Marc Andreessen on Building Netscape & the Birth of the Browser

In this special episode, Marc and Ben dive deep into the REAL story behind the creation of Netscape—a web browser co-created by Marc that revolutionized the internet and changed the world. As Ben notes at the top, until today, this story has never been fully told either in its entirety or accurately. The two discuss Marc's early life and how it shaped his journey into technology, the pivotal moments at the University of Illinois that led to the development of Mosaic (a renegade browser that Marc developed as an undergrad), and the fierce competition and legal battles that ensued as Netscape rose to prominence. Ben and Marc also reflect on the lessons learned that still resonate in today's tech landscape (especially with AI).

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Marc Andreessen?

  It was this invitation to basically do anything. It was this kind of great moment where you just kind of felt like the future was like in front of you. It's very important to know that at this point and all the way up until really 1994, the overwhelming uniform universal expectation was the internet would never be a business. I at the time completely lacked the skill set and the perspective to navigate, I would say interpersonal and in particular bureaucratic situations. I had no clue how to do any of it. So much of computer science at that point was about optimizing scarce resources because that was all you had at that time. And they had spent decades figuring out how to do that. And we collectively decided to just break that rule.

• 0:36Steph Smith?

  You've probably heard of the browser. In fact, billions of people use browsers as their gateway to the internet. And you might even be using one right now to access this very podcast recording. Now, in today's episode from the Ben and Mark Show, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz share the real story behind the creation of Netscape, a web browser co-created by Mark that revolutionized the internet and quite frankly, changed the world. As Ben notes up top, until today, this story has never been fully told, either in its entirety or accurately. In this one-on-one conversation, Mark and Ben discuss Marc's early life and how it shaped his journey into technology, the pivotal moments at the University of Illinois that led to the development of Mosaic, a renegade browser that Marc developed as an undergrad,

• 1:20Steph Smith?

  which is widely referenced as the first widely-used browser, and the fierce competition and legal battles that ensued as Netscape rose to prominence. Ben and Marc also reflect on the broader implications of Netscape's success, the importance of an open internet, and the lessons that still resonate in today's tech landscape, especially with AI. That and so much more. I hope you enjoy.

• 1:46Sonal?

  Who will decide the future of the internet? Read, Write Own, a book by A6 and Z General Partner and author Chris Dixon, takes on one of the most consequential questions of our time, which is also the key to unlocking more entrepreneurship, more creativity, and more innovation. From AI that compensates artists to social networks that reward you for participating, Read, Write Own shares a playbook for building the next era of the internet. Learn more at readwriteown.com.

• 2:16Marc Andreessen?

  Okay, you idiot, like this giant commercial opportunity is staring you in the face. You literally have like inbound sales leads like coming out of your ears. Like, why don't you go raise venture capital and start a company?

• 2:26Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 2:26Marc Andreessen?

  And of course, the answer was because I had no idea that there was such a thing as venture capital.

• 2:29Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, what venture capital?

• 2:31Marc Andreessen?

  I literally.

• 2:32Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, you know what a tractor was.

• 2:34Marc Andreessen?

  Yes, exactly. The content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investor or potential investors in any A16Z fund. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see A16Z.com/disclosures.

• 3:02Ben Horowitz?

  Welcome to the Mark and Ben Show. Today is a super special episode because we are going to talk about the origin of the web browser and the invention of the web browser. And we have one of the co-inventors with us right here, Mark. So it's exciting. It's also exciting because this story's never really been told, either in its entirety or accurately. And so we're going to get a chance to do that. For those of you who are so young that you're not quite sure what a web browser is anymore, it is kind of how most people experience the internet. So you might call it the internet. It's that thing, Chrome. Let's start at the very beginning because, you know, one of the things that is kind of

• 3:46Ben Horowitz?

  one of the largest disinformation campaigns going is this whole idea that people, entrepreneurs and people who invent things are kind of born with a silver spoon in their mouth. And almost none of the successful entrepreneurs we work with is that the case for. They all come from, you know, somewhere between like refugee and middle-class backgrounds. And you certainly were not born with a silver spoon in your mouth. So tell us a little bit about where you grew up. You didn't grow up in a big city. You grew up in quite a small town. What was that like? And then. What is it like growing up and how did you first encounter the internet?

• 4:23Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, so let me, if I could, start our session today with two disclaimers, which maybe relate to your question. So disclaimer number one is we're going to be talking about events that happened over 30 years ago.

• 4:31Ben Horowitz?

  Little memory problems.

• 4:33Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, so you know, I'm going to tell the truth as I remember it. I may get things wrong or other people may have different recollections. And so I have to disclaim that it's because I can't swear to the factual accuracy of stuff that was that long ago. But I'll tell the stories. I understand it. And then I'd say the other story is there are twists and turns along the way where I would just characterize it as at the time I was irritated at other people for things that happened. I think in the fullness of time, what I've realized is that I just at the time completely lacked the skill set and the perspective to navigate. I would say interpersonal and in particular bureaucratic situations, I had no clue how to do any of it.

• 5:02Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, well, I think when you get into your background, people will kind of understand.

• 5:07Marc Andreessen?

  I sometimes describe myself, I was feral at this point in my life. And so it's always this thing, if you could rerun prior events, like with the skill set I have today, I could have navigated it much better. And a bunch of things could have turned out different, but I certainly did not have the skill set at the time. So anyway, if it sounds like I'm criticizing other people, it's actually not what I intend. It's going to be more ultimately criticizing myself in the sense of whatever happened that I didn't like at the time. I think I was at least partly, if not wholly responsible for.

• 5:30Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah. You know, young men can be like that from time to time, you know?

• 5:35Marc Andreessen?

  Yes, I would say I was raw aggression at that point with very little. And you, yes, you, Ben, of course, remembers this because he met me shortly after the events we're about to talk about. So first of all, the modern cliche is, you know, Elon Musk, you know, father had an emerald mine.

• 5:48Ben Horowitz?

