The Journey from 0 to 1, from Mosaic to Netscape

0:00:03 – Hi everyone, welcome to the A6 and Z podcast.
0:00:06 Today we have one of our special guest hosted episodes
0:00:08 as part of a new series where we share
0:00:12 select A6 and Z partner appearances elsewhere here.
0:00:15 This one is with A6 and Z co-founder Mark Andreessen.
0:00:18 The episode is cross-posted from the new show
0:00:21 Starting Greatness, hosted by Mike Maples Jr.
0:00:25 In the show that follows, Mark shares some rare
0:00:28 behind the scenes details on his journey
0:00:31 to product market fit from zero to one
0:00:34 from the University of Illinois and Mosaic to Netscape.
0:00:36 – So it was a strange time.
0:00:37 There’s an old William Gibson quote,
0:00:40 the author of Neuromancer, all the great science fiction books.
0:00:41 He says the future’s already here,
0:00:43 it’s just not evenly distributed.
0:00:45 And so this was a great example of that.
0:00:46 – That’s Mark Andreessen,
0:00:50 who’s now a famous venture capitalist at Andreessen Horowitz.
0:00:52 At age 22, he founded Netscape,
0:00:54 the company that kicked off the internet age.
0:00:56 How did Netscape even happen?
0:00:59 And what was it like when it was about to blow up?
0:01:00 This is Mike Maples Jr. a floodgate
0:01:03 and it’s go time with Mark Andreessen.
0:01:05 (upbeat music)
0:01:08 Welcome to Starting Greatness,
0:01:10 a podcast dedicated to ambitious founders
0:01:14 who want to go from nothing to awesome, super fast.
0:01:15 When you’re a startup founder,
0:01:18 you have to channel your inner James Bond,
0:01:20 your MacGyver, your Wonder Woman.
0:01:23 I’m going to help you win by curating the lessons
0:01:24 of the super performers.
0:01:26 But before, they were successful.
0:01:30 So without further ado,
0:01:32 – Vignition sequence start.
0:01:35 – Let’s get started.
0:01:38 (upbeat music)
0:01:42 I decided to do some things a little differently
0:01:42 with this interview,
0:01:44 because I wanted to capture things
0:01:46 about Mark’s startup journey
0:01:47 that most have likely not heard.
0:01:50 I wanted to get a level deeper about how Netscape
0:01:53 and the early web grew out of mosaic project.
0:01:55 But I also wanted to help people see a side of Mark
0:01:57 that few people see in public.
0:02:01 While you might see him share books he likes on Twitter,
0:02:02 it’s hard to connect this
0:02:04 to what it’s like to spend time with him.
0:02:06 He’s an incredibly avid reader
0:02:09 in diverse areas like technology, science, art,
0:02:12 literature, science fiction, history, politics,
0:02:14 economics, psychology,
0:02:17 and he can synthesize ideas and connect the dots
0:02:19 in a blink of an eye.
0:02:21 And that curiosity combined with his technical depth
0:02:23 is definitely a superpower.
0:02:26 If you’ve wondered about the origin stories of the web,
0:02:28 what it was like to be in the middle of it,
0:02:31 Mark goes into a depth that I haven’t seen before.
0:02:32 And he also reveals the three things
0:02:34 he wishes Netscape had done differently
0:02:37 that would have made the internet better today.
0:02:39 I’m excited about how the conversation went
0:02:40 and hope you enjoy it too.
0:02:42 Let’s talk to him.
0:02:45 (upbeat music)
0:02:48 Mark Andreessen, welcome to the podcast.
0:02:50 – Hey, it’s great to be here.
0:02:52 So Mark, you’ve been involved with some pretty big wins.
0:02:54 So why don’t we just start out by asking you,
0:02:56 what’s your advice to people
0:02:57 who want to build something great?
0:02:59 – So the first piece of advice is don’t do it.
0:03:00 (laughing)
0:03:02 – It’s impossible.
0:03:04 – It’s impossible, so it’s so hard.
0:03:07 John Parker has the best line on starting companies.
0:03:09 Starting a company is like chewing glass.
0:03:12 Eventually you start to like the taste of your own blood.
0:03:14 And so don’t do it.
0:03:16 And the reason that’s the first piece of advice
0:03:18 is because number one, if you can be talked out of it,
0:03:19 you definitely shouldn’t do it.
0:03:21 So if you listen to advice number one,
0:03:22 you definitely shouldn’t do it.
0:03:24 If you ignore advice number one,
0:03:26 you might have the personality type to be a founder.
0:03:28 So that’s the first gut check.
0:03:30 And then you see this a lot, I’m sure,
0:03:32 is there are a lot of people who would like
0:03:35 to start a company, the goal is to start a company,
0:03:37 and then they kind of try to back in on an idea.
0:03:38 We call this sort of synthetic,
0:03:40 we call these sort of synthetic startups.
0:03:41 It’s like I want to start a company
0:03:43 and I am now going to apply myself.
0:03:44 – Market white space companies.
0:03:45 – Yeah, exactly.
0:03:47 Boy, wouldn’t it be great if X,
0:03:50 whatever X is just something I read in the magazine that day
0:03:52 or just a, you know, by the way,
0:03:54 there have been some successful synthetic startups,
0:03:54 like some have worked.
0:03:57 The more common thing is an actual honest to God,
0:03:59 organic idea that is actually something
0:04:02 that you are like deeply immersed in, right?
0:04:03 The odds that it’s going to be like
0:04:05 a flash of inspiration or very low,
0:04:07 but like if it’s a field that you’ve been working in
0:04:09 for five or 10 years and you know it inside out
0:04:10 and it’s just like obvious to you
0:04:12 that it should work a different way,
0:04:13 then maybe you’ve got something.
0:04:15 But you got to like really deeply,
0:04:17 like number one, you have to deeply believe
0:04:17 because you have to really be
0:04:19 irrationally committed to it because it is so hard.
0:04:20 But the other thing is like,
0:04:21 you have to actually validate your beliefs.
0:04:23 Like it has to actually like, you have to be right.
0:04:26 – And gates and jobs are the same way in PCs.
0:04:28 You’re obsessed with a field for its own sake
0:04:29 and you start noticing things
0:04:31 because you’re down the rabbit hole.
0:04:32 – Yeah, that’s right.
0:04:32 And it’s very hands on.
0:04:35 And you know, both the Microsoft and Apple founding stories,
0:04:36 both companies started very small and very humble
0:04:37 because they were literally working.
0:04:38 Like, you know, Apple,
0:04:40 they were building their first computers by hand.
0:04:41 – Yeah.
0:04:42 – You know, there was no abstraction to it.
0:04:43 – Right.
0:04:44 – There was no master plan, there was no theory.
0:04:46 It was can we build a hundred computers
0:04:48 made out of wooden boxes and sell them at the trade fair
0:04:50 and it built out of that.
0:04:52 But to your point, like they were living in that world.
0:04:53 – I would love to just know about
0:04:56 just how you got to building Mosaic.
0:04:58 How did you get involved with the internet in the first place?
0:05:00 – So it was a strange time.
0:05:02 There’s an old William Gibson quote,
0:05:03 the author of Neuromancer,
0:05:04 all the great science fiction books.
0:05:06 He says the future’s already here.
0:05:07 It’s just not evenly distributed.
0:05:09 And so this was a great example of that.
0:05:12 And so what I sort of semi-realized,
0:05:13 when I chose to go to Illinois,
0:05:15 part of it was because they had a top-flight
0:05:17 engineering program, computer science program.
0:05:19 But in particular, they were picked in the mid-80s
0:05:22 to be one of four federally funded centers
0:05:23 for supercomputing at the time.
0:05:25 And this was a specific government program
0:05:26 that basically had two parts.
0:05:30 One was to basically buy these $25 million supercomputers
0:05:33 from companies at the time like Cray and thinking machines
0:05:34 and basically put them in,
0:05:36 basically with four locations in the U.S.
0:05:38 And then for scientists to be able to use
0:05:40 for drug design and studying black holes
0:05:42 and doing all kinds of stuff.
0:05:45 The $25 million computer occupied a full room.
0:05:46 And in fact, in those days, what they would do
0:05:49 is actually build an entire building for the computer.
0:05:50 And then they would actually,
0:05:51 they’d build the shell of the building,
0:05:52 they’d build the walls,
0:05:53 they’d leave the ceiling open,
0:05:54 then they’d lower the computer down
0:05:57 through the ceiling, using a crane to lower it into place.
0:05:59 And then they’d finish the building.
0:06:00 So this was a big deal at the time.
0:06:01 These things were super expensive.
0:06:03 And so they only put them in four locations
0:06:05 and they wanted other scientists and researchers
0:06:07 all over the country to be able to use them.
