My highlights from the book:

1. Maybe somewhere in a footnote, it would be mentioned that he came from nothing, grew up poor, dropped out of high school, and made himself three or four billion dollars. 

2. Clark was the first person to create three different multibillion dollar technology companies. 

3. Oddly enough, this character at the center of one of history’s great economic booms, who, in effect, sits with the detonator between his legs, could not describe what he did for a living.

4. The new new thing is a notion that is poised to be taken seriously in the marketplace. It’s the idea that is a tiny push away from general acceptance and, when it gets that push, will change the world. 

5. The searcher for the new new thing conforms to no well-established idea of what people should do for a living. 

6. The person who makes his living searching for the new new thing is not like most people. He chooses to live perpetually with that sweet tingling discomfort of not quite knowing what it is he wants to say. 

7. It’s one of the little ironies of economic progress that, while it often results in greater levels of comfort, it depends on people who prefer not to get too comfortable. 

8. Progress does not march forward like an army on parade; it crawls on its belly like a guerrilla. 

9. His mere presence on a scene inspired the question that propels every adventure story forward: What will happen next? I had no idea. And neither, really, did he. 

10. You didn’t interact with him so much as hitch a ride on the back of his life. 

11. New Growth Theory argued that wealth came from the human imagination. Wealth wasn’t chiefly having more of old things; it was having entirely new things. 

12. Growth is just another word for change. 

13. Everyone in the kitchen starts with more or less the same ingredients, the metaphor ran, but not everyone produces good food. And only a few people who wander into the kitchen find entirely new ways to combine old ingredients into delightfully tasty recipes. Their recipes were wealth. 

14. A certain tolerance for nonconformism is really critical to the process. 

15. The Prime Mover of Wealth was no longer the great industrialist who rode herd on thousands of corporate slaves, or the Wall Street tycoon who bankrolled new enterprises. He was the geek holed up in the basement all weekend discovering new things to do with his computer. He was Jim Clark. 

16. Impatience, to Clark, was a commercial virtue. The impatient man kept his own life in such a constant state of upheaval that neither his experience nor his immediate surroundings ended up meaning very much to him. 

17. He was keen on things only as they happened; after they had happened he lost interest in them altogether. 

18. He’d been expelled from the local public high school.

19. He’d been an indifferent student and a cutup—one of those great bad examples to youth who prove that if you really want to be a success in life you have to start by offending your elders. 

20. In under eight years this person, considered unfit to graduate from high school, had earned himself a Ph.D. in Computer Science. 

21. I thought the world was shit and I was sitting in the middle of it. 

22. Success for him became a form of revenge. 

23. He tried to explain this extraordinary leap in his career from a thirty-eight-year-old unsuccessful college professor to the founder of a multi-billion dollar corporation. 

24. After my wife left I went into this spiral. Six months of counseling. Then I said fuck counseling; it wasn’t helping anything. I thought I don’t need some guru to tell me how to find my way out. 

25. One day I was sitting at home and, I remember having the thought ‘You can did this hole as deep as you want to dig it.’ I remember thinking ‘My God, I’m going to spend the rest of my life in this fucking hole.’ You can reach these points in life when you say, ‘Fuck, I’ve reached some sort of dead-end here. And you descend into chaos. All those years you thought you were achieving something. And you achieved nothing. I was thirty-eight years old. I’d just been fired. My second wife had just left me. I had somehow fucked up. I developed this maniacal passion for wanting to achieve something. 

26. In something like an instant, the man had changed his life. He reinvented his relationship with the world around him. No one who was in his life to that point would be in it ten years later. His wife, his friends, his colleagues—they’d all be new. 

27. The Hollywood people were shrewder about the possibilities, and it wasn’t long before Steve Spielberg and George Lucas were banging on Clark’s door and asking to be his first customers. 

28. Jim Clark’s new company exerted a gravitational force on the technical mind. When you ask people who dealt with or worked for Silicon Graphics, they all say the same thing: “It was the smartest group of engineers I’ve ever seen in one place.”