  When he showed up in the US with $2,000 is the actual story.

• 5:52Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, exactly. So there's all these kind of fake histories that are kind of retconned into people who grew up in, in some cases, pretty tough backgrounds. Yeah. So I grew up in the American Midwest and rural Wisconsin. And for people who haven't spent time in Wisconsin, there's basically three Wisconsins. There's sort of the big city of Milwaukee, which is like, you know, kind of like a bit, almost like a Chicago kind of thing. That's its own world. And then there's Madison, which is like a very kind of hippie college town. That was actually kind of a core of activity in the 60s. And then there's the rest of Wisconsin, which is completely disconnected from those two cities, which has nothing to do and has no interface into those two places at all. And is sort of the rural Midwest, which is basically farming country.

• 6:28Ben Horowitz?

  A little like grants, actually, as I understand it.

• 6:31Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, I think that's right. If you get 10 minutes outside of either Milwaukee or Madison, you get into real, real rural territory in a hurry, right? And so there were people in the farming world in the Midwest out through the 1970s that still didn't have indoor plumbing. I have memories of outhouses.

• 6:44Ben Horowitz?

  Well, for a while you didn't have gas heat, so you weren't that far.

• 6:47Marc Andreessen?

  There's also, there's also that, exactly. So yeah, so if you want to heat your house, you cut down some wood. And so, look, it's up north and it's very close to Canada, so it's extremely cold. And so it's actually this amazing thing where it's sort of frozen tundra for nine months and then three months of summer. You know, but mostly farming, you know, a lot of dairy farming, a lot of corn to feed the cows. So corn and cows. And then I would say light manufacturing, light tourism, a lot of Illinois people vacation up there, go hunting, fishing or whatever. So a little bit of that, but mostly agricultural. My town was sort of the sign of the outside of town forever. Population 1309. The sign never changed.

• 7:22Ben Horowitz?

  Regardless of whether you had 1308 or 1310.

• 7:25Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, I don't think it actually moved around that much. So it's probably more or less accurate the whole time. And then, of course, the running joke was that's 1309, including the cows. So, so yeah, so very small town environment, kind of lower middle class context and public K through 12 school. My school was very small, 25 kids in a class. So I feel like whatever, 300 kids in the whole school.

• 7:42Ben Horowitz?

  A lot of people don't have school choice today. You didn't have teacher choice either because there's I guess one teacher for every subject.

• 7:49Marc Andreessen?

  No, no, exactly. And then, you know, like this is the 70s and then the 80s. And so this not only predates the internet, but this also predates cable TV. We had no cable TV. Long distance phone calls were still a dollar a minute. We saw, actually, my neighborhood growing up, actually, we had a party phone line for the entire neighborhood.

• 8:03Ben Horowitz?

  That's interesting.

• 8:04Marc Andreessen?

  Which is actually quite an adventure. And so there's a single phone number for the neighborhood. And so when your phone rings, everybody in the neighborhood picks up the phone. This is true. This is true. And then there's a, there's an arbitration process, a verbal arbitration process for who the call is actually for. And then the expectation is that everybody else hangs up, but you know, they don't have to.

• 8:21Ben Horowitz?

  Well, they say there are no secrets in a small town.

• 8:23Marc Andreessen?

  This is one of the reasons why. So yeah, so it's sort of, I don't know, it's halfway between the 1930s and the 1980s or something. It just is one of those places where, you know, a lot of the country was like that at that point, which is it hadn't fully adapted to certainly the things that we all now take for granted. And then you asked why to discover the internet. So I had no idea the internet even existed until I went to college. The thing I knew that existed, and this is where I kind of got lucky in terms of when I grew up and when I came of age, is I came of age sort of precisely at the moment when the PC happened. And so I was aware of, you know, there were all these just amazing stories. This is when Steve Jobs was on the cover of Time Magazine.

• 8:55Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 8:55Marc Andreessen?

  So there was this moment when the personal computer hit the popular consciousness. And it was sort of built in the late seventies and then it sort of catalyzed hard in the early eighties, especially around eighty-two. And then, you know, our school, even though it was very small, started to get a handful of early computers. And then there were a wave of consumer computers at that time that were actually quite inexpensive. And so there were computers at that time as cheap as $200 in currency at that point, which

• 9:15Ben Horowitz?

  And this was our floppy disk. So this is pre-hard drive or post-hard drive when you got your first computer?

• 9:23Marc Andreessen?

  Pre-floppie disk.

• 9:24Ben Horowitz?

  Tape.

• 9:25Marc Andreessen?

  Cassette tape, exactly. Yes.

• 9:26Ben Horowitz?

  It's a slow loader, bro.

• 9:28Marc Andreessen?

  Yes.

• 9:29Ben Horowitz?

  It can't load a game. I remember that era.

• 9:31Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, so if people don't remember, but before floppy disk, you would literally hook up a cassette tape player. And the thing with the cassette tape player is it didn't have any kind of seek capability. Right? And so the way that you loaded the program was you had to fast forward by hand to the right point of the tape.

• 9:43Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 9:44Marc Andreessen?

  Right? And then you were always at risk. You were going to write to the tape. You wrote a program, you wanted to write it, you, under the tape, you ran the risk, you were going to overwrite something in the past.

• 9:51Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 9:51Marc Andreessen?

  And then there was this really fundamental trade-off. If you didn't have a lot of money, it's this very fundamental trade-off, which is you could buy a short cassette tape that was high quality.

• 9:58Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 9:59Marc Andreessen?

  Right? And it was, or a small amount of stuff, or you could buy, same price, you could buy a cassette tape that was much longer and could record a lot more, but at much lower quality. And that mattered because the lower quality tapes frequently, you would not be able to read back what you had written. And so there was a real quality, quantity trade-off.

• 10:12Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, this is a gambling exercise.

• 10:15Marc Andreessen?

