As a side note, I listened to this as an audiobook, which makes it hard to remember names and particularly dates, and I also don’t have a good way to flip back and review key passages. I don’t have a precise chronology, therefore, but it’s not a deal breaker.

In a nutshell, Michael Lewis bios Jim Clark, the SGI and Netscape fonuder. The book is split into two parts, interwoven. One part describes Hyperion, Clark’s computerized mega sailing yacht and its transatlantic voyage. The other part is more like a regular bio, covering Clark’s career and quest for the new new thing.

The general story goes something like this. He grew up poor, joined the Navy, went to college, learned about computers. As a professor at Stanford, he developed the hardware geometry pipeline which led to the founding of Silicon Graphics. He worked there for a decade, although the venture capitalists and management eventually pushed him out of a leadership position. Clark became bitter and vowed his next company, Netscape, would make the engineers rich first. Microsoft encroached on Netscape’s territory, so Clark jumped to a new venture called Healtheon, a sort of health care doctor/patient/insurance intermediary. Shortly after that, he was starting to move on to a financial services company called MyCFO as the book ends.

The consistent theme throughout the book is that Clark is a visionary, always out to change the world, disrupt existing industries, turn the established players on their heads. He moves so fast, competitors are still trying to figure what he’s done when he’s already moving on to the next idea. Kind of. The book tries to stay on the positive side of things, but there’s no hiding the fact that Clark is also abandoning his startups. He stuck with SGI and certainly contributed to the implementation there, but after that, he’s finished before the first product ships. If ever a book needed a ten years later, Where Are They Now?, this is it. By my count, Clark is 0.5 for 4 for founding sustainable companies (SGI’s death wasn’t entirely his fault).

As for the Hyperion sections, they provide a lot of humor and entertainment. It’s a tale of technology gone wrong. Everything on the boat is run by computers, which seem to have a mind of their own. The computers decide that one cabin needs to be heated to about 90 degrees. Playing a DVD in one room causes the dining table in the galley to retract into the wall. The GPS reports they are cruising through the middle of Yemen. The captain of the ship understandably relies on his eyes and ears, instead of the computer, to navigate the ship without ramming it aground, for which Clark rewards him by firing the captain. It honestly sounds like Clark would have preferred crashing Hyperion by relying on the computer info instead of a faithless captain.

There’s a lot to think about, regarding entrepreneurship and futurism. Clark certainly changed the way startups raise money and the terms they get, and had a lot to do establishing the notion that a successful company is one that has an IPO before it has profits. The book predates the internet bubble crash, and as mentioned, really needs an updated epilogue. The story gets wrapped up in its own hype from time to time, and some passages sound jaw droppingly ludicrous today, even in the midst of the social media bubble. Still good for a short read (or listen).

Times review and summary.