The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story Read online

  Steve punched some buttons. According to the computer we’d been grounded. “It is truly unfortunate that we find ourselves in this situation,” he said, at length.

  Yes it was. Just a few hours earlier the weatherman had predicted Force 4 sailing conditions. Force 4 implied pleasant winds of twenty knots and seas of perhaps six feet. Even before we left the canal and passed through the locks into the North Sea, the report lost its credibility. The gauges on the boat that measured the speed of the wind had frozen at fifty knots—the computer had not been programmed to register winds any higher.

  As we passed through the lock and into a harbor, we could finally see why Wolter Huisman muttered to himself. Fifteen-foot waves crashed against the seawall and flicked their white foam thirty feet in the air, where it mingled with falling snow. Gusts of wind blew at seventy miles an hour. The boat suddenly began to rock too violently for anyone to stare very long into his computer. The programmers scrambled out from the bridge and onto the deck, where Allan and Wolter stood together in the snow with pretty much everyone else: twelve boatyard workers, seven crew members, two Dutch friends of Clark’s, a photographer, and a German television crew present to document the launching of the world’s first computerized sailboat. The only person missing was Clark himself, but, then, people who knew Clark knew better than to expect him to be where he was meant to be. Sooner or later he’d turn up, usually when he was not wanted.

  “It’s too goddamn windy out there,” Wolter Huisman shouted, to no one in particular. “It is wedder to test people, not boats.” He shot Allan a meaningful look, who shot it right back to him. They both knew that the weather was the least of their problems.

  When Hyperion left the seawall behind, it put itself at the mercy of a furious North Sea. Instantly, the boat was seized by forces far greater than itself; its magnificence was trivialized. A furious partial corkscrewing motion pulled us up to the right and then down to the left. We’d dip into a trough, experience a brief, false moment of calm, and then be picked up and twisted again. The German television soundman dropped to his knees, crawled over the side of the boat, and vomited. There was no question of his suppressing the urge; it was as if someone had pushed a button on the computer that instructed the man to be sick. There, prone and puking on the violent deck, he lifted his microphone into the air to capture the ambient noise. Room tone. A young Dutch friend of Clark’s along for the ride chuckled and said, “The Germans. They will always do the job they are given no matter what.”

  But the German soundman was a trend setter. It took about a minute and a half before the first Dutch boatyard worker leaned over the safety ropes and vomited the Saint Nick’s cake he’d been served an hour before. A minute later he was joined by two poor colleagues who had been down below monitoring the engines. A few minutes after that the three fellows working on the foredeck came back to join the party. Then came the rest of the German television crew. Hyperion rose and twisted and plunged and settled, then rose and twisted and plunged and settled all over again. Within twenty minutes eight men had gone as lifeless as if they had been unplugged from their sockets. Those who weren’t sick pretended to be amused. They clustered around the captain and clung to the rails and smiled crazily at each other.

  Eventually, Allan reduced the engine speed and hoisted the sail. He did this by pushing a button, which told the computer to hoist the sail, which the computer, for once, did. The mast was hatched with crossbars, called spreaders. The sail rose with a great flapping sound past them one by one until at length it reached the second-to-last spreader. Just when you thought there could be no more sail, more sail appeared. The mainsail alone was 5,600 square feet, a bit more than a quarter of a football field. The world’s largest sail, as it happened. It was expected to handle up to eleven tons of wind. That is, the force on its ropes was the equivalent of dangling from their ends an eleven ton steel block. Already the ropes were being tested. “The wind is too strong to let it all out,” Allan shouted to Wolter. Wolter nodded solemnly.

  Not until you have hoisted a sail and turned off the engine can you fully appreciate the euphoria that accompanied the invention of the steam engine. The boat, now engineless, was subjected to a grosser, more primal force. The waves crashed and the spray came in sheets and the partial corkscrewing motion became a full corkscrewing motion. The eight men in Puker’s Alley retched all over again. This time it wasn’t so funny to the others. A wave washed over the deck and knocked two of the Dutch shipyard workers on the bow off their feet; they were saved from the sea by their safety ropes, which they alone wore. The three technogeeks clung to the rails and tried not to remember that they didn’t belong here. They knew without being told that anyone who went overboard was as good as gone. A person tossed into the North Sea in December would last only a few minutes before freezing to death; and in these conditions it might take an hour to pick up a man overboard, if you could find him. Maybe for this reason no one bothered to don a life jacket.

  It was then I noticed Wolter, his arm wrapped tightly around a rail, trying not to look at everything at once. It was Wolter whose ass was really on the line out here. If a Huisman mast snapped, or a Huisman hull leaked, and a Huisman yacht sank, a long and glorious family tradition bubbled to the bottom of the North Sea floor. That is why Wolter and his three hundred stout and sturdy craftsmen back in their tiny village in the north of Holland resisted change. They did not cling to the past mindlessly. But they were as immune as people can be to the allure of a new way of doing things. Traditional, in a word.