  Exactly. And then, so we didn't have the internet, but you know, we had no exposure to the internet. I'll, we'll talk about the internet pre-history in a little bit, but we didn't have that. What was happening at that time was what were called BBSs, which was acronym for bulletin board systems. And you think about these is BBSs were kind of pre-social networks in a way and pre-internet. And so the way this would work is the host of a BBS would literally set up a set of modems in their house or apartment, often like eight or 12 or 20 or something, to take incoming calls from people with remote computers. And then you, in theory, you could dial into BBSs and you just literally used a modem and you dialed into the phone number for the BBS. And then if you got on the BBS, it was really cool because you had access to early versions of like email and social networking and user profiles and bulletin boards and classified ads and downloading games and playing games and so forth.

• 11:00Marc Andreessen?

  And so it's kind of pre-internet, pre AOL kind of versions of these things. The problem that I had was, again, rural Wisconsin, lunges and phone calls are a dollar a minute. There are no BBSs in my town. And so I read about BBSs. I actually don't, to this day, I think I never actually used one because I couldn't afford it. And by the way, also, this is also predates broadband. And so when I first started on this stuff, this is actually pre-modem, as we understand it today. So the form of the modem at the time was what's called an acoustic coupler. And so you take your old fashioned telephone handset and you literally put it

• 11:27Ben Horowitz?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I remember those. Yeah, right.

• 11:31Marc Andreessen?

  In the two rubber cups. And then it's literally using your handheld phone as the receive transmit for the audio signals. And so the acoustic coupler modems were 300 baud, 300 bits per second.

• 11:40Ben Horowitz?

  Yes, and very noisy 300 baud, yeah.

• 11:44Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, very noisy, exactly. So, yeah, very slow. So you could kind of get a glimpse. I would say the romance of the personal computer at that point was very clear. And that's what really got me was, and basically the way that you'd want a computer, you plugged it into your TV set in those days. And what happened was you literally, you got injected into the basic programming language interpreter. And what that showed up as is that it literally, the screen would say ready, and then there was a cursor. And for kind of kids my age, it was this invitation to basically do anything. Right? And so it was this kind of great moment where you just kind of felt like the future was like in front of you. And then there were all these, this became a pop kind of culture thing. And so there are all these books and magazines, you know, that you could buy or subscribe to that you literally subscribe to, you know, hobbyist magazine for whatever kind of computer you had. And it would literally have printouts in the magazine of programs that you could actually sit and type into your computer,

• 12:27Marc Andreessen?

  type into the basic prompt and make work. And so there was this incredible sense of adventure for what you could do on a computer. And then there was this additional thing out there, which was, wow, if you could afford it, you could be on BBSs and you could talk to other people. And so they kind of had that network thing from the beginning. It's just the economics at the time was not feasible to have it be a mass marketing.

• 12:44Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, yeah. Interesting, interesting. Okay, so then you get the University of Illinois. And why did you go there? Why not Madison or MIT or what have you?

• 12:56Marc Andreessen?

  Financially, the state schools were the options. And then Illinois, it turns out to, then and now is a great engineering school. And so Madison's very good, but Champaign-Urbana is one of the top engineering schools in the country. And so it was just, it was a nice coincidence that was kind of close enough and expensive enough.

• 13:09Ben Horowitz?

  It also happened to have national computing, supercomputing.

• 13:13Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah. So this is where I got really lucky. So I dropped into Illinois as a new student, started out in double E and then decided I did not care at all about electrical engineering and switched into computer science, which was a much better fit. But, you know, I showed up as a CS student and basically this was my big stroke of luck was this was Illinois University of Illinois in 1989. So this was four years into two federal programs that basically created the precondition for everything that followed with the internet. And the two programs were something, I think it was called the National Supercomputing Act, and it was basically this effort to basically fund, it funded for what were called National Supercomputing Centers at four universities, one of which was Illinois. And so the campus, the federal government just dropped in a ton of money to basically buy state of the art computers, including at the time, really big computers, like these big Crayon Thinking Machines computers that

• 13:58Marc Andreessen?

  cost like $25 million at the time and filled up entire rooms. Those supercomputers in those days were so big that in some cases, you'd actually build a building for them and you'd build the building, but you wouldn't close the roof and you would lower the computer by a crane down through the roof into the center of the building and then you would finish the roof. And so

• 14:14Ben Horowitz?

  The big iron.

• 14:16Marc Andreessen?

  Exactly. So very esoteric, expensive, powerful systems. So we had those. And then the other federal program was a program to build what was called the NSF net. NSF there being short for National Science Foundation, which is the government agency that all the money came through. And the NSF net basically was the first internet backbone, as we understand it today. And those programs were joined because the original purpose of the NSF net was to connect together the supercomputing centers and then to allow researchers, scientists in many other colleges, universities across the country, to be able to remotely access these large centralized supercomputers. I want to take a moment here to kind of pay credit to Al Gore on this, who famously gets just like endless shit for people kind of saying that he said that he invented the internet. And so to just defend Al's honor for a moment, A, he never actually said he invented the internet. What he said is he

• 14:59Marc Andreessen?

  took the lead in the Senate in creating the internet. And what he meant by that was not that he sat down and wrote the code for it. What he meant was he was one of the real leaders, one of the main forces in the Senate to actually fund these two programs. And these two programs led directly to the internet as we know it today. And so he and his colleagues at that time really stepped up at a pivotal moment. And I think that's actually very relevant to kind of what's happening today with AI. Like, I think that's actually the same thing that needs to happen with AI today.

• 15:21Ben Horowitz?

  Well, it's kind of the opposite of what's happening with AI in universities today, which is they're not only underfunded to do AI, but there's a push among the big tech companies to enact legislation that would essentially outlaw AI in universities by eliminating open source. So. Full credit to Al Gore for doing the right thing because it's clear that wasn't obvious.

• 15:44Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, that's right. We've been spending a lot of time in Washington lately and I've actually been telling the story to a lot of current senators and encouraging them to basically do the same thing.

• 15:52Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 15:52Marc Andreessen?