29. It didn’t take long for Clark to become deeply irritated by the rules of American capitalism. In his opinion, the game was rigged so that the people who really mattered most were the brilliant engineers: the chefs who cooked up the new recipes. 

30. Clark took almost everything that happened at Silicon Graphics personally. At each step of the way, it became clearer that SGI would be a huge success; yet at each step of the way, Clark found himself more at the mercy of his financiers, who had nothing at risk but their money. 

31. Clark had trusted him. He’d never do that again with a venture capitalist. 

32. Clark thought that Silicon Graphics had to cannibalize itself. For a technology company to succeed, he argued, it needed always to be looking to destroy itself. If it didn’t, someone else would. “It’s the hardest thing in business to do,” he would say. “Even creating a lower-cost product runs against the grain, because the low-cost products undercut the high-cost, more profitable products.” Everyone in a successful company, from the CEO on down, has a stake in whatever the company is currently selling. It does not naturally occur to anyone to find a way to undermine that product. 

33. He wanted Silicon Graphics to operate in a self-corrosive spirit. 

34. It’s a good rule of the technology business that the more intellectually appealing a machine, the less likely anyone will pay for it. 

35. The guy who finds the new new thing and makes it happen wins. 

36. He was not the first engineer with a taste for money and power. He was just the one who finally said, “Now’s the time to take it.” 

37. Marc Andreessen mentioned that 25 million people were now using the Internet, and that their numbers had been doubling every year. 

38. After the IPO Andreessen, by then twenty-four was worth eighty million dollars. 

39. Most people don’t enjoy making huge gambles on the future. They would just as soon have someone else tell them what to do. 

40. When he cooked up his plans, it never occurred to him that he was an outsider with no experience in the industry he planned to invade. He felt hat pretty much the entire American economy was up for grabs, thanks to the Internet. 

41. Clark had no plans to spend even a day in the office. He had ceased to be a businessman and become a conceptual artist. 

42. Clark often preferred young, inexperienced people over older, more experienced ones. Even if they didn’t quite know what they were doing, at least they hadn’t learned the wrong things. 

43. He could never become one of those ordinary people—a venture capitalist or a chief executive or anything else that required him to behave in the way important businessmen are meant to behave. 

44. Circumstances had made him an insider, but temperament kept him forever an outsider. 

45. He could see human society in ways that most businessmen could not, because he was not very much a part of it. 

46. Clark liked to say that human beings when they took risks, fell into one of two types, pigs or chickens. “The difference between these two kinds of people is the difference between the pig and the chicken in the ham-and-eggs breakfast. The chicken is interested, the pig is committed. If you are going to do anything worth doing, you need a lot of pigs.” 

47. They wanted to be chickens: Clark forced them to be pigs. 

48. He wanted badly to do what was expected of him. It was only after he determined that this was somehow impossible that he went ahead and did whatever he wanted. 

49. He believed in putting all of his chips on 00. He had not the faintest desire to “manage that money”, or to “diversify his holdings.” He sank his wealth in his newest company and left it there until the new new thing came into view. 

50. In Clark’s mind, diversification was a recipe only for mediocrity and stability, which came to the same thing. 

51. Clark’s willingness to take risks others shunned was the source of his financial power. 

52. His role was clear: he was the author of the story. He was the man with the nerve to invent the tale in which all the characters—the engineers, the VCs, the managers, the bankers—agreed to play the role he assigned them. 

53. He was not one of those people who can be sustained for long by other people’s fictions. He required his own. 

54. [Jim Clark in 1993] The Internet is the future of all data communications, and all communications are data communications.  

55. Clark was far happier doing something that he had just decided to do than something he had decided long ago.

56. The Internet created many opportunities for people like Clark—outsiders, troublemakers—to think thoughts that would turn entire industries on their heads. 

57. I remember him telling me when he came back from the Navy, ‘Mama, I’m going to show Plainview.’