0:06:08 And so the part two of the program
0:06:10 was this program called NSFNet.
0:06:12 It was National Science Foundation Network,
0:06:14 which was the funding group that they’d pay
0:06:15 for this whole thing.
0:06:17 So those programs are authorized in the mid-80s.
0:06:19 And then I got to Illinois in ’89.
0:06:21 And so they basically had been rolled out at that point.
0:06:23 And so Illinois in those days,
0:06:27 it was like a fully broadband wired internet native campus.
0:06:29 And it was one of exactly four of those.
0:06:30 But just because you have the internet
0:06:32 doesn’t mean that it’s actually all that useful
0:06:33 for anything, right?
0:06:34 That there’s, you know, like if you’re a scientist,
0:06:36 like how exactly are you communicating with every,
0:06:38 you know, with your colleagues on different campuses?
0:06:41 How exactly are you storing and analyzing your research?
0:06:44 How exactly are you gonna share your research with the world?
0:06:45 That stuff was all yet to be built.
0:06:48 And so the purpose of this group was to build,
0:06:49 you know, basically to build the early systems
0:06:51 that would let people collaborate.
0:06:53 – So then you’re building these early systems.
0:06:56 Where does the idea for the mosaic browser come from?
0:06:58 – So funny story there.
0:06:59 So basically, so the project I ended,
0:07:02 I got hired into work on was a project called Collage,
0:07:06 which basically was sort of, I don’t know,
0:07:08 maybe Zoom’s the current comp or something, or Skype.
0:07:11 So, sort of, but sort of general purpose,
0:07:12 real time conferencing, right?
0:07:16 So video, audio video, but also like,
0:07:17 it’s all the standard compliment,
0:07:19 whiteboard sharing, you know, document,
0:07:21 collaborative document editing, Google Docs kind of thing.
0:07:24 You know, this is like what, in 1991, 1992, right?
0:07:26 So they kind of had all those ideas back then.
0:07:27 It’s one of those funny things.
0:07:29 Like it’s when people talk about this,
0:07:30 but like the role of timing and the stuff
0:07:31 is always so interesting.
0:07:33 ‘Cause like that stuff’s all happening now, right?
0:07:35 Like Zoom goes public now, right?
0:07:37 ‘Cause it’s like 30 years later, right?
0:07:41 So the lag on these things can be quite something.
0:07:43 – Okay, so you’re trying to help these ideas
0:07:45 take some early baby steps.
0:07:46 How’d you think about what to work on?
0:07:47 – Well, there were a few things.
0:07:48 So there were a few things.
0:07:49 And so then you basically say, okay,
0:07:50 real time isn’t gonna work.
0:07:51 So it was sort of internet variations
0:07:54 on the bulletin board systems of the PC hobbyists
0:07:55 in the mid-80s, right?
0:07:56 And so it’s sort of those ideas
0:07:57 being transplanted to the internet,
0:07:59 which is kind of what all the social networking
0:08:02 has been doing for the last 30 years.
0:08:03 There was that.
0:08:04 And then there was this new thing called the web,
0:08:07 which had been developed in Switzerland at CERN.
0:08:09 But that was like super early.
0:08:10 And there were like, I don’t know,
0:08:12 two or three websites at the time.
0:08:13 And like the software was like,
0:08:15 it was just very early.
0:08:18 And so if you would read like an article
0:08:20 about the internet at that point,
0:08:21 it would, the article would be like,
0:08:23 well, why would anybody wanna use the internet?
0:08:25 And then a lot of the articles just ended there.
0:08:26 But if they would go on to describe
0:08:27 why you might use the internet,
0:08:28 it’s like, well, you can kind of do email.
0:08:29 And then there’s this FTP thing.
0:08:30 You can download files.
0:08:32 And then if you really wanna get weird,
0:08:34 you can like be on Gopher and wait.
0:08:35 You can like go to Gopher and view menus.
0:08:37 You can go on Waze and do searches,
0:08:38 you know, kind of clay, clay to be molded.
0:08:41 And so basically the original idea for Mosaic was, okay,
0:08:43 how about the universal client, right?
0:08:44 How about, okay, because the problem is like,
0:08:45 all this stuff was like,
0:08:46 these are all fragmented programs.
0:08:47 They were hard to use.
0:08:48 They were hard to install.
0:08:50 But most of this stuff was open source.
0:08:52 It was like, you had to be pretty sophisticated to install it.
0:08:54 By the way, it seems obvious that like,
0:08:55 everybody’s gonna have this stuff.
0:08:57 It seems obvious that kids are gonna wanna keep using this
0:08:59 stuff once they graduate from college.
0:09:01 It seems obvious that there’s gonna be, you know,
0:09:03 software on servers and clients.
0:09:04 It’s gonna be used to share information.
0:09:07 It’s like, why wouldn’t you be able to have a link?
0:09:09 Well, number one, you don’t wanna have a text-based display
0:09:10 ’cause you don’t wanna be able to read stuff.
0:09:12 Like most computer UIs up until that point
0:09:13 were not text-based, right?
0:09:15 They were like, you know, they were like buttons
0:09:17 and switches and levers, right?
0:09:19 Like old style nuclear control panels or something.
0:09:20 And this software metaphor was like,
0:09:21 put everything in a document.
0:09:23 So that was new, but we thought that was obvious
0:09:25 ’cause you’d like to be able to read things.
0:09:28 And then we thought, okay, hypertext is probably obvious.
0:09:29 So there were a set of these things that we thought were obvious,
0:09:31 but it’s kind of like, okay, if they’re so obvious,
0:09:32 why haven’t they happened?
0:09:37 – Yeah, and I remember, was it Vannevar Bush wrote something?
0:09:39 He talked about this thing called the Memex, I think,
0:09:41 and it hypertexts like in the ’40s maybe even,
0:09:42 like a long time ago.
0:09:44 – So I started to do a lot of research.
0:09:45 So luckily, Illinois has a big library.
0:09:47 So I started to do, and again, I was just stressed again,
0:09:49 this is like pre-Google.
0:09:51 So this is like, go to the card catalog,
0:09:54 and try to figure out like, can I swear on this podcast?
0:09:55 – Yeah, it’s okay with me.
0:09:56 – Okay, go to the card catalog and feel like,
0:09:58 who the fuck wrote a book about this?
0:10:01 Like please God, could somebody have written a book about this?
0:10:04 – So basically, the history was there had basically,
0:10:06 tracing back in time, there had been Doug Engelbart,
0:10:09 basically, who basically developed a lot of these ideas
0:10:11 and demonstrated a lot of them working in prototype form
0:10:12 in the late ’60s.
0:10:13 And so there was like an intellectual heritage
0:10:14 going back to Doug.
0:10:17 Contemporaneous, but even before that was Ted Nelson,
0:10:20 who had sort of invented the term hypertext.
0:10:23 And so there was this idea of linking that kind of existed,
0:10:25 but like Ted is the guy who kind of picked up those ideas
0:10:26 and kind of put them in the idea
0:10:28 that a computer should be able to do this.
0:10:30 And so there was kind of that heritage.
0:10:31 And then there was, as you alluded to,
0:10:34 there was this guy named Vannevar Bush who in 1945,
0:10:36 that wrote a paper called As We May Think,
0:10:38 which is one of those great old style,
0:10:41 1940 style titles for papers.
0:10:44 And it basically outlined a hypothetical system.
0:10:47 This is 1945, so Vannevar Bush is important guy.
0:10:49 He was FDR, science advisor during the development
0:10:50 of the nuclear bomb.
0:10:51 And so he was like a very important guy.
0:10:54 And he basically, he defined basically how the federal
0:10:56 government would fund research for the next like,
0:10:57 basically 70 years.
0:10:58 So he was like a very important guy,
0:10:59 pillar of the establishment.
0:11:01 So he wrote this document, which the Atlantic
0:11:03 at the time published back when they used
0:11:05 to publish things like this.
0:11:07 That’s the day they’d publish a piece about how bad it is,
0:11:09 but at the time they just like published a piece
0:11:10 describing it.
0:11:12 Basically outlined a system called Memex,
0:11:14 which was, which is funny ’cause 1945,
0:11:16 so it’s actually like pre-digital computer,
0:11:18 like digital computer was like a brand new idea.
0:11:22 And he didn’t, but like these ideas go way back.
0:11:25 You know, they’re fairly obvious fairly quickly, right?
0:11:27 You know, ’cause it’s like, okay, that would be a good idea.
0:11:29 It’d be a good idea to be able to store large amounts
0:11:30 of information, retrieve it, share it,
0:11:33 transmit it over long distances, search it.