  The Democrats love it because it rehabilitates Al Gore. The Republicans, I gotta get him through the Gore part, but.

• 15:56Ben Horowitz?

  Everything partisan in 2020.

• 15:58Marc Andreessen?

  But they also seem to think it's a good idea, so I hope that will happen. So basically, my great luck was I showed up at Illinois in 89 and basically four years into these federal programs. And so I showed up, basically just got blasted into the future in one step because when I showed up there, there was all, University of Illinois was actually wired. It was one of the hub nodes of the internet backbone and the campus was getting wired for broadband. And there were computers and computer labs were stated there at equipment all the way up to these giant crate supercomputers that the computer science department had access to. Like it was just there. It was like being beamed into the future. Now, the twist on that is the assumption in those days was you would use this stuff while you're in school. And so they had started to give out like email addresses to undergrads and things like that, right? But the assumption was that you would use these systems while you were in school.

• 16:41Marc Andreessen?

  And then if you stayed and became a faculty member or something, you would use these systems for your research. But if you graduated and just went out and went into the real world, you would leave it all behind.

• 16:49Ben Horowitz?

  The internet, right? There's no access to the internet chains, right? Maybe you could kind of describe what the internet was at that point. Because when we say internet, people imagine a lot of things, but that's not what it was then in terms of a user experience.

• 17:06Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, that's right. And so a couple of things. So one is it's very important to know that at this point and all the way up until really 1994, the overwhelming, uniform, universal expectation was the internet would never be a business. There would never be a business. There would never be an industry. There was never going to be money to be made. There was never going to be commerce. There was never going to be streaming video. There was never going to be stores, any of the stuff. By the way, even the idea of having like newspapers online was considered bizarre. It wasn't even going to be that. It was supposed to be like scientific research papers and experimental data and things like that. And so it was very much not viewed as like a commercial opportunity. It was viewed very much not that way. And basically, I think crypto had been up until like 94. I think zero of the big tech companies of that era took it seriously.

• 17:43Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, zero internet. Well, in fact, the opposite. They were building kind of parallel systems to the internet, often referred to as the information superhighway. You know, Bill Gates was a huge kind of champion of the information superhighway, and specifically not the internet. So, yeah. And he was kind of the biggest figure in, for sure, in software and probably in the industry at the time.

• 18:06Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, so the big computer companies wanted to build proprietary networks, and they were doing that. And by the way, AOL was up and running by 94. AOL kind of got going around 89, kind of the same time I showed up at Illinois, but it really kind of hit critical mass. AOL basically was a consumer-scale version of the BBS idea that we described, and then in 93 it famously interconnected itself with the internet. And so all of a sudden, all the AOL subscribers became internet users. And so there was that, but that didn't even happen until 93. There was certainly no vision for that, I think, in the late 80s. And there were no consumer ISPs, and then there were no normal businesses online. And in fact, the internet up until 1993, what was the NSF net, which then turned into the internet, operated under something that the federal government dictated called the Acceptable Use Policy, the AUP. And because the NSF net was federally funded, commercial activity on the internet was actually

• 18:49Marc Andreessen?

  banned, right? Because it was viewed as a sort of inappropriate use of federal research dollars. And so it actually would not have been legal to engage in commercial activity. And so there basically was none. And then, yeah, and then the big phone companies and the big media companies at that time didn't even want to build, like, BBSs or anything internet-related. What they wanted to do was, basically, what we now know as streaming. They wanted to do what they called at the time, interactive television. And the big killer app for internet television was called video on demand. And so it was sort of the revolutionary idea at that time, that instead of watching whatever was on a TV channel at that moment, you could watch whatever you want by clicking a button, and then maybe you could order a pizza.

• 19:22Ben Horowitz?

  Interestingly, there is a small, minor bandwidth problem with that idea, if I recall correctly.

• 19:27Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, it was actually an idea that was ahead of its time, right? Streaming video didn't really work in the way that we understand it today until, what, probably 15 years later, right?

• 19:34Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, well, really, when Netflix made the cutover from CDs to streaming, which was the late 2000s, right?

• 19:43Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, I remember meeting with Reed Hastings in, I think, 2004, and Netflix was up and running. It was very successful doing DVD rental by mail. And Reed's a technical genius in addition to being a business genius. And he said, I'm thinking about doing streaming. And my first reaction was, that's crazy. It'll never work because even in 2004, like most people on the internet, they didn't have broadband connections fast enough to do like TV quality. So like video at that point was actually these little postage stamp sized videos. And I was like, oh, I don't understand who's going to want to sit there and watch a little postage stamp sized thing. And Reed had correctly extrapolated that the broadband wave in the 2000s was going to result in streaming working. But just to give you a sense of the delay there, right? So even a decade later, even a decade after the founding of Netscape, development of Mosaic, and founding Netscape, even a decade later, it was still considered weird and bizarre to try to stream videos.

• 20:26Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, so the media companies in the early 90s were not being run by technologists. And so they had a hard time, I think, mapping. There was a famous interactive television information superhighway trial in the early 90s around this time, which was to do this video on demand. So to do this thing where you'd have a remote and you could press a button and watch whatever movie you wanted. And I remember it was a trial, they were trying to figure out if there would be consumer demand for this. And so one of these companies, they wired a neighborhood to do the streaming of a video, but it wasn't digital switched, it was analog switched. And so they had a dedicated, long, basically analog line wired to each house. And then in the back office, they had a bank of ECRs.

• 20:59Ben Horowitz?

  Oh, wow.

• 21:00Marc Andreessen?

  Videotape players. And they had a videotape player for each house. And then they had a wall of video cassettes with all the movies that were optioned. And then they had a guy on roller skates.

• 21:08Ben Horowitz?

  You're on roller skates to get to the...

• 21:10Marc Andreessen?

  Roller skates to get there quick enough because the user expectation was you click the button, you watch the movie.

• 21:15Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 21:16Marc Andreessen?

