the-new-new-thing
The best thing about "The New New Thing" is its insightful exploration of the dot-com bubble and the tech industry's transformative impact on society, praised for its engaging storytelling and deep analysis of Silicon Valley culture. The worst aspect noted by reviewers is its sometimes overly romanticized portrayal of its subject and the characters involved, which can detract from the more serious implications of the tech boom.
Key Insights
- Jim Clark as the archetype of the Silicon Valley founder. Lewis profiles Clark — who founded Silicon Graphics, Netscape, and Healtheon in succession — as the purest expression of the founder type: someone for whom money is not the point, starting companies is not the point, and the actual point is the pursuit of whatever is just over the visible horizon. Clark himself doesn’t fully understand his own motivations, which is part of what makes him interesting.
- The “new new thing” as a cultural phenomenon. Lewis’s central observation: Silicon Valley at the height of the dot-com boom was organized around the premise that the next disruptive idea was always just about to emerge, and that capturing it before anyone else was the only game worth playing. The result was a society that valued novelty as an end in itself — a permanent forward orientation that treated the present as already obsolete.
- Netscape as the moment that changed finance. The Netscape IPO (1995) — a company with no profits going public at a multi-billion-dollar valuation — was the event that demonstrated to Wall Street that the old rules didn’t apply to internet companies. Lewis was there, and his account of how bankers, lawyers, and executives collectively decided to pretend they understood what they were valuing is one of the best passages in business journalism.
- The engineer’s worldview vs. the financier’s worldview. Clark’s contempt for Wall Street runs through the book. He sees money as a tool for building things; financiers see things as a tool for making money. Lewis uses their friction to illuminate how Silicon Valley’s self-image (we’re changing the world) coexisted with its actual function (making a very small number of people very rich very fast).
- The gap between stated purpose and actual purpose in tech companies. Healtheon — Clark’s attempt to fix American healthcare — is the book’s cautionary tale. The idea was compelling; the execution collapsed under the weight of the healthcare industry’s complexity and resistance. Lewis is fair to Clark while showing how the founder’s forward momentum can outrun the reality of what’s actually being built.
— Drafted from external sources; review and edit to make your own.