0:11:35 There we were sitting in like 1992 being like, okay.
0:11:37 So basically it’s like, are we crazy?
0:11:38 Right, is the rest of the world crazy?
0:11:40 Or is it just the right time?
0:11:43 – Yeah, and it’s funny because it’s one of, to me,
0:11:45 you know, we both know this guy, well,
0:11:48 biology, Srinivasan, one of the things I really like
0:11:50 is his notion of this idea maze.
0:11:52 I think Chris Dixon talks about it too, right?
0:11:55 It’s, to me, it’s a way better way to come at the question
0:11:59 because a lot of the, like, all of it will happen someday,
0:12:00 right?
0:12:01 And so the question is just,
0:12:03 what’s the right time for it to happen?
0:12:05 And the idea maze is kind of this technique
0:12:08 for understanding all the attempts that have occurred
0:12:10 in the past and kind of understanding why those ideas
0:12:13 got blocked and now do they get unblocked all of a sudden.
0:12:15 How do you decide what to build first
0:12:16 and which ideas are worth pursuing?
0:12:18 – So what we needed to have was a network effect.
0:12:20 We needed to have a flywheel kick in.
0:12:22 We did the browser, we also did the web server
0:12:23 at the same time.
0:12:24 And that web server actually now is,
0:12:28 Apache is the modern descendant of that web server
0:12:30 over the last 25, 30 years.
0:12:32 What we needed was kind of a ping pong effect, right?
0:12:34 Where, ’cause what you want is the flywheel,
0:12:35 where, like, more people reading with the browser,
0:12:37 at least more people wanting to publish with the server,
0:12:38 the more people who publish with the server,
0:12:39 the more incentive there is to read
0:12:42 and then you get the flywheel effect.
0:12:42 So what we needed for that,
0:12:45 the advantage we had is we basically had a hack.
0:12:47 One of the things we say at our firm is
0:12:49 if you’re gonna start a new network effects
0:12:50 are like the best businesses in the world,
0:12:52 but to get a network effect going,
0:12:53 to get through the bootstrap phase,
0:12:56 you need some hack, you need some strategy
0:12:58 to kind of get you through that initial phase
0:12:59 to the flywheel catching.
0:13:02 And so our hack actually was the fact,
0:13:05 well, the internet, it was sort of the NSF net,
0:13:07 the other hack actually was at the time,
0:13:11 internet news groups, and so we were actually the carrier.
0:13:13 And so it just like, it turned out,
0:13:15 and this is one of those kind of stroke of luck things,
0:13:17 it just turned out there was latent demand.
0:13:19 There were enough people on this thing.
0:13:20 They weren’t, it kind of goes back to,
0:13:21 they weren’t online at the same time,
0:13:23 but they were online.
0:13:27 And so there were enough people online where you could,
0:13:29 there was a big incentive to be able to share,
0:13:31 even to the small number of people who were there.
0:13:33 And then there was a big incentive to consume
0:13:35 if there was anything at all to read.
0:13:37 And then this was like the prototypical early adopter crowd
0:13:39 where they just like to try new things.
0:13:40 And so there were a set of internet news groups
0:13:42 that were kind of actively baiting,
0:13:44 discussing all these kinds of topics.
0:13:47 And so we were basically able to just kind of use that
0:13:48 as the carrier wave.
0:13:50 One of the first blogs was a page I maintained.
0:13:51 I wouldn’t say it was the first one, not necessarily,
0:13:52 but it was one of the first ones.
0:13:55 So we had what was called the What’s New page.
0:13:57 And the What’s New page, I would update it every,
0:13:59 you didn’t get into work and update it every morning,
0:14:02 or say when I got into work late in the afternoon,
0:14:02 as the case might be.
0:14:05 – Probably started out as just everything that’s there.
0:14:07 – No, it’s literally every new website, right?
0:14:09 And it was literally like, I would just get emailed,
0:14:11 like, okay, you know, I launched a new website
0:14:13 that’s got the menu of my favorite Indian restaurant,
0:14:15 and you know, Cardiff.
0:14:16 I’ve got a new website that has, you know,
0:14:19 lyrics for the REM songs, right?
0:14:20 It was just like random stuff like that.
0:14:23 A lot of it was just people experimenting.
0:14:25 And so it was literally, and you know,
0:14:26 it started out being like one a day.
0:14:28 I was like, okay, and then it started being two a day,
0:14:29 and then it started being three a day,
0:14:31 and then it went to five and 10, 20, 30 a day.
0:14:33 And so you could just, you could kind of,
0:14:34 there were two ways to see the flywheel.
0:14:36 One was the incoming email.
0:14:37 There were two incoming email boxes
0:14:38 where you could see the flywheel kick in.
0:14:40 One was entries for the What’s New page,
0:14:42 ’cause the What’s New page was the main distribution method.
0:14:43 It was the main way people were finding out
0:14:45 about new webpages because this was pre-Google
0:14:47 and everything else, pre-Yahoo.
0:14:49 But the other email was customer support email
0:14:53 for the browser, which was the thing that almost–
0:14:53 – The ones you didn’t want to get.
0:14:55 – The thing that almost killed me.
0:14:55 – Okay.
0:14:56 – It was providing customer support
0:14:58 for the entire internet.
0:15:02 But that’s another part of the story later on.
0:15:03 So basically, so literally what happened was,
0:15:05 so this whole thing started taking off.
0:15:07 The more and more people at Illinois
0:15:10 started working on this, the teams size started to expand.
0:15:11 We became more ambitious.
0:15:12 And then we actually went for the second round
0:15:15 of NSF National Science Foundation funding.
0:15:16 This is all, all this is happening.
0:15:19 I mean, I was making minimum wage, $6, $0.25 an hour.
0:15:22 But that $6 and $0.25 an hour was being paid for
0:15:23 by the National Science Foundation
0:15:25 through a very generous, generous grant.
0:15:26 And I’m grateful for that.
0:15:27 – At least you didn’t get deluded.
0:15:31 – No, it was hard to delude $6 and $0.25 an hour.
0:15:34 In fairness, they say, keep your burn rate low.
0:15:36 Yeah, that’s a good way to do it.
0:15:37 – Mission accomplished.
0:15:38 – So we actually went, we actually,
0:15:40 so literally what was happening was we were just,
0:15:41 it was working.
0:15:43 And so we had the, we were the dog that caught the bus,
0:15:45 you know, kind of thing where it’s just like the,
0:15:46 like literally what happened was,
0:15:47 you know, the number of customer support emails per day
0:15:50 was like, you know, 100 and then 200 and then 300.
0:15:51 And then, you know, kind of up into the right.
0:15:55 So we went to NSF for grant number two to basically like,
0:15:57 you know, basically make this thing real.
0:15:58 Like, and kind of fully build it out.
0:16:00 And of course they denied the grant.
0:16:02 (laughing)
0:16:05 – We don’t want to pay money to take all these support emails.
0:16:06 – Yeah, exactly.
0:16:07 Which is literally, and what I, at the time I was like,
0:16:08 well, that’s kind of your, it’s kind of, you know,
0:16:09 they have a thing that’s working
0:16:10 and they’re shutting off the money.
0:16:12 Like, okay, that seems kind of dumb.
0:16:14 And then I realized actually later on, I was like,
0:16:15 oh, that was actually smart.
0:16:17 Like, so specifically, like, it’s a research institute.
0:16:19 It’s NSF, it’s research.
0:16:21 It’s intensive on scientific research.
0:16:23 And so clearly, yeah, customer support emails are like,
0:16:25 you know, the 14th version of the Mac client, like, is not.
0:16:28 – Yeah, so maybe that’s an initial sign
0:16:30 of product market fit is when the university says,
0:16:33 you know what, we’re done with you using our resources here.
0:16:35 You’ve outgrown this university.
0:16:36 – Yeah, exactly.
0:16:38 – That happened kind of with Google too, I think, later on.
0:16:39 – Yeah, right, right, right.
0:16:39 At some point, Google would have taken
0:16:41 over the entire computer-sized department.
0:16:42 – Yeah.
0:16:43 – Right, eating all the computers.
0:16:44 And it was, yeah, you get kicked out of the nest.
0:16:46 – Yeah, so they were kind of pushing you out of the nest.
0:16:49 – So in retrospect, they did exactly the right thing.
0:16:51 They did exactly the right thing at exactly the right time.
0:16:54 – So did you decide, okay, I want to start a company?
0:16:56 Or were you just like, well, that’s a bummer.
0:16:57 My grant money just went away?
0:16:58 – The second.
0:16:59 – Okay.
0:17:01 – So then, so like, now you’re just answering
0:17:02 customer support emails.