  And so the guy on roller skates had to like shoot over to the wall of videotapes, pull down the right tape, and then shoot down the hall to the right VCR and get the tape in the VCR and press play before the couch potato was like giving up because the stream business started.

• 21:27Ben Horowitz?

  Oh, my God.

• 21:28Marc Andreessen?

  And so, yeah, that idea was a bit early. But on the University of Illinois campus, like broadband existed, like I said, email existed. You asked, how did people use the internet in those days? So sort of pre-web. It was mostly, well, there was the leading apps at that point. There was an app called Telnet that you would use to basically log into another computer on the network. And that was actually very important because that's how the scientists would use the supercomputers. And actually, the group I was in at Illinois actually built one of the main Telnet apps. There was an app called FTP that was a file downloading app. And so you could upload and download files. There was early email. So that worked. There was early what were called news groups, which is like basically forums, kind of early social networking. Ben, I think at the time, those were probably the four main things that people did.

• 22:08Ben Horowitz?

  And it was all scientists and computer science majors on the internet, if I recall. I mean, there was real, nobody else.

• 22:16Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, so this is at the time, 89, I'm gonna guess, there were somewhere between 500,000 to 2 million people total online. And yeah, it was basically the, it was basically the faculty, staff and students at these four supercomputing centers. It was the remote users and then it was like the defense contractors got wired up early. And then there were branches of the government that got wired up early. And then there was like the national labs and, you know, there were, and then a handful of hobbyists would, would figure out a way to get online. And so, yeah, so, so basically it was, you know, first of all, it was like 100% people in the West. You know, overwhelmingly, the US and Europe, it was, you know, very heavily, obviously, English dominated from the very beginning. It was extremely technical, scientific oriented. Almost everybody on it had a scientific or technical degree.

• 22:57Marc Andreessen?

  It was also very, as a consequence of all that, the, you know, it was this incredible, you know, brilliant, you know, this is like a million of the smartest people on the planet. So the, the caliber of the people and the quality of the discussions was like sky high.

• 23:07Ben Horowitz?

  Oh, yeah, I remember the old news groups were unbelievable. I remember like there was like a bug in a compiler, like you could find out about it. And, you know, there, there would be workarounds and like the, the level of expertise on those things was absolutely astounding.

• 23:26Marc Andreessen?

  And look, many of the smartest people in the scientific and technical world at that point were in there and they would talk to you. If you had something interesting to say, and so if you posted on a news group, they, they would respond. And so it was like this distributed community of like, you know, the smartest scientific, technical minds on the planet. It was, it was really special. And then, and then also because there was no money, you know, there, there was, there were no ads, you know, there were, there were no scams, there was no fraud, there was no, you know, spam, you know, there. Like I remember there was actually a scandal that there was a, there was a guy who figured out that this was like a ripe for, you know, basically scam, you know, kind of thing. And he started, did the first spam emails and news group messages. And it was like a big scandal at the time that somebody, that somebody would actually do that. Cause like a guy just literally started to do that, right? And, but you know, it had run for years without anybody even trying that.

• 24:06Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, that's, what a community. That's the true meaning of community, right? Like you have all people of the same culture in one place, that scale, that's, that's amazing.

• 24:17Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, so people who were on that at the time kind of always look back at that and they, they miss it because that, that, that has never been reconstituted. You know, like a lot, a lot of, a lot of those people and their equivalents today are like on X or they're on the other social platforms. But they're, you know, they're a minority population in a much larger, you know, context everywhere now, whereas at the time they were the entire population. Yeah, so that was a super magical thing, but yeah, I mean, look, the actual functional use cases were quite limited. And yeah, so yeah, that's sort of what I saw when I got there. Maybe it'd be helpful, just because I think it's really relevant, both to the what followed, but also the AI discussion. Maybe if I could, maybe I could go back in history now to kind of where the internet came from.

• 24:52Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, yeah, go back to like the late 60s.

• 24:55Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, so the idea of the internet was sort of famously this idea of what was called a packet switch network, right? So the reason the internet works is because it's this peer to peer system in which computer, you know, anybody can kind of plug a computer into the internet and then you kind of have messages that are able to go around and route. And so, you know, famously, this is an idea that actually was developed originally by the Defense Department in the 1960s called packet switching. And in particular, there's a guy, Paul Buran, who's kind of the original, you know, kind of true founding father, you know, godfather of this idea. And actually, he's a great, he's a great story on this, going back to your silver spoon thing. So he was born, he was a Jewish, Jewish, Polish immigrant to the US. And so his parents came, brought him as a small child to the US in the 1920s,

• 25:36Marc Andreessen?

  sort of classic American immigrant success story. His father opened a grocery store and then was able to make enough money to send his kid to college. Buran, you know, was a super genius. He got an engineering degree and then he actually went to your alma mater, he went to UCLA for a master's degree, which he got in 1959 in computer science. By the way, his master's degree in 1959 in computer science was on character recognition.

• 25:57Ben Horowitz?

  Oh, amazing.

• 25:59Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah. So like he was actually, so it's like he tried to do AI first. And, you know, he was early on that. Yeah, you know, he got partway there, but you know, he was already at that point trying to do AI. And then he went, he went to work for the Rand Corporation, which did a lot of work for the Defense Department on military, you know, kind of strategy topics. And there was a huge, this is at the height of the Cold War. So this is in the early 60s, Cuban Missile Crisis, you know, where there was a real feeling that, you know, there might be nuclear war at any moment. And one of the big concerns the Defense Department had was in a nuclear strike, the way telecom systems worked at that point is if you took out the central office, you took out an entire telecom network. And so the fear of the Defense Department was the Soviets presumably knew where the central switching offices were for like the AT&T network. And so they would bomb those, you know, in a nuclear strike.

• 26:44Marc Andreessen?

  And then basically what would happen is the US would lose command and control of its nuclear weapons. And so basically, it was a way, it was, the fear was it was a way for the Soviets to do a decap, what they call a decapitation strike. They take out the central switching office from AT&T, and then the US can't retaliate.

