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“the greatest legal creation of wealth in the history of the planet,”
Silicon Valley is to the United States what the United States is to the rest of the world.
recently made it big in Silicon Valley could have made it big at no other time in history.
when I watched one of these people—a man who had made himself a billion dollars—try to fill in a simple questionnaire. On the line that asked him to state his occupation, he did not know what to write.
Believe it or not, there are people, inside and outside of Silicon Valley, who consider it almost their duty to find the new new thing.
Often starting with the best intentions, or no intentions at all, he turned people’s lives upside down and subjected them to the most vicious force a human being can be subjected to, change.
“What’s the worst weather you ever tested a sailboat in?” I asked him. “Dis wedder,”
“When Yim sits behind duh computer, he is not any more in dis world.”
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
Wolter had spent the past three years wrestling with a great force that had neither the time nor the taste for tradition.
You didn’t interact with him so much as hitch a ride on the back of his life.
No matter how reckless his mode of travel might appear, he never considered himself anything less than the soul of caution.
If anything, Clark used his machines not to impress other people but to avoid them.
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.”
New Growth Theory argued, in abstruse mathematics, that wealth came from the human imagination. Wealth wasn’t chiefly having more of old
“A certain tolerance for nonconformism is really critical to the process,”
The exercise could not have been more tedious; Clark could not have enjoyed himself more thoroughly.
At one point he looked up and said it was such a beautiful machine that he thought he might buy the company that made it. He was perfectly serious.
the world breaks down neatly into people who can look at a control panel and know instinctively what it all means, and those who can’t.
There’s not much to say about a man who insists on learning all by himself how to fly, other than he has a tendency to terrify his passengers.
Everything in Silicon Valley, including the people, was built so that no one would find it tragic, or even a little bit sad, when it was destroyed and replaced by something new.
He was rarely irritated by machines, but he was often irritated by people, especially when they stood between him and what he was after.
The cop resigned himself to letting him go wherever he wanted, since he was going there anyway.
“One of my motivations was that I had come to the conclusion that the most creative people were not adequately rewarded as the employees of industry.”
This mind-boggling chain of events had been triggered by the technical man’s desire to find a place where he could take what he felt was rightfully his.
“They need to tear it all down and start over. It’s a ridiculous waste of space.”
In all the time I spent with him, I never once heard him refer to his ability to see the future. He couldn’t see it—that’s why he had to grope for it. He would be seized by some overwhelming enthusiasm—say, his ambition to create a new field of study that he wanted to call biocomputing, or his newest idea for snaring more billions in the World Wide Web—and he would be off and running down some long, dark tunnel leading God knew where.
“That’s boring,” he’d say. When I pressed he might say, “That’s the past. I really don’t give a shit about the past.”
one of those great bad examples to youth who prove that if you really want to be a success in American life you have to start by offending your elders.
In the Navy, Clark said, he learned that his desire for revenge could lead to success.
Thus success, for him, became a form of revenge.
the fence Clark wanted to build was declared too high. So Clark built a hill, and put the fence on top of the hill. It did not occur to him that there was anything unusual about this.
I developed this maniacal passion for wanting to achieve something.”
“Kind of overblown title isn’t it. Dealers in Lightning,” he snorted,
He was actually irritated that he was somehow obliged to exhibit pride in something he had done; and he reacted by looking for something he might do.
the Protestant Ethic, with its emphasis on rugged individualism, had been displaced in American life by something else.
It tended to attract the technologists who valued their freedom and wanted to live out on the edge.
What he did with his opinion, however, was astonishing. He forced it down Silicon Valley’s throat.
Clark took this and almost everything else that happened at Silicon Graphics personally.
after Mueller had told him that, to obtain venture capital, he needed a CEO, Clark had literally walked outside, found Anderson on the street in Palo Alto, and asked him if he wanted the job.
One of the company’s founders grabbed his shape and led off. He rose and said that he had spent his whole life getting himself to the point where he could tell someone he was an idiot and that he had no intention of changing that now. Did anyone want to fight about it? The other engineers cheered. Another engineer said that he had figured out how the questions related to the profile, and he wanted to take the test again so he could get a perfect score.
it took people a while to realize that the new rule in Silicon Valley was that Jim Clark always got his way. It took ten years, to be exact.
Clark predicted that this would happen once the computer became fun to use.
“Jim was probably two or three years ahead of the rest of us in seeing what was coming,” Ed McCracken says. “He could see problems down the road and the problems become emotionally important to him.”
For a technology company to succeed, he argued, it needed always to be looking to destroy itself.
All the good things that happened at Silicon Graphics happened because Clark had guessed that computer graphics had a commercial future. The company had been built entirely on Jim Clark’s foresight. But once it became a big company it had no room for Clark or his hunches.
“Jim Clark is not one of these flakes who starts companies,” said Kittu. “He’s not some manager who doesn’t know what he’s talking about. When he first saw the tools, he knew exactly what they meant. He knew we were onto something.”
He was doing this, he once told them, because he had ideas about the future of high technology that no one would listen to.
If McCracken would do what Clark told him to do, he, Clark, wouldn’t be forced to amuse himself by riding around on motorbikes on wet city streets in the middle of the week.
“I would go out, and I would just say all this shit to reporters,” he recalls. “And they’d print