0:17:03 – No, I was like, shit, I have to get a job.
0:17:04 – Okay.
0:17:06 So what year were you at college?
0:17:06 – I was graduating.
0:17:07 – Okay, so you were about to graduate.
0:17:08 – It coincided with graduation.
0:17:09 – Okay, okay.
0:17:10 – It coincided right around that time.
0:17:11 And I was like, well, shit, I got to get a job.
0:17:13 And so like, and they were, you know, basically,
0:17:14 there’s not, you know, very, there’s very little
0:17:15 actually in Champaign-Urbana.
0:17:18 – Okay, so now you got to get a job.
0:17:19 You’re interviewing for jobs.
0:17:20 – Nope.
0:17:21 – No, what was this?
0:17:22 – Well, I had a slight advantage in my job search.
0:17:23 – Okay.
0:17:25 – Which is like, you controlled Mosaic.
0:17:26 – I controlled Mosaic.
0:17:27 (laughing)
0:17:28 And specifically I controlled Mosaic,
0:17:29 which is like, I got to decide what people saw.
0:17:30 – Okay.
0:17:32 – And so I made sure they saw my resume.
0:17:33 – Okay.
0:17:33 – Yeah.
0:17:34 – Nice.
0:17:35 (laughing)
0:17:36 – Yeah, yeah.
0:17:37 – That’s a growth hack.
0:17:38 – Yeah, yeah, it’s a growth hack.
0:17:39 For your career, you just go in the browser
0:17:42 and you add to the browser a button to see your resume.
0:17:45 And so in fairness, I didn’t put it on the homepage,
0:17:48 which I could have done, that was a step too far,
0:17:50 but I put it in the about page.
0:17:50 – Okay.
0:17:54 – And so I got a set of offers, some on the East Coast,
0:17:55 some on the West Coast.
0:17:56 I almost joined the Java team.
0:17:57 – No kidding.
0:17:59 – In ’94, yeah, ’94 when I first came out here.
0:18:00 (laughing)
0:18:01 But they offered me–
0:18:02 – When it was called Oak.
0:18:03 – It was called Oak at the time.
0:18:04 This was Java pre-Java.
0:18:06 And they, but they, at the time it was a,
0:18:09 it was a spin-out from sun, but it was only a partial spin-out.
0:18:10 And so they offered me something
0:18:11 called Phantom Stock Options.
0:18:14 – So, you know, but it’s also funny
0:18:16 because all of us were thinking about,
0:18:19 okay, there’s gonna be this network-centric future.
0:18:22 But most people were framing it in yesterday’s metaphor.
0:18:24 They were talking about the digital superhighway.
0:18:25 – Yeah, that’s right.
0:18:27 – And so as a result, people thought the center of gravity
0:18:29 is gonna be like set-top boxes and video game consoles.
0:18:33 And I don’t know if others had this reaction,
0:18:36 but when I first saw the Mosaic browser,
0:18:38 it was instant, like instant ignition,
0:18:40 this is how it’s gonna play out, right?
0:18:42 I just immediately knew the way
0:18:43 we’ve been thinking about this is wrong.
0:18:45 It’s not gonna happen on these set-top boxes.
0:18:47 It may someday, but like the browser
0:18:49 is gonna happen right here, right now.
0:18:51 Like there was just no doubt in my mind, right?
0:18:52 – Well, no, so what I would nominate on the point
0:18:53 that you made, I think the point you made
0:18:55 is an important point that we see all the time
0:18:57 in our day job, and we see it all the time today,
0:18:59 which is it’s like, it’s, I would nominate
0:19:00 two kinds of dynamics to that.
0:19:03 So top-down versus bottom-up.
0:19:04 – Yeah.
0:19:05 – And one-way versus two-way.
0:19:06 – Yep.
0:19:08 – Right, and these are still battles that are playing out.
0:19:09 I mean, this is the whole battle
0:19:10 on cryptocurrency that’s happening right now.
0:19:11 Like you see this all over the industry,
0:19:12 all over the world, like this battle,
0:19:15 and by the way, this is like many of global politics
0:19:16 are based on this battle right now.
0:19:18 And so top-down versus bottom-up,
0:19:19 like the view at that time, right,
0:19:20 it was the information superhighway,
0:19:23 it was gonna be sort of, it was gonna be set-top boxes,
0:19:25 interactive television, but it was gonna be provided
0:19:26 by big companies.
0:19:27 – Yeah, or should the government–
0:19:28 – Or the government.
0:19:29 – Yeah, they built the regular highway,
0:19:31 should they build a digital superhighway,
0:19:34 and that’ll help us against Japan, quote-unquote.
0:19:35 – Exactly, that was the big thing.
0:19:36 That was the thought process.
0:19:38 – Family, the country that was gonna take everything
0:19:40 at the time, but it was gonna be top-down.
0:19:41 And so the magazines and newspapers,
0:19:43 100% of the coverage, 100% of the commentary,
0:19:45 like all of the media coverage, it was all around,
0:19:46 it was gonna be, right, the government,
0:19:48 or it was gonna be Time Warner in those days,
0:19:52 or AT&T, or Verizon, or the big cable company
0:19:54 with a predecessor to Comcast.
0:19:57 And so it was gonna be these giant media telecom companies.
0:19:59 And then Microsoft and Oracle,
0:20:00 giant software companies were trying
0:20:01 to kind of wedge their way in
0:20:03 to kind of be part of it, is top-down thing.
0:20:05 But they would decide what it was gonna be.
0:20:08 And then that goes to the second thing,
0:20:09 which is One Way versus Two Way,
0:20:11 which was it was gonna be a primarily video,
0:20:13 but a one-way push, right?
0:20:15 And so this is why the whole metaphor
0:20:16 is that 500 channels, like the whole thing was,
0:20:18 oh, today you’ve got 14 TV channels,
0:20:20 in the future you’ll have 500.
0:20:21 That’s the information.
0:20:22 – And it’ll be interactive TV.
0:20:23 – Well, it’ll be interactive TV.
0:20:24 – You’ll be able to push a button, or a pizza.
0:20:26 – You’ll have remote control.
0:20:28 You won’t have a keyboard, right, or a mouse,
0:20:29 or anything unless you get into trouble.
0:20:30 – You’ll just have a button
0:20:32 that has a slice of pizza on it.
0:20:33 – Yeah, exactly, exactly.
0:20:34 We really had those.
0:20:35 – Or like, you know, American Idol,
0:20:37 basically, they’ll all be like American Idol.
0:20:38 It’ll just be like, oh, you can vote for the person
0:20:40 who’s singing the best, or something like that.
0:20:43 But the idea that an individual user
0:20:45 was gonna be contributing into this environment,
0:20:47 the idea that an individual user
0:20:49 would be publishing a video, right,
0:20:51 or making a post, or anything like that,
0:20:53 was just like setting up a website.
0:20:55 There was just, there was no incorporation
0:20:57 of that kind of two-way idea at all.
0:21:00 And so, I think what put the whammy on people was,
0:21:03 if you came from the established power structure,
0:21:05 if you came from the big companies,
0:21:07 or the press that was used to covering the big companies,
0:21:11 it obviously had to be top down in one way, right?
0:21:13 And by the way, the press, the press was one way at that time.
0:21:15 I mean, this was before the audience could talk back.
0:21:17 And so, if you were at Time Magazine,
0:21:18 or NBC News, or The New York Times,
0:21:19 like you were used to–
0:21:21 – You controlled the conversation.
0:21:22 – Yeah, exactly, and like, maybe you published
0:21:23 the occasional editor to the editor,
0:21:24 but like, you constrained that shit.
0:21:26 Like, you don’t let people get carried away.
0:21:28 And that’s, you know, 1/48th of the space
0:21:30 on, you know, one page of the paper.
0:21:32 And so, there was that.
0:21:33 And so, all the people who thought
0:21:35 that they were in a position to decide had this,
0:21:36 had that view.
0:21:39 But then, all the regular people, right?
0:21:41 Or at least especially the, let’s just say,
0:21:44 the nerds, including ourselves, the regular people,
0:21:45 the people who were just like,
0:21:46 “Look, I just want to be able to do things.”
0:21:47 – Yeah.
0:21:48 – Right, and by the way, do things.
0:21:50 I want to be able to consume, but I also want to create,
0:21:51 and I want to contribute, and I want to build.
0:21:55 – Yeah, and the thing that I’ve just seen time and again,
0:21:56 it’s like, you think about it,
0:21:58 when you were at the University of Illinois,
0:22:00 you’re hanging out with his supercomputers,
0:22:02 and you’re building a browser.
0:22:04 It’s almost like the world was thinking
0:22:05 in Cartesian coordinates,
0:22:08 and you were raised only thinking polar coordinates, right?