• 26:58Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 26:58Marc Andreessen?

  Literally, the US would not be able to fight, you know, to fire its nukes because they couldn't send the commands to actually fire, fire, fire the nukes. And so it was this existential kind of thing at the moment. And so this guy, Paul Buran, said, well, what if we build a network that basically is designed for packet switch, instead of being circuit switch, where everything's going through a central place, a packet switch, where the packets can flow around, and if part of the network gets bombed, or destroyed, or taken offline, or, you know, power cut, or whatever, you know, the network kind of reallocates. And the significance of this idea is not just that it led to the internet. The other significance is AT&T thought it was the craziest idea they'd ever heard.

• 27:29Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, yeah, right. Because you need control.

• 27:32Marc Andreessen?

  You need control.

• 27:33Ben Horowitz?

  Control, there's a central control.

• 27:35Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, yeah. And I was reading, and just before this, I was refreshing myself when I read Paul Buran's obituary in the New York Times, and Vince Surf is quoted in the obituary saying that, you know, Paul Buran was basically laughed out of AT&T when he proposed this idea, right? Because it was, it was such a heretical idea. So anyway, so the point being is, the internet was a heretical idea from the very beginning.

• 27:52Ben Horowitz?

  And I thought, and both in that it would never work, because it would be like entirely too slow, and the packet reassembly and all that would never work. And then also that it was a dumb idea, because of course you want central control. So like,

• 28:07Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah.

• 28:08Ben Horowitz?

  They derided him in every direction possible.

• 28:12Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, as late, so that was 1964. Twenty years later.

• 28:16Ben Horowitz?

  Horrible idea that would never work.

• 28:17Marc Andreessen?

  Horrible idea that will never work. Exactly right. So that was 1964, when he proposed this. As late, 20 years later, 1984, a federal judge went to break up AT&T, which at that time was the national telecom monopoly. They, they owned and controlled everything. And AT&T actually got the Secretary of Defense in 1984, 20 years later, to testify that, that if the federal judge broke up AT&T, it would permanently cripple the US's command and control capability for nuclear weapons. Right? And so even 20 years later, people didn't, you know, people didn't believe it. It was, it was still a heretical idea. And by the way, 84 is significant, because of course, the very next year, in 85, is when the, is when the NSF net was funded, right? And so it was, it was like a 20, it was a 20-year journey to get from that original heretical idea with resistance all the way through

• 28:59Marc Andreessen?

  to ultimately get to the point where Al Gore and his colleagues figured out that actually, no, it was, it was actually a good idea, and they should actually put money in it.

• 29:06Ben Horowitz?

  So. What I'd really like to know, and I think a lot of people would, is so you have this network with some supercomputers on it and a bunch of scientists and some news groups. Like, how did you get to this idea? Because nobody else had the idea. I'd say, like, first of all, nobody else had the idea. And then, secondly, if you had not had the idea when you had it, the internet as we know it probably doesn't happen in that the kind of Microsoft alternative, the Oracle alternative, would have had an opportunity to gain a network effect. And so the chance of all this getting built, I mean, maybe if it was invented six months later, but four years later, definitely not.

• 29:50Ben Horowitz?

  And so what happened?

• 29:52Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, so there were serious efforts underway. You alluded to this, but there were serious efforts at the time. So let's just itemize the efforts. And so there were three, basically, consumer online services that came out of the 80s. AOL, CompuServe and Prodigy. AOL, you know, became, you know, famous later, much larger. CompuServe kind of petered out at one point. Prodigy was actually an IBM joint venture, so that they were actually kind of clued into that, that part of it early. And then, and that, and they, you know, those systems existed into the early 90s. And those were all these proprietary, you know, sort of proprietary stove piped, not interconnected, not open, you know, these were by definition closed systems. And for people who don't remember this, if you wanted to, like, put content up on AOL, you had to go, you had to pay AOL. Like, you had to, like, you had to get, and you had to get their permission, their approval, and they could take it down. And so it was, you know, any of these stovepipe proprietary things, you know, somebody really

• 30:37Marc Andreessen?

  is in charge. And the internet is the opposite of that. And so that, you know, those systems ran like that. And then there were a set of companies that then were going to do, you're alluding to, that were going to do the leapfrog on that and kind of do the modern GUI version of that. And that was specifically Microsoft with MSN. At the time, it was called MSN. And then Apple had something at the time called E-World. And then who else was running around? A whole bunch of these other companies were running. And then the media companies were doing these proprietary video, you know, interaction TV things that would also be centralized, controlled. But yeah, in particular, I think, probably at the time, it was really the big ones would have been, you know, it would have been AOL getting really big. It would have been, it would have been Microsoft establishing its own, you know, kind of permanent proprietary, you know, online service as an alternative to the internet. And then it would have been probably Apple, you know, with its own proprietary system.

• 31:23Marc Andreessen?

  Probably would have been the big three. And look, those companies would have loved for that to happen. Like, all three of those companies would have been much better off had that happened.

• 31:29Ben Horowitz?

  Oh, yeah. You'd get a vig on every transaction.

• 31:32Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, this was actually the famous, Ben just used the word vig. So there was a famous interview with Microsoft's CTO at the time that they were trying to make MSN work.

• 31:39Ben Horowitz?

  Nathan.

• 31:39Marc Andreessen?

  Their proprietary system. And interesting guy. And he said, he said, yeah, he said, and he actually, to his credit, he kind of said it out loud. He said, yeah, the goal of this program is to get a vig of every online transaction. You know, vig being the mafia term for, you know, your slice of the pie.

• 31:53Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, vigorous.

• 31:54Marc Andreessen?