  Wolter had spent the past three years wrestling with a great force that had neither the time nor the taste for tradition. The struggle had turned Wolter into an old man. Before Jim Clark had come to the boatyard at the end of 1995, Wolter had never heard of Silicon Valley, or of the Internet, or, for that matter, of Jim Clark. Yim, as Wolter called him, had sat down amid the exquisite models of ships built centuries before, and the old black-and-white photographs of Wolter and his ancestors at work building them. He had seen a yacht Wolter had just finished building, he said, and wanted one like it. Only bigger. And faster. And newer. He wanted his mast to be the biggest mast ever built. And he wanted to control the whole boat with his computers. Specifically, he wanted to be able to dial into his boat over the Internet from his desk in Silicon Valley and sail it across the San Francisco Bay. It was as if someone had distilled manic late twentieth-century American capitalism into a vial of liquid and poured it down Wolter’s throat.

  Only a small part of the discomfort experienced on that wintry, gray December afternoon on the North Sea was physical. Most of it occurred inside of people’s minds. Clark pushed people into places they never would have gone willingly. Often the people who’d been pushed assumed, for one reason or another, that Jim Clark, the rich man from Silicon Valley who seemed to know what was about to happen before anyone else, would make sure that it didn’t happen to them. The problem with their assumption was that it wasn’t true: all Jim Clark ever guaranteed anyone was the chance to adapt. His penchant for disrupting his environment was at the bottom of every new company he created; now he’d used it to transform a sailboat. The many strange deep sensations on board—Wolter’s dread, Allan’s frustration, the computer geeks’ unlikely feelings of responsibility—all were the doing of Clark and his new technology. It was a single great, messy experiment, which, in retrospect, was bound not to end well. And it didn’t.

  At the moment when the seas were most fierce, the boat’s tiny population huddled together on the stern. Hyperion pitched and rolled; its passengers clung to the rails and to each other. Even Allan, who had sailed around the world three times in boats the size of Clark’s bathtubs back in California, was numb as a mummy. “It’s not sailing,” he hollered to Wolter. “It’s more like throwing something into a washing machine to see what breaks.”

  It would have occurred to no sane person at this point to crawl along the side and have a look around. But that is what Clark did. He emerged f
rom his cabin, where he’d been fiddling with his computer, and made his way up the safety ropes along the side. Since Hyperion was 157 feet long, and he was six foot three, this took some doing. I should say that he did not look as he was expected to look; his appearance was just another element of surprise in a surprising universe. He was tall and broad in a way computer nerds are not supposed to be. His blond hair was neatly combed. His features were small and delicate: one could easily imagine that he resembled his mother. He was handsome. Unlike most men who make billions of dollars for themselves, he had an expansive, easy manner. At any rate, that’s the first impression he made. If you looked closely, you could see that each of the slow and easy gestures was countered by another that was small, tense, almost involuntary. His body language was engaged in a debate with itself. It was as if he had an itch that he was refusing to scratch.

  When he reached the bow, he climbed up toward the world’s tallest sailboat mast, which rose to a point 189 feet over the deck. He put his hand on it, to steady himself. There he stood for some long while, a large yellow lump of Gore-Tex, directly beneath the tall, rigid white rod of his ambition. He was looking, it appeared, straight up at the sky. What he was looking for, no one could say. Probably he was thinking about something he might like to change. Possibly he was not thinking at all but groping. That is how his mind worked—the logic always came after the initial, inexplicable, primal impulse. But whatever he was doing he didn’t do it for long. Once he’d found his footing, his mast began to sway. At first its movements were barely perceptible; then they became more pronounced; at last they were violent.

  Later someone who had been on the bridge said he had heard a loud crack. The rubber at the base of the world’s tallest mast had shattered. The foot-wide seal that kept Clark’s 189 feet of carbon fiber standing straight had frozen into a crystal, and then broken to bits. The mast came loose in its socket. Its three and a half tons rocked wildly back and forth, like a broomstick rattling around inside a garbage can. As quickly as he could press a button, Allan Prior lowered the sail, before the mast itself broke and fell over into the sea.

  “Yesus,” Wolter Huisman muttered, and looked away.

  2

  The Accelerated Grimace

  It couldn’t have been more than a few hours after the last guest stumbled out his front gate that Clark called and made his suggestion. “I’m going up in the helicopter,” he said. “Want to come?” His voice was deep and thick and unsteady. Apparently, he hadn’t slept. It was just before eight in the morning on the fifth of July. He’d spent the past three hours writing computer code, and the seven hours before that drinking with seventy of his favorite engineers who worked for the companies he’d created and then, more or less, abandoned.

  By then I knew that the only way to spend time with Jim Clark was to leap onto one of his machines. You didn’t interact with him so much as hitch a ride on the back of his life. Once you proved to him that you wouldn’t complain, or weep, or vomit into the gearbox, he was not unwilling to pick you up. He offered you a choice of vehicles: helicopter, stunt plane, motorbike, various exotic sports cars of the type that no one but really rich people ever even know exist, and, of course, the computerized sailboat. His array of possessions was hardly original. He could be made to seem like yet another newly rich guy trying to demonstrate to the world just how rich he’d become. Either that or one of those people who try to prove how interesting they are by risking their lives in various moronic adventures. This was not his motive, however. He didn’t need to show how much money he had; the number was in the newspaper every day. It was public knowledge that Jim Clark owned 16 million shares in Netscape and that Netscape, on July 5, 1998, was trading at $25 a share. Twenty-five times 16 million equaled $400 million. That was $650 million less than Clark had been worth two years ago and, for that matter, $3 billion less than he would be worth nine months from now. The number was always changing.