0:22:12 And so, like, your mind was prepared to receive the insight,
0:22:14 because like you said, you were living in the future.
0:22:16 You may not have even known it at the time
0:22:17 that you were living in the future,
0:22:21 but it just, and like so much of entrepreneurship I found is,
0:22:22 it’s like noticing.
0:22:25 It’s, you’re living in the future,
0:22:27 and you notice something, and you solve your own problem.
0:22:29 And you’re not necessarily trying to get rich at the time.
0:22:32 You’re just like, I’m working on cool stuff,
0:22:34 and to do more cool stuff, I got to build this thing.
0:22:35 So, yeah.
0:22:36 – When I found it with myself,
0:22:37 or I found it with the other founders
0:22:39 who are like what you’re describing is,
0:22:39 it’s just obvious.
0:22:43 Like it’s just like, oh, obviously this should be this way.
0:22:45 But then there’s like cognitive dissonance,
0:22:46 which is like, if it’s so obvious,
0:22:48 why hasn’t everybody figured this out yet?
0:22:50 Now, most of the time, when people come to that conclusion,
0:22:51 – They’re just wrong.
0:22:54 – They’re just wrong, or insane, right?
0:22:56 – They have a vision, but it’s like a hallucination vision.
0:22:58 – Exactly, exactly.
0:22:59 But every once in a while,
0:23:01 you’ve got somebody who really does decode something.
0:23:02 And I think to your point,
0:23:05 on kind of the preconditions for it,
0:23:06 some of it is you get to see the,
0:23:07 you get to see the early kind of pings.
0:23:09 I always talk about like, they’re pings from the future.
0:23:11 Is there a way that, like,
0:23:13 you can see these things actually running today.
0:23:14 And so you get in a position
0:23:15 where you can see something like that.
0:23:16 So that’s part of it.
0:23:17 But the other thing that happens is,
0:23:19 just like you get to operate,
0:23:21 it’s the people who get to operate with new assumptions.
0:23:22 – Right, right.
0:23:24 – Yeah, and like when you’re your age,
0:23:26 starting Netscape, you don’t have to translate, right?
0:23:29 Like people who lived in Cartesian coordinates,
0:23:31 they have to translate to go to polar, right?
0:23:33 And so people who lived in the world of,
0:23:36 tops down one way digital superhighway interactive TV,
0:23:40 they had to translate that to what you were already doing.
0:23:42 But to you, it’s just obvious, right?
0:23:44 It’s like there wasn’t anything for you to unlearn.
0:23:47 – Yeah, and then on top of that, I had no power, right?
0:23:49 And so like, I was not the CEO of AT&T.
0:23:52 Like I couldn’t do any of the stuff
0:23:53 that all these fancy people could do.
0:23:55 I didn’t have that level of control.
0:23:57 And so like anything that I was going to do
0:23:59 was gonna have to be bottomed up.
0:24:00 It was gonna have to be two-way.
0:24:01 Like, you know, kind of by definition,
0:24:03 if it wasn’t two-way, I’d be blocked out.
0:24:05 – So then speaking of powerful people,
0:24:07 how did you find Jim Clark?
0:24:08 Or how did you guys connect?
0:24:10 – And this is where I got really lucky.
0:24:14 So Jim Clark, kind of quick recap, Jim Clark at that time,
0:24:15 Jim Clark had been the founder
0:24:17 and original CEO of Silicon Graphics,
0:24:19 which was at the time, you know, the companies,
0:24:20 as you said, you were there.
0:24:22 It was the company at the time,
0:24:23 it’s probably most analogous today to,
0:24:26 I don’t know, some combination of, I don’t know, Google.
0:24:29 And I mean, it was like, it was the company.
0:24:32 It was the company that all the smart,
0:24:33 it was like, if you were a smart person
0:24:34 in the computer industry, it was the company
0:24:36 you either worked for or wanted to work for.
0:24:39 It was like the brain center of the industry.
0:24:41 And this was when they really drove
0:24:43 computer graphics to be what they are today.
0:24:45 – Total GWIS company, right?
0:24:47 Best graphics engineers in the world,
0:24:48 best networking engineers in the world,
0:24:50 ’cause you have to push the pixels over network.
0:24:52 I mean, it was just an incredible place to be.
0:24:53 – Fortunately for me, Jim had a problem.
0:24:56 And the problem was Jim had grown very dissatisfied
0:24:59 with the state of affairs at Silicon Graphics at the time.
0:25:00 He got frustrated by a number of things.
0:25:02 He left the company.
0:25:04 He decided to start his second company.
0:25:06 But he had a very specific problem,
0:25:09 which was that he had a non-solicit at SGI.
0:25:11 So he had spent the previous 15 years
0:25:13 hiring all the smartest people he knew in the world into SGI,
0:25:15 and now he couldn’t take them with him.
0:25:17 And so he literally had like a,
0:25:19 he had a, what’s that called, a warm meat problem.
0:25:26 He didn’t have any bodies to work on, to work with him.
0:25:28 And so he literally went out to a whole bunch of people
0:25:31 in the industry who he knew, who weren’t at SGI,
0:25:32 and he talked to them about maybe,
0:25:35 you wanna start something or work on something.
0:25:38 And then he met me through a mutual, a guy,
0:25:40 actually a guy, he worked with SGI who I didn’t know,
0:25:41 but who knew about me.
0:25:43 He was actually one of the guys at SGI
0:25:45 who actually was responsible for all the demos.
0:25:46 They were a famous demo company.
0:25:48 – Oh yeah, that’s how we sold our computers.
0:25:49 – Yeah, and so the guy who ran the,
0:25:51 I think it was designed the demos
0:25:53 or built the demos for the briefing center.
0:25:57 Basically it was up on all the leading edge stuff
0:25:58 ’cause he was the demo guy,
0:26:00 and so he basically knew about all this stuff.
0:26:03 And so he, I apparently happened to mention at Jim
0:26:04 that A, that I existed,
0:26:07 and then B, that I had just recently moved out here.
0:26:09 And so I get a random call from Jim Clark,
0:26:10 like one afternoon being like, hey.
0:26:12 – Okay, and did you know who he was?
0:26:14 – Oh yes, yeah, no, it’s like, literally,
0:26:15 it’s like Steve Jobs calls you,
0:26:17 or you’re like, marriage age calls you.
0:26:19 Hey, you know, and this is Larry Page,
0:26:21 would you like to talk about starting new companies?
0:26:22 You know, you’re like, oh, okay.
0:26:23 – You think?
0:26:25 – All right, you know, gee, I don’t know,
0:26:26 let me check my calendar, right?
0:26:26 – Yeah, yeah.
0:26:28 (laughing)
0:26:29 – So I’m like, yeah, you know,
0:26:32 basically, yeah, sure, name the time and place.
0:26:34 – And so did you guys get on pretty well
0:26:35 in the early days?
0:26:36 – Yeah, so a couple of things happened.
0:26:38 So one is to my enormous shock,
0:26:39 the other people he were talking to,
0:26:41 the other people he was talking to were too risk averse,
0:26:43 and they didn’t, and I should also,
0:26:45 this was during a very sort of down period
0:26:46 in Silicon Valley.
0:26:48 This was not an exciting time.
0:26:49 This was like ’93, ’94.
0:26:51 So there had been a really big recession
0:26:52 and a lot of companies had failed.
0:26:53 And so there were a lot of people
0:26:54 who just like wanted a job.
0:26:55 – Yeah.
0:26:57 – But he did not get as nearly a positive response
0:27:00 as I would have imagined from a lot of people
0:27:01 who had like actual, you know,
0:27:02 and had careers, let’s say.
0:27:05 And so through process of elimination,
0:27:07 in part, I think it came down to me.
0:27:10 And then he and I started brainstorming.
0:27:12 And we actually, well, and then, yeah,
0:27:14 and then we started working together on plans.
0:27:18 – So he wasn’t saying, I want Mark Andreessen,
0:27:19 because he invented the Mosaic browser.
0:27:24 It’s like, I can’t get any of these killer SGI engineers.
0:27:25 He’s maybe another new smart guy
0:27:27 that I can get and not get sued.
0:27:29 – Yeah, I think that’s part of it.
0:27:31 And I think it’s, you know, probably just channeling Jim.
0:27:32 He probably, you know, at the very least,
0:27:33 he knows how to build something new.
0:27:33 – Yeah.
0:27:35 – You know, which not everybody does.
0:27:36 And so at least he’s done it once before.
0:27:39 But the reason why the escape idea was not obvious
0:27:40 is because even after all of that,
0:27:42 it still wasn’t obvious that the internet would be a business.