  Vigorous. Exactly. So, so, and you know, yeah, they would have had, you know, they would have had total control. And so if you think about the level of control that big tech has today, like, it would have been like that times 10. And that really was where the industry was headed. And, and those companies had a big advantage at the time because if, you know, one is they just had tremendous resources, like, they, they, they were funded to do this. And then the other thing is that, you know, you, at the time, you know, look, to just get this stuff to work was hard. And they could marshal thousands of engineers, and they could design everything to work in a completely integrated manner. And they had, you know, all these graphic designers to make it beautiful. And they had all these performance engineers to make it fast. And, you know, they could run big advertising campaigns and do consumers, you know, do consumer support. And I'll tell the story later of how I became the consumer support, I became the user support desk for the entire internet for about a year and a half, myself.

• 32:39Ben Horowitz?

  It's an amazing.

• 32:39Marc Andreessen?

  But, you know, amazing job. They would have had, you know, they would have had the ability to, you know, they had a lot of natural advantages to be able to, to do it in the proprietary way that they wanted. And so this was a critical period for that. Yeah, the internet, as we know today, didn't, didn't have to happen. Yeah. So, so basically, I think in retrospect, what just happened was a couple of things. So one is just the generation of super geniuses like Paul Baran and, you know, your friend, you know, Len Kleiner and Vince Surf and, you know, these, these, all these really bright guys who had created the internet as, as, as, you know, kind of the, the, the, the network side of it. You know, they, they just, they were networking people and they just didn't, they didn't, their natural, you know, kind of world was not user interfaces and consumer services and content and media and, you know, gaming and, you know, all these, all these, all these application level things, you know, they, they just, they, the way these systems

• 33:24Marc Andreessen?

  are built is they just assume somebody else is going to do all that. And that hadn't really happened yet. And so, yeah, so there's part of it was people, they hadn't tried. Part of it was it wasn't a business. And so there was no business motivation to try to do it. And then also, part of it was, there was another coincidental thing that happened, which was the arrival of the graphical PC. And so the arrivals, the arrival specifically of the Macintosh, and then followed by that, the arrival of Windows, Windows version three. And the, and the first graphical PCs. And so the, you know, before about 1992 or so, you weren't going to have a graphical user interface to anything because you didn't have graphical user interfaces at all. And so there was also a moment in time thing that happened there. So there was all that. Yeah. And so then my, my part of the story was, I was, I had a bunch of jobs in college and was getting my computer science degree.

• 34:09Marc Andreessen?

  And then I ended up working for what's called NCSA, which was the National Center for Supercomputer Applications.

• 34:15Ben Horowitz?

  You're a freshman at the time or a sophomore when you got that job?

• 34:18Marc Andreessen?

  No, so I actually didn't get, I actually just started working there until I was a junior. So I worked when I was a freshman, I worked in a physics lab called the Materials Research Lab there, which, which was actually a great entry point for me because the, that was one of the main labs using the big supercomputers.

• 34:31Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 34:32Marc Andreessen?

  And so I kind of got plugged into that world very early. And then I, and then my sophomore year, I spent nine months actually as a co-op student working for IBM in Austin. And I worked on the workstations at the time. Which was again, very, very helpful for this because these were kind of the leading edge user interface, you know, so like I worked on graphics.

• 34:48Ben Horowitz?

  And they had TCP IP, right? The workstations, yeah.

• 34:51Marc Andreessen?

  They were built in. And then IBM in Austin had at the time, you know, this is when IBM was on top of the world. It was, you know, by far the most important tech company still at that, at that point. And, you know, there, we had this, we had 6,000 person division in Austin, working on these, these Unix workstations at the time, graphical workstations. And, and again, they, they had the resources. Everybody there was also wired. Everybody was on the internet. These workstations were designed to be used on the internet.

• 35:12Ben Horowitz?

  Right, right.

• 35:13Marc Andreessen?

  And I was, I was.

• 35:14Ben Horowitz?

  At the time, did not have any internet capability. You know, there was, oh, in, in the early 90s, there was no TCP IP. There was none of.

• 35:22Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, well, computers, you recall this, yeah, computers, PCs and Macs up until 93, 94 didn't even come with TCP/IP built into the computer, built into the operating system.

• 35:31Ben Horowitz?

  Right.

• 35:31Marc Andreessen?

  You had to actually, you actually had to buy what was called a TCP/IP stack as a separate thing.

• 35:36Ben Horowitz?

  Winsock.

• 35:36Marc Andreessen?

  Winsock and these things. And so, yeah, but the Unix workstations of that era, you know, the problem with the Unix workstations is they cost like $50,000. And so, these were not consumer products. But if you had one, you had internet networking built into it. And then if you were at IBM like I was, or at Illinois like I was, you were also on the internet. And so, you know, I kind of, I kind of got to see, you know, I kind of saw the bricks being put in place, you know, for what followed. And then I knew how it all worked because, you know, my job was to do engineering on all these things. And then basically, there was this moment in, basically, I think it was 92, 91, 92, there was this moment where there were basically three online efforts to kind of do front ends, new kinds of, of sort of user interfaces, interaction models for the internet at that point. And so, and it was famously, it was, it was three of them. There was one called Gopher, there

• 36:21Marc Andreessen?

  was one called WAIIS, and then there was the World Wide Web. Tim Berners-Lee. And so, and these were, in the very beginning, these were actually in a real bake-off with each other. There were a lot of people who had different opinions about which of these we're going to, we're going to win. Gopher was, was actually based on the user, user interfaces of the BBSs from the 80s. And so, it was, it was, it was a menuing system. And so, you could go down all these different menus and download content and so forth. And then WAIIS, W-A-I-S, I think it was called Wide Area Internet Search. WAIIS was like a pre-Google, pre-Google search engine. And so, it was sort of the idea that you would have, you know, type in search keywords and get back results. And then, and then this guy, Tim Berners-Lee, in, in, in Switzerland, an English guy working at CERN in Switzerland, had this kind of really, at the time, radical idea, which was to take an old idea called hypertext

• 37:06Marc Andreessen?

  and bring it on to the internet. And, and basically be able to have documents that can link to point to other documents. And this is an idea that goes back to the 50s, a guy named Doug Engelbart, and another guy Ted Nelson, you know, had kind of conceived of this idea decades earlier, but the computer systems in the 50s, 60s were not quite capable of doing it yet. And so, Tim, Tim, Tim basically said, he was sitting at CERN, you're kind of doing related kinds of work that, you know, he was working in kind of support of the physicists at CERN in the same way that I was working in support of the physicists at Illinois. So, kind of a similar, similar, similar universe. And, you know, he had, he had this idea, basically, okay, we're going to put, put hypertext, we're going to put hypertext on the internet in the, in the form of the web. But I would describe this at the time as all three of these were like very, I would say nascent experimental efforts. And then really critically, all three were text-based.

