"The most appealing companies became those in a state of pure possibility,'' Lewis writes. "Which is to say that capital markets acquired the personal predilections of Jim Clark.''
Third Act
And there is a remarkable third act as well, played out during just the last couple of years, which Lewis, who had extraordinary access to Clark, witnessed firsthand.
After Clark was hospitalized in 1995 -- for an impossibly apt affliction, a kind of anti-anemia, too much iron in his blood -- he dreamed up Healthscape or, as it came to be called, Healtheon.
Unlike Silicon Graphics, which was based on a revolutionary new piece of hardware, or Netscape, based on a revolutionary new piece of software, Healtheon was driven merely by an administrative problem (fragmented, logistically messy American health care) and Jim Clark's entrepreneurial hubris.
His idea was to eliminate medical paperwork by creating a computerized clearinghouse that would act as the intermediary between US patients, doctors, hospitals, HMO's and insurance companies -- to accomplish the idealized efficiency of socialized medicine without the Socialism. This is the point at which the saga begins looking suspiciously tulipomaniacal.
"Clark had no plans to spend even a day in the Healthscape offices,'' Lewis writes. "He had ceased to be a businessman and become a conceptual artist.''
The venture capitalists and bankers were a bit more resistant to Clark's new big idea than the A-list Silicon Valley engineers who begged to join him, but only a bit. And earlier this year, just a few months after one attempt at an IPO failed, Healtheon successfully sold its shares to the public.
"No one asked how a company that the stock market deemed unworthy was now, suddenly, desirable,'' Lewis writes. "Like other Internet companies, it said to the stock market: our future will look nothing like our present; ergo, you cannot determine our value by looking at the present. You must close your eyes and imagine a new world. In this new world, skepticism was not a sign of intelligence. It was a sin."
Kurt Andersen writes for The New Yorker magazine.
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