0:27:45 And part of that was it wasn’t a business,
0:27:46 like nobody had made it into a business.
0:27:47 – Yeah.
0:27:48 – And so there was just, it was just this thing,
0:27:50 which he goes to the top, bottom, sub thing,
0:27:51 which is just like, even after all that,
0:27:53 and I saw the adoption cycle and the whole thing,
0:27:54 and I stayed on all the mailing lists,
0:27:55 and I saw everything.
0:27:56 It was just like, okay, like, I don’t know.
0:27:58 Like, what are we gonna, like, this is all open source.
0:28:00 Like, you know, there’s no commercial transactions
0:28:00 on the internet.
0:28:02 It had been illegal to do commercial transactions
0:28:04 on the internet until 1993.
0:28:06 And this is only the spring of 1994.
0:28:07 So there was no e-commerce.
0:28:08 There’s no Amazon.
0:28:09 There was none of that stuff.
0:28:09 – Yep.
0:28:10 – There was literally nothing to buy.
0:28:11 There was no money.
0:28:12 There was no nothing.
0:28:12 Right.
0:28:15 And so it was just like, okay, there was not an obvious business
0:28:16 to be built.
0:28:18 – And I remember for a couple of years, right,
0:28:21 Upside Magazine at the time and things like that would say,
0:28:24 you know, when’s the internet gonna have a business model?
0:28:24 – Yeah, right.
0:28:26 – For about two years, people said nobody’s
0:28:27 gonna have a business model.
0:28:27 – Yeah, this is absurd.
0:28:28 Everybody knows this thing.
0:28:30 – Even Yahoo, people said, well, great,
0:28:31 but no business model.
0:28:32 – Yeah, of course, yeah.
0:28:32 And Google had no business model.
0:28:34 Like, all these things, yeah.
0:28:35 None of these things had business models.
0:28:35 Right, exactly.
0:28:39 So basically, so, and then Jim had been in meshed,
0:28:41 you know, selling graphics had gotten in meshed
0:28:45 in two areas that were, goes back to the conversation
0:28:46 about having interactive TV.
0:28:48 So they were actually the provider of the technology
0:28:50 for the Time Warner Interactive TV Project,
0:28:53 which was like the most viable, it was the most
0:28:55 actually developed version of the top-down information
0:28:57 superhighway thing at the time in Orlando, Florida.
0:28:58 This was written up in all the magazines
0:28:59 and newspapers at the time.
0:29:02 It was a really cool like system that’s kind of analogous
0:29:04 to what you have today on a modern, you know,
0:29:06 whatever Comcast or Direct TV set-top box or something,
0:29:09 heard like Netflix kind of experience in 1994.
0:29:10 It was impressive.
0:29:12 It was just, it was like the capital cost per house
0:29:14 was like, I don’t know, $60,000.
0:29:14 Yeah, it was crazy.
0:29:17 We had some of our high-end gear, right, power those boxes.
0:29:18 It was not.
0:29:19 So there was no, so we basically set out,
0:29:21 plan number one was to build the software layer
0:29:23 for interactive TV and then we basically realized,
0:29:25 oh, shit, there’s not going to be actually
0:29:26 any interactive TV.
0:29:28 Like, the economics actually don’t work.
0:29:31 And then the other decision was,
0:29:34 SGI was building the graphics chip for the Nintendo,
0:29:37 the Nintendo 64, the first game console with 3D graphics.
0:29:41 And so the idea basically was to build what today
0:29:42 you’d call like Xbox Live or PlayStation Live
0:29:45 to build basically the network for Nintendo 64.
0:29:47 The problem was Nintendo 64 was not going to ship
0:29:48 for another two years.
0:29:50 So literally we got to the point where we were like,
0:29:51 okay, those two plans don’t work.
0:29:52 And then it was like, are we going to,
0:29:53 like, what are we going to do?
0:29:54 Process of elimination.
0:29:57 Okay, so if top-down interactive TV isn’t going to work
0:29:59 and interactive gaming at that point wasn’t going to work,
0:30:00 then what’s left?
0:30:00 Yeah.
0:30:02 What’s left is the internet, right?
0:30:04 And so it’s like, okay, process of elimination,
0:30:05 this thing that nobody’s taking seriously,
0:30:07 that nobody thinks can be a business
0:30:09 that breaks all the rules, that’s bottom’s up, that’s organic.
0:30:12 By the way, messy and hackers and crime.
0:30:14 And you probably don’t even think it’s a business yet.
0:30:15 No, yeah.
0:30:17 Well, now I have no actual business experience at that point.
0:30:19 So I have no basis to evaluate anything in business.
0:30:21 But however, it seemed like a stretch.
0:30:25 But like, if it’s the only thing, then it’s going to win.
0:30:25 Right.
0:30:26 Because the only thing.
0:30:28 Is the thing.
0:30:28 Is the thing.
0:30:31 And so it was weird because Jim was like,
0:30:32 oh, that makes total sense.
0:30:34 And what Jim actually realized, I think to his credit,
0:30:38 was he was so, he was so, SGI was so powerful at that point
0:30:40 that he was able, he was, he was in that,
0:30:41 he was in that top down world.
0:30:44 And he, and so he, I think he would say like,
0:30:47 he was so fully in it and of it that he thought
0:30:48 that that was how the world was going to work.
0:30:50 And he was doing his best to make it work
0:30:51 that way when he was in SGI.
0:30:54 But then he’s got such amazing mental flexibility,
0:30:56 which is extraordinarily rare to have somebody
0:30:57 who’s this flexible in their thought process,
0:30:59 where he was just like, when he got into this new context,
0:31:01 he was kind of just shedding assumptions.
0:31:03 He was able to replant himself into a true startup context.
0:31:05 And able to shed all the assumptions and say,
0:31:06 okay, from a standing start, what would you do?
0:31:08 And come into a completely different set of conclusions.
0:31:11 – Yeah, so then you decide to start this thing.
0:31:12 – Right.
0:31:17 – And you raise money from, well, he seed funds it at first.
0:31:19 He’s probably already been seed funding
0:31:20 just your little vision quest.
0:31:21 – No.
0:31:22 – No, no, okay.
0:31:24 So you’re just on this vision quest.
0:31:27 By process of elimination, it’s like, okay, we’re doing this.
0:31:33 Then you just go raise money from John Dorr Kleiner Perkins or?
0:31:34 – See, we ran about six months with Jim.
0:31:36 We ran about six months with Jim’s money.
0:31:38 And then it’s like, I’m rich, but I’m not that rich.
0:31:42 And so he was like, we’re time to go raise money.
0:31:44 So Jim zeroed in at Kleiner Perkins
0:31:46 because KP had actually backed Son,
0:31:48 which was SGI’s big competitor.
0:31:49 And he had always really received,
0:31:51 he told me he’d always really respected how…
0:31:54 Son, both companies ended up being very successful,
0:31:56 but Son had a much faster takeoff rate out of the gate.
0:31:59 And then he had always respected how John went about
0:32:01 being a board member at Son.
0:32:03 – Okay, so you raised some money for Netscape.
0:32:07 Not sure if it’s a business yet, but hey, let’s go for it.
0:32:11 And this must be around the time when Mosaic
0:32:13 has started to see even bigger lift, right?
0:32:17 Because I seem to remember the summer of ’94,
0:32:19 it was starting to really become a thing.
0:32:21 – So it just knew it was a snowball rolling down the hill,
0:32:24 picking up speed, and it was starting to mainstream.
0:32:25 And so you were starting to be able to…
0:32:26 You’re starting to get the first signs of consumers
0:32:29 actually coming on the thing, which is normal people,
0:32:30 which is like a big deal at the time.
0:32:31 You’re starting to have companies
0:32:33 starting to start launch websites.
0:32:34 So it was around that time,
0:32:35 I think it was around that time that AT&T
0:32:39 ran the first internet ad on at the time.
0:32:40 And because Wired had created a website
0:32:42 and they ran the first internet ad on…
0:32:44 The reason we have all these banner ads
0:32:47 is because the first ad was a banner ad for AT&T on thewired.com.
0:32:50 – When did you switch from Mosaic to Netscape?
0:32:56 – Mosaic had been the name of the project at Illinois.
0:32:58 We didn’t bring any of the code with us.
0:33:00 It was… The code was open source,
0:33:02 but copyright, University of Illinois.
0:33:03 So we decided, and we needed to rewrite it anyway,
0:33:05 because we needed a bunch of stuff in the code
0:33:06 like security that we didn’t have.
0:33:11 So we wanted to do a clean rewrite with what we knew now.
0:33:13 But we figured it’s the name of the research project.
