equivalent of what Jim Clark was building 30 years ago. In less mathematical notation than Romer, New Growth theory posits that ideas are capital in the gears of the economy – they can have massive sway over various sectors and thus eventually arise in GDP.
People complain about lower productivity growth, manufacturing output, and a stagnant middle class in America: little to none of these people go on to address the problem.
Clark is like Churchill, who had famously remarked:
“I like things to happen, and if they don’t happen I like to make them happen.”
But unlike Churchill’s long-forgotten era, Clark believed that the real power was given to the builders of society: the engineers.
As he built one of the foundational companies of the 80s, Silicon Graphics International, Clark was later kicked out to bring in what Lewis’ calls an Organizational man: someone with no personality and who is quintessially boring. Good at steering the ship, but little else.
On the other hand, Clark would buy yachts, configure them to his liking, and set sail around the world wherever he wanted to go (he had no knowledge of ships before his first 7-figure purchase).
Not someone who belongs in an oak-paneled office, no matter how nice it is perceived to be. Dick Kramlich, a venture capitalist, said:
“Jim’s a revolutionary, you know. He’s out to revolutionize whatever needs to be revolted against.” [..]
“[Dick’s colleagues] thought Jim Clark was a bit of a crazy guy”
Entirely it was “revolting” against the Organizational man and everything the status quo stood for. But how do we get more Jim Clarks?
What I find funny is that people invest in start-ups expecting outsized returns, but also want those returns to arise from normal people. Normal people don’t make companies. Chris Dixon writes:
You’ve either started a company or you haven’t. ”Started” doesn’t mean joining as an early employee, or investing or advising or helping out. It means starting with no money, no help, no one who believes in you (except perhaps your closest friends and family), and building an organization from a borrowed cubicle with credit card debt and nowhere to sleep except the office. It almost invariably means being dismissed by arrogant investors who show up a half hour late, totally unprepared and then instead of saying “no” give you non-committal rejections like “we invest at later stage companies.”
It means looking prospective employees in the eyes and convincing them to leave safe jobs, quit everything and throw their lot in with you. It means having pundits in the press and blogs who’ve never built anything criticize you and armchair quarterback your every mistake. It means lying awake at night worrying about running out of cash and having a constant knot in your stomach during the day fearing you’ll disappoint the few people who believed in you and validate your smug doubters.
I don’t care if you succeed or fail, if you are Bill Gates or an unknown entrepreneur who gave everything to make it work but didn’t manage to pull through. The important distinction is whether you risked everything, put your life on the line, made commitments to investors, employees, customers and friends, and tried – against all the forces in the world that try to keep new ideas down – to make something new.”
Certainly, people throw around arguments that they would be a “Jim Clark” if they were born into privilege like Bill Gates, or if they had skipped a grade like Steve Jobs.
Both of these are red herrings. People like Jim Clark don’t fit the mold: this is precisely why venture capital general partners can be paid unbelievable sums of money.
Let’s say you wanted to be a Jim Clark. To do so, the most optimal way would be to fully explore your weird interests. When we’re young, those interests can be beaten out of us. I’d bet they still lie within us somewhere: when we’re walking down the street, sitting in class or at work, or engaging in conversation. Thos passions don’t escape us so easily.
What is weird now is essentially what the nerds are working at on the weekends. Why is this the case? Dixon proclaims that at other times, society expects something from us in the form of time and labor. Weekends, nevertheless, are sacred geek time. Time to think and tinker. These ideas are the things we believe that others would disagree with us on. Today, I think, for most of the world, the weird ideas lie in building open networks such as blockchain-related technologies, programming medicine, and space infrastructure.
I’m most partial to space tech as I’ve always been the most fascinated by aerospace innovation. However people have little to no idea that there is already a space race occurring between the vast powers of the world: China is exploring every crevice of the market to continue expansion.
The other reason many lack knowledge about these advancements is that they perceive these projects as mere “toys.” They used to call those people hobbyists, then it turned out the hobbyists made all the money. There is hysteresis in technology and working on cool projects: we’re too quick to dismiss innovation until it happens all at once.
Being weird is the only way to be Jim Clark-esque and it’s the only way to build the future. In my life, I’ve been hesitant to write off people for acting unnaturally and arguing for implausible ideas. Over time, those people have become my closest friends. Maybe we can all learn to appreciate the bizarre a bit more – it’s definitely the “new new thing.”
“I thought, I’ve got the Internet, which is hot; I know I can make a big deal out of that. I’ve got Jim Clark, who is hot,” Siino remembers. “And then I’ve got this twenty-two-year-old wonder kid. No matter what, [Netscape’s] going to get a lot of coverage.”