Jim Clark is perpetually dissatisfied. In most people this trait is an affliction, but in people like Clark and other prominent Silicon Valley innovators, it’s a strength-at least from an economic point of view. What Michael Lewis calls “the greatest legal creation of wealth in the history of the planet” has been powered by engineers convinced that something in the world needs fixing.
Lewis went to Silicon Valley to understand what Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter would have labeled the “creative destruction” of the old economy by the new. It was natural that he should gravitate to Clark, whose own lust for change led him to found three of the Valley’s heaviest-hitting companies: Silicon Graphics, Netscape and Healtheon.
Lewis is a first-rate storyteller, and no one in Silicon Valley has lived as many stories as Clark. The former mathematician’s dissatisfaction with his life as a Stanford professor in the early 1980s led him to build his famous Geometry Engine chip, which became the cornerstone of Silicon Graphics. Clark’s contempt for the executives who took control of the firm led him into a rival project to create interactive television. That technology turned out to be impractical, but Clark’s interest in interactive media led to the founding of Netscape. Once Microsoft launched a counterattack and Netscape’s glitter dulled, Clark was on to Healtheon, which aimed to eliminate paperwork in the health-care industry by mediating every transaction between doctors, patients, hospitals and insurers. When Healtheon struck it rich, Clark once again lost interest and dreamed up myCFO, an Internet “money butler” where the super-rich can pool their billions and buy world domination at a quantity discount.
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