0:33:17 I knew Sun, the name Sun was actually named after the research project at…
0:33:19 Stanford spawned Sun was actually called
0:33:21 the Sun Research Project.
0:33:22 – Stanford University Network.
0:33:23 – Exactly, exactly.
0:33:25 So I was like, it’s not a…
0:33:27 It’s just like the name of the research projects.
0:33:29 It’s like a… It’s a free thing.
0:33:32 So it’s just obviously we’ll just call this thing Mosaic Communications.
0:33:33 We’ll figure out the product name later.
0:33:38 And then University of Illinois then did a very sort of clever thing
0:33:40 I had not seen before, and I don’t think I’ve seen Suns,
0:33:41 which is they didn’t sue us.
0:33:45 Instead, they sent lawyers to all of our potential customers
0:33:46 and told them they were going to sue us.
0:33:50 And so they’ve freezed us in our tracks.
0:33:52 They basically blocked our ability to do business,
0:33:55 because then they alleged to basically a broad range
0:33:57 of trademark and copyright violations.
0:33:58 The copyright violations weren’t true
0:34:00 because we didn’t take any of the code,
0:34:02 but they threatened to sue us for that.
0:34:04 And then we had this problem, which is we had this name,
0:34:07 which there’s ambiguity as to whether there was a trademark on it or not,
0:34:10 but there did seem to be a clear…
0:34:11 – Hard to explain away.
0:34:12 – Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:34:13 Just like inconvenient facts, as they say.
0:34:18 And so we actually ended up suing them before,
0:34:20 I believe it’s what is it, restraint to trade and purchase…
0:34:23 – So are you feeling kind of pissed at them right about now,
0:34:25 like thermonuclear super pissed?
0:34:27 – Yeah, right about now, like today, sitting here?
0:34:28 – Yeah, even now.
0:34:29 – Very much so, yes.
0:34:31 Yes, I’m still extremely angry.
0:34:33 Thank you for asking.
0:34:35 – How does that make you feel, Mark?
0:34:37 – Exactly, exactly.
0:34:41 We’ll pick that up in part two, the psychotherapy section of the thing.
0:34:42 So we actually ended up suing them,
0:34:44 and we actually ended up suing them,
0:34:46 and then we negotiated a settlement and we paid them,
0:34:48 and as part of the settlement, we changed the name.
0:34:48 – Okay.
0:34:52 – Yeah, and that was the last penny.
0:34:54 – So you changed the name to Netscape.
0:34:57 – So then, so you do the Netscape browser,
0:34:59 did it just immediately blow up?
0:35:01 I mean, it was just everybody knew who you were,
0:35:04 everybody knew that you were the voice of browsers, it just…
0:35:05 – Yeah.
0:35:05 – So like what was it?
0:35:06 – That was a super fact.
0:35:08 Well, it was this thing of,
0:35:10 it was basically a continuation of the Mosaic phenomenon,
0:35:11 and we were the clear inheritors of that
0:35:12 because we had built it,
0:35:14 and so it was just one of these things where like,
0:35:16 it was a cold start as a company,
0:35:19 but it was building directly in the momentum from the previous thing,
0:35:20 and then we knew, what else do we know?
0:35:22 We knew Illinois was not going to continue the Mosaic project
0:35:23 because we knew they didn’t…
0:35:24 – Yeah, they didn’t want to do it.
0:35:25 – Right, exactly.
0:35:28 And so we kind of knew that it had to be picked up.
0:35:29 And then look, the other thing was like,
0:35:30 there were just a set of things that you just,
0:35:32 you needed, like it was time,
0:35:34 it was time to be able to like do financial transactions, right?
0:35:36 So it was time that you needed encryption,
0:35:38 which the original browser didn’t have.
0:35:44 – So then, so was there any sort of palpable moment
0:35:47 where you’re just like, holy crap, this is blowing up,
0:35:49 or had it kind of already blown up
0:35:51 even before Netscape really got started?
0:35:54 Like was there any moment where you’re inside a Netscape
0:35:56 and you’re just like, holy shit?
0:35:57 – Well, the big moment was the night of the original release
0:36:00 of the browser where we hooked up one of the computers
0:36:04 to the stereo system and had the Canon fire sound effect
0:36:05 for every time somebody downloaded it.
0:36:07 And the Canon started to go off before long.
0:36:09 The Canon was going off continuously.
0:36:11 – Like how long?
0:36:13 – Oh, that was like in a couple, that was a few hours.
0:36:15 But I mean, that was, but again,
0:36:16 it was feeding on this moment.
0:36:18 It was just like everybody, yeah.
0:36:19 We knew everybody who was using Mosaic.
0:36:20 We knew how to get to them.
0:36:21 We just said, hey, there’s this new thing.
0:36:22 It was much better.
0:36:24 I mean, it was built correctly.
0:36:25 It was our second implementation.
0:36:28 And so we just, we knew it was better.
0:36:30 – Okay. And so now it’s probably what the,
0:36:32 this is probably late ’94?
0:36:34 – Yeah.
0:36:36 – Okay. And so, and if I remember,
0:36:41 you went public like in early ’95 with no profits.
0:36:41 – August.
0:36:42 – Did you have any revenue yet?
0:36:43 – Yeah, yeah. So we had revenue.
0:36:45 We doubled revenue every quarter of that year.
0:36:47 So the revenue that year was,
0:36:49 my quarter was 5 million, 10 million, 20 million and 40 million.
0:36:52 And we went cash flow positive,
0:36:54 like I think right around the time we were,
0:36:55 we went public.
0:36:56 And I think we were,
0:36:57 if I remember correctly,
0:36:59 we were cash flow positive continuously
0:37:00 all the way to when we sold the company.
0:37:01 So one of the legends that,
0:37:03 one of the legends myths that built up around the company
0:37:04 is that it was this early precursor
0:37:06 for these unprofitable companies.
0:37:06 – Really?
0:37:07 – And actually we,
0:37:08 we actually prodded ourselves at the time
0:37:11 of like delivering cash flow basically through the whole thing.
0:37:13 – So was the decision to go public pretty obvious then
0:37:14 at the time?
0:37:16 It was just like your revenues are exploding.
0:37:18 People want the product.
0:37:19 – It was obvious to Jim.
0:37:22 So, so yeah.
0:37:23 So like, what’s it like?
0:37:25 So you’re just barely out of college
0:37:27 and all this stuff’s happening around you.
0:37:28 Like what’s that like?
0:37:30 – You know, it was just,
0:37:30 I mean, it was literally,
0:37:32 we were so heads down.
0:37:33 It was just like, you know,
0:37:34 go work somewhere.
0:37:35 There was one of those things.
0:37:37 There was so much to do.
0:37:38 There was so much to do.
0:37:39 I mean, it’s like it’s building a company
0:37:39 which is incredibly hard,
0:37:40 but on the top of that,
0:37:42 like the whole thing started to work.
0:37:42 And then there’s just like,
0:37:44 you have like a thousand ideas.
0:37:44 – Yeah.
0:37:44 – Right.
0:37:45 And then it’s just-
0:37:46 – Well, and a few more customer support calls.
0:37:47 – And all that.
0:37:49 Yeah, all this, all this other infrastructure to build.
0:37:49 And you know, and then look,
0:37:50 I’m learning business.
0:37:52 I’m learning like basically all the business on the fly.
0:37:52 Right.
0:37:53 – Uh-huh.
0:37:54 – I’m basically learning like, you know,
0:37:55 I don’t know, whatever is in an MBA,
0:37:57 plus another 10 years of operating experience.
0:37:57 – Yep.
0:38:00 – You know, and like as fast as I possibly can.
0:38:00 Right.
0:38:01 So I’m basically either like,
0:38:02 I’m either at work or I’m like,
0:38:03 at home reading business books.
0:38:05 Like those were the only two things that I did.
0:38:09 – So now you know about the theories
0:38:11 of product market fit and all that stuff.
0:38:14 Like how do you reconcile what happened at Netscape
0:38:15 with the notion of product market fit?
0:38:16 Like, yeah.
0:38:18 So how do you, because it just seems
0:38:19 like one of these rare cases
0:38:21 where it’s just like lightning just struck
0:38:23 and it was like huge right away.
0:38:25 – I think for B2B, there’s like,
0:38:26 there are deterministic ways to try
0:38:27 to get to product market fit.
0:38:30 For consumer stuff, it’s less clear to me even still.
0:38:31 – Yeah.
0:38:32 – We actually use the term lightning strike.
0:38:33 – Yeah.
0:38:34 – It may just be.
0:38:35 Well, here’s one of the questions.
0:38:36 It’s like, there are these companies,
0:38:38 there are quite a few companies that have had
0:38:41 lightning strike consumer hits in the last 20 years.
