Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Rate this book!
Write a review?
Quick and fun.
I think I was on a quest to read every Michael Lewis book at the time I read this. Dude. This book was straight awful. I figured Michael Lewis + Silicon Valley = great novel. Wrong. I remember it was vaguely about technology beginning it's rise, but I swear half of the book about some rich douche and his sailing escapade. Do not read.
“Never was a man’s love of risk so beautifully amplified by his environment as Clark’s was in Silicon Valley.” ― Michael Lewis, The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story I did like Lewis' exploration of the relationship of Investment banking and the information technology companies that seemed to weed up in Silicon Valley during the late 90s. The normal venture technology relationship seemed to invert in Silicon Valley. Power shifted from the money men to the idea men, or perhaps not even the i...
what Michael Lewis does not emphasize enough in this book (and he should have) is the fact that this is not just yet another story of from rags to riches but the story of just how the mania of the internet bubble came to existence in the 90s and how that influenced not just the traditional investors, wall street bankers and the silicon valley then new venture capitalists.... it shows u how the technicians, the coders, the hackers, the wizards, the architects of the new world who were supposed to...
It was interesting at points, but could have been much shorter.
I came to the Silicon Valley in 2000, just before the dot.com crash. I witnessed the tail end of the boom and the prolonged bust. You could not spend an hour without someone day trading and making or losing a few thousand dollars each minute. I saw the overflowing BMW lot at El Camino and 237 swell and shrink and littered eventually with slightly old cars on fire sale. Stories of second mortgages invested in the stock market and crazy AMT left a mark.I was 5 years too late to arrive and probably...
It is hard to fathom Jim Clark, whom this book is really about, lead three different Billion Dollar companies: Silicon Graphics, Netscape, and Healtheon (WebMD). He and his companies are the focus of this book. The author also gives a heck of a review of the crazy times that were the late 1990s in technology but as well as the stock market. I think Biff Tannen (you know Biff from Back to the Future) would have been better off with this book than his Sports Almanac. Imagine knowing the exact comp...
Quick read, like most of Michael Lewis' books, but it felt less engaging than others. But, despite this book being published over a decade ago, it's still relevant and provides a lot of interesting context for the beginnings of the tech industry as we know it today.One main takeaway was how Jim Clark helped to shift the startup value system to favor labor (founders) and their ideas/execution over capital (VCs), but that's only true for some companies (Google, Facebook, etc.) but not for others,
I love Lewis' style of writing and have thoroughly enjoyed this book. My personal interest in Web and it's history was one of the reasons why I picked up this book in the first place and although it follows the career of one man, Jim Clark, the founder of Netscape, I still found it very interesting.
Hero Worshipping the DevilMichael Lewis - one of my favourites - often centres his books around heroes - whether nice or nasty - and the New New Thing has his most blatant hero so far - Jim Clark. He is as repulsive as a hero gets, often confusing us with his selfish, ludicrous behaviour. Lewis falls for Clark like a high school sweetheart - blindly in love, yet somehow keeping enough of his senses to avoid being buggered to death.Jim Clark is a genius, and as such invites our sympathy. Having a...
Reading this book in 2021 is like opening a time capsule. Very interesting read, and it was very cool to look up where the people mentioned in the book are now.
It was a very good book about the internet browser startup craze in Silicon Valley in the mid-1990s. It described the rivalries between Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator, which were the two main internet browsers back when the internet was still very new. I believe that a good theme for this book is that great ideas can set the standard for future products. I say this because Silicon Graphics allowed modeling cars, airplanes, and ships. This opportunity lead to dramatic improvem...
3.5* - good, but not nearly as good as Flash Boys and The Big Short. Interesting stuff.