[S6E1] The New New Thing by Michael Lewis

Yeah, I had never heard of Jim Clark until I read this book, although I read this book a while ago, so I have known about him for a while.

So James Henry Clark was born and raised in Plainview, Texas, which is a small town between Lubbock and Amarillo.

He dropped out of high school and joined the Navy.

And it was there that he got exposed to technology and engineering, ultimately studying at Tulane and night school while he was still in the Navy.

And then I think he got his degrees from the University of New Orleans and then ultimately a master's in physics and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Utah.

So he ended up having a number of academic roles.

And so he didn't really get his sort of startup experience until he was in his late 30s, you know, some about about our age.

He ultimately founded first Silicon Graphics with some technology that he had developed as a professor, the geometry engine.

That technology inspired a lot of the early graphical computers.

And so sort of the way that Hollywood made Jurassic Park, for instance, was on these Silicon Graphics workstations.

From there, he went on to work with Marc Andreessen on founding Netscape and then Healthion, which merged into WebMD.

And so he was the first person to found three multibillion-dollar companies, which I think Elon Musk has certainly done that subsequently.

I'm not sure if there have been others that have done it.

It's a really impressive thing to have managed to not just strike it rich once, but really three times.

He's been married four times, and he has four children.

Thanks for that overall summary.

And I think we can see why he's worthy of having a book written about him by a very famous author, I might add.

For those that are not familiar with Michael Lewis, you might have seen the movie Moneyball.

That's a Michael Lewis book originally.

So is the movie The Big Short, which was also originally a Michael Lewis book.

So one of the prominent nonfiction authors of our time decided Jim Clark was a worthy subject.

But let's go back to the really early days of Jim Clark.

You gave us a good summary of his overall picture, David.

But Kevin, can you tell us about what his early life was like leading up to founding these companies?

So Short gave a fantastic introduction to why we were reading a book about Jim Clark.