  In any case, it never would have occurred to Clark that anyone of his machines was a mere display of wealth, or some kind of thrill ride. No matter how reckless his mode of travel might appear, he never considered himself anything less than the soul of caution. No, for him all the joy came from mechanical intimacy. Machines! He loved to know about them, to operate them, to master them, to fix them when they were broken. More than anything he liked to upgrade and improve them. I came to believe they were the creatures in the world to whom he felt closest. They were certainly the only ones he really trusted.

  If anything, Clark used his machines not to impress other people but to avoid them. They were his getaway vehicles. Once it became clear that a person would not permit himself to be gotten away from, Clark would load that person into the back of his stunt plane, launch him five thousand feet straight up in the air, and switch off the engine. The maneuver was known as the reverse hammer. The plane would plummet back toward earth, tail first, spinning like a top. The passenger rarely returned for a second trip.

  Unsettling as these rides often were, they were never dull. Something always happened on them that wasn’t supposed to happen.

  An hour after Clark phoned, he picked me up in one of his designer sports cars. He wore dark sunglasses and the pained expression of a man enduring the aftershocks of two bottles of fine Burgundy. I lobbed into the haze a series of conversation starters before he took a swing at one of them: a book I had first mentioned a few weeks before, Thorstein Veblen’s The Engineers and the Price System. Veblen was a quixotic social theorist with an unfortunate taste for the wives of his colleagues in the Stanford economics department. Between trysts he coined many poignant phrases, among them “leisure class” and “conspicuous consumption.” Back in 1921 Veblen had predicted that engineers would one day rule the U.S. economy. He argued that since the economy was premised on technology and the engineers were the only ones who actually understood how the technology worked, they would inevitably use their superior knowledge to seize power from the financiers and captains of industry who wound up on top at the end of the first round of the Industrial Revolution. After all, the engineers only needed to refuse to fix anything, and modern industry would grind to a halt. Veblen rejoiced at this prospect. He didn’t much care for financiers and captains. He thought they were parasites.

  When I told Clark about Veblen, he did a good imitation of a man who was bored out of his skull. When he didn’t want to seem too interested, he pretended he wasn’t paying attention. Now, his head splitting, he was particularly keen on the idea of the engineer grabbing power from the financier. “That’s happening right now,” he said. “Right here. In the Valley. The power is shifting to the engineers who create the companies.”

  That, Clark thought, was only as it should be. Engineers created the wealth. And during the 1990s Silicon Valley had created a fantastic amount of new wealth. The venture capitalist John Doerr, Clark’s friend and Valley co-conspirator, liked to describe the Valley as “the greatest legal creation of wealth in the history of the planet.” He may have been right about that. But such a great new event in economic history raised great new questions. For example, why had it happened? What caused this explosion? Why had it happened here? The old economic theories of wealth creation—that wealth comes from savings or investment or personal rectitude or the planet earth or the proper level of government spending—failed to capture what was happening out here in the engineering division of the American economy.

  The people who make a living trying to explain where wealth comes from were just starting to get their minds around the phenomenon. In the mid-1980s a young economist named Paul Romer had written a couple of papers that put across a theory, which he called New Growth Theory. Soon after Romer published his papers, Robert Lucas, the Nobel Prize–winning economist from Chicago, delivered a series of lectures at Cambridge University on the subject; inside of ten years New Growth Theory had become something like the conventional wisdom in the economics profession and the business world. New Growth Theory argued, in abstruse m
athematics, that wealth came from the human imagination. Wealth wasn’t chiefly having more of old things; it was having entirely new things. “Growth is just another word for change,” said Romer, when he paused for breath between equations. The metaphor that Romer used to describe the economy to noneconomists was of a well-stocked kitchen waiting for a brilliant chef to exploit it. Everyone in the kitchen starts with more or less the same ingredients, the metaphor ran, but not everyone produces good food. And only a very few people who wander into the kitchen find entirely new ways to combine old ingredients into delightfully tasty recipes. These people were the wealth creators. Their recipes were wealth. Electricity. The transistor. The microprocessor. The personal computer. The Internet.

  It followed from the theory that any society that wanted to become richer would encourage the traits, however bizarre, that led people to create new recipes. “A certain tolerance for nonconformism is really critical to the process,” as Romer put it. Qualities that in eleventh-century France, or even 1950s America, might have been viewed as antisocial, or even criminal, would be rewarded, honored, and emulated, simply because they led to more…recipes. In short, the new theory conferred a stunning new status upon innovation, and the people responsible for it. The Prime Mover of Wealth was no longer a great industrialist who rode herd on thousands of corporate slaves, or the great politician who rode herd on a nation’s finances, or the great Wall Street tycoon who bankrolled new enterprise. He was the geek holed up in his basement all weekend discovering new things to do with his computer. He was Jim Clark.