0:38:42 And that led to the creation
0:38:43 of like very interesting companies.
0:38:44 And there’s probably, I don’t know,
0:38:47 in the U.S. alone, 50 or 100 or 150 of those, right?
0:38:49 How many of those, how many of those ever had another one?
0:38:50 – Yeah, very few.
0:38:52 – In the same company that they didn’t have
0:38:53 to go acquire from outside.
0:38:54 – Yeah.
0:38:56 – And I think it’s maybe zero.
0:38:58 – Now people talk about the internet
0:39:02 as being easy for hackers to get to fundamentally insecure
0:39:05 as an architecture or needs to be rethought in some ways.
0:39:08 Knowing what you know now, are there things
0:39:09 that you think you could have done
0:39:11 or that Netscape could have done
0:39:15 that may have made it play out a little differently?
0:39:16 – Yeah, so there’s three big things,
0:39:18 there’s three big things that we should have done
0:39:21 that would have made a big difference early on.
0:39:23 And one of them, well, there’s one thing we did
0:39:25 that mattered a lot, I’ll talk about that.
0:39:27 There’s one thing we tried to do and couldn’t get there,
0:39:28 which remains a hot topic today.
0:39:30 And there’s a third thing that didn’t even occur to us,
0:39:31 which I kicked myself, we didn’t think about this,
0:39:32 but I’ll explain why we didn’t think about it.
0:39:35 So the thing that we did do is we got encryption in there.
0:39:36 – That’s huge.
0:39:38 – And that was a fight then.
0:39:41 By the way, it looks like it’s gonna be a fight again now.
0:39:44 The various Western governments are once again,
0:39:46 pushing to try to restrict the use of strong encryption.
0:39:48 Like we, and for people who don’t know the history of that,
0:39:51 like we fought that battle and Netscape navigator
0:39:54 was the first commercial implementation of encryption
0:39:55 that became widely used.
0:39:56 There had been other products before,
0:39:58 but we were the first one that millions of people used.
0:40:03 And so we, at the time, we developed Netscape
0:40:05 to have strong encryption in the browser method.
0:40:08 The browser was classified under U.S. federal law
0:40:09 with criminal penalties as a munition.
0:40:12 It was classified in the same export control category
0:40:13 as Tomahawk missiles.
0:40:16 And so we were not allowed to export.
0:40:17 The version was stronger encryption.
0:40:18 We could sell it in the U.S., we couldn’t export it.
0:40:21 We had to deliberately export it, we had to export it weakened version.
0:40:21 – Wow.
0:40:24 – So our sales pitch to a user in, you know,
0:40:25 France or Australia or something is like,
0:40:27 “Hey, congratulations, you get the one that’s easy to crack.”
0:40:28 – Okay.
0:40:28 – Yeah, you know.
0:40:31 – The U.S. government can have their way with it.
0:40:32 – I hope you like it.
0:40:32 Right, exactly.
0:40:35 Yeah, and I say, has it pre-wired effectively
0:40:36 because they could just crack it easily.
0:40:40 And so we fought really hard in the ’90s,
0:40:42 since there was an encryption wars at the time.
0:40:44 And ultimately, the government actually backed down.
0:40:47 And as of like ’97 or whatever, they actually changed policy.
0:40:48 And they actually legalized,
0:40:50 essentially legalized strong encryption globally
0:40:52 for U.S. companies to be able to build products globally.
0:40:55 That battle keeps getting refought.
0:40:57 And it has come, and probably in my view,
0:40:57 it’s come back to life.
0:41:00 I think it’s just an absurd thing to be.
0:41:03 It’s just like, do you want secure systems or not?
0:41:03 – Right.
0:41:04 – Could somebody please decide?
0:41:05 – Right.
0:41:07 – If you don’t want secure systems, fine.
0:41:08 I guess we’ll stop trying to build them.
0:41:10 I guess they’ll get built in other countries.
0:41:12 And the U.S. tech industry will not be relevant anymore.
0:41:13 So that’s an option.
0:41:13 – Yeah.
0:41:15 – But if you want American companies to win at tech,
0:41:17 like maybe we should be able to build secure systems.
0:41:18 And if you want us to be able to protect
0:41:21 and defend the United States against cyber terrorism
0:41:23 and criminals and all this stuff, presumably that’s a good idea.
0:41:25 But anyway, we got that one in there.
0:41:29 The one that we tried to do was integrated financial transactions.
0:41:33 So payments, obviously, was something that you would want.
0:41:35 And we tried to build that in.
0:41:36 We tried hard there.
0:41:39 The problem there is, obviously, money payments transactions
0:41:41 have been historically highly regulated.
0:41:42 – Right.
0:41:44 – And so we made arguably the mistake in that case
0:41:46 of asking for permission, which is we went to the banks
0:41:48 and the credit card companies.
0:41:49 – We should have let the pirates go crazy.
0:41:49 – Probably.
0:41:51 The problem was we didn’t have the technology yet.
0:41:52 We didn’t have Bitcoin.
0:41:53 We didn’t have cryptocurrency.
0:41:54 This was pre-cryptocurrency.
0:41:55 – Yeah.
0:41:57 – And so had we let the pirates go crazy,
0:41:58 we would have had to just implement a system
0:42:01 that just let you transfer money with no permission.
0:42:02 – Yeah.
0:42:04 – And probably we would have gotten nuked for that.
0:42:05 – Yeah.
0:42:06 That would have even been worse than the encryption.
0:42:07 – Yeah.
0:42:09 Like PayPal figured out a way to bootstrap a system
0:42:11 a few years later, but they almost died.
0:42:12 Like they came close to dying.
0:42:13 – Yeah.
0:42:15 – They almost got regulated out of existence.
0:42:16 They just barely got through it.
0:42:20 And so that was the big one that we should have had
0:42:21 and we missed.
0:42:21 But we did try.
0:42:24 And that’s one of the reasons why I’m so strong now,
0:42:27 so positive on cryptocurrency and blockchain and Bitcoin
0:42:28 and Ethereum and all these things today.
0:42:30 It’s just like internet scale, money, and trust
0:42:31 needs to happen.
0:42:31 – Yeah.
0:42:33 – It was a huge problem that we didn’t have it early.
0:42:36 Had we had internet scale, money, and trust wired in early,
0:42:38 like the internet economy today would not be based
0:42:38 on advertising.
0:42:38 – Yeah.
0:42:39 – Right?
0:42:41 It would not be based on any of this privacy stuff
0:42:42 that people are worried about today.
0:42:43 It would be based on money and trust.
0:42:43 – Yeah.
0:42:45 – And it would be a fundamentally better, stronger system.
0:42:49 And so, and so we like with our view is like
0:42:51 with cryptocurrency, we have a chance to go back
0:42:52 and kind of redo that.
0:42:52 – Yeah.
0:42:54 – Now, of course, they’re trying to, in various forms,
0:42:55 keep that from happening as well.
0:42:56 – Yeah.
0:42:59 – They, but we’re going to try.
0:43:01 And then the one that I wish we had had,
0:43:03 but we just didn’t even occur to us
0:43:05 as real names, real identities.
0:43:06 – Oh, interesting.
0:43:08 – Which is the other part of trust, right?
0:43:10 Which is like, okay, who are you dealing with?
0:43:10 – Yep.
0:43:10 – Right?
0:43:13 And so all the issues, you know, spam and fraud
0:43:15 and like all these issues of abuse and harassment,
0:43:16 all that stuff.
0:43:17 Like it’s basically, you can’t solve any of that stuff
0:43:18 if you don’t have real names.
0:43:21 And so, I mean, it’s hard enough to solve those problems
0:43:22 when you have real names.
0:43:22 – Yeah.
0:43:23 – It’s impossible to do it
0:43:24 if you don’t have real names, I think.
0:43:26 – Okay.
0:43:27 Well, thanks, Mark.
0:43:28 – Good.
0:43:28 – Thank you, Mike.
0:43:29 – Great talking to you.
0:43:32 [music]
0:43:34 Thanks for listening to Starting Greatness.
0:43:37 You can follow me on Twitter @M2JR
0:43:39 and please shoot me an email with any comments
0:43:41 or questions to greatness@floodgate.com.
0:43:44 I hope you’ll subscribe on Apple, Spotify,
0:43:46 or wherever you get your podcasts.
0:43:48 And if you like the show, I’d be grateful
0:43:50 if you could leave us a review on Apple podcasts.
0:43:54 Never let go of your inner power to do great things
0:43:55 in whatever matters to you.
0:43:58 And until we meet again, remember,
0:44:00 Greatness is a Decision.
0:44:05 [music]
0:44:15 [BLANK_AUDIO]