• 37:48Marc Andreessen?

  And again, the assumption here was the internet basically is the assumption was the internet's slow, which for most people at that time it was. And so the assumption was internet's slow, your computer's slow, your network connection is slow. And so Gopher was, you know, literally text-based menus. Waze was type in a text keyword and then get back text results. And then the web was hypertext and it was, there's a text document and then it contains links to other documents. But like, just as an example, the web when it was originally conceived didn't have images. It's just because the idea that the network would have the capacity to be able to do images was just still too much of a reach. And then basically people started, you know, a bunch of people online started to play with this. And then, you know, and then I was, we talked about what I was doing at the time, but I was working on a semi-related project and then figured out that, you know,

• 38:32Marc Andreessen?

  with a bunch of my colleagues there at the time that there was a, you know, we had ultimately this idea that led to Mosaic.

• 38:38Ben Horowitz?

  So what was your other job?

• 38:39Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah. So what I got, so what I got hired to do at NCSA, what I got hired to do is I got hired into a group called the Software Development Group, which was the group that was basically supposed to make, it was again funded by the National Science Foundation, supposed to make tools, specifically open source tools, that would make it easy for scientists to use the NSF net and to use the supercomputers. Right? And so those tools I mentioned earlier, this thing called Telnet. So we made this, we made NCSA Telnet, which was the main way you would log into remote computers. We had, I think at the time, I think we had FTP client and server. We had, you know, so we had like a variety of these kinds of tools that you would use for, you know, for these things. By the way, we also were doing early work in VR at the time, because there was this whole focus, oh, there was this whole focus, what was at the time called scientific visualization. And this

• 39:22Marc Andreessen?

  is sort of, and this is, this is sort of what later became like special effects in movies. But this was, this was actually pre like Jurassic Park and pre Terminator 2. And so this, then the idea was to like, you know, the supercomputers would do these like black hole simulations or weather simulations or something. And then you could actually use these graphical workstations to actually render movies and you could actually show scientific results in visual form. And so that, the group, the group did a lot of that. Actually, those guys, actually, a lot of those guys actually went on and actually ultimately then created the computer graphics industry in both the computer industry and then also in the, in the, in film and television. So that was also a thing that was happening then. And then, and then actually the VR idea was actually already present at the time. And so there were attempts to do, to do VR. And our sister campus at University of Illinois-Chicago actually had something called the Cave, which was, it was an alternate vision of VR. So

• 40:07Marc Andreessen?

  the main VR idea, of course, was a headset strapped to your face, which is what people have today. At Chicago, they had the idea of the Cave, which was no, you're actually in a physical space and you have giant monitors around you. Right. And so you're, you're actually in a

• 40:19Ben Horowitz?

  Like the sphere in Las Vegas.

• 40:22Marc Andreessen?

  Like the, like the sphere in Las Vegas, like the sphere in Las Vegas. And also like the, the way that a lot of these new movies and TV shows are filmed now in something they call the volume, which are sound stages that are literally made up of walls and ceilings that are giant display panels showing, you know, graphic rendered scenes and imagery.

• 40:36Ben Horowitz?

  In some ways, that's the, become the, the most practical idea.

• 40:41Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. That works really well. So the, the first TV show that used that technique was called the, the Star Wars show, The Mandalorian, which is a huge success. And if you watch The Mandalorian, it's actually really, you know, they did a great job on it. If you watch it, it, it seems like they're outside all the time and they're not. The, most of that, most of that series was filmed when it seems like they're outside. That was filmed in a very small soundstage in an environment with giant LCD displays on all sides. And then with all the software, it's control software they have where they could literally shift the perspective of the, of the, of like the background scenes to match like the motions of the actors and they, they'd have like, they have overhead lights so that they can like replicate the sun or like sunset. And so actually, so anyway, so that cave idea in 1992 actually is now state of the art in Hollywood.

• 41:22Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 41:22Marc Andreessen?

  You know, you know, it was too early. We didn't, you know, we didn't have the quality of the screens back then or quality of the graphics. So it wasn't ready yet, but like now, now it is ready. So it's another one of these back to the future things. Yeah. So, so anyway, so that's what the group at, at, at Illinois was doing. And then the specific project I was on was a project called collage. And the idea for collage today, you would describe it as sort of a forerunner to, to zoom or to, you know, maybe Skype or something like that. And it, it did have the idea of doing audio and maybe hopefully doing video conferencing. But the main thing was like a shared whiteboard and then shared documents. And, and so specifically the idea was real time collaboration. And, and so, you know, you, you and I are scientists in two different locations. We're writing a paper together.

• 42:01Marc Andreessen?

  We want to be able to look at the paper at the same time and be able to make edits such that we can, you know, see each other's edits, like, like Google Docs, like the way Google Docs works today. Or to have a whiteboard where you could, you know, you could look at, you know, imagery, or you could look at, you know, draw diagrams. And you could share them and work on them together and annotate them like you had a shared whiteboard. And, you know, I think that was, that was like a good, I mean, that was a good idea. And like all of that stuff has happened and it's very important today. It was just, I think it was in retrospect, it was just before its time. Which is, you just like the internet. What's that?

• 42:30Ben Horowitz?

  Out of order and what you should build first, for sure.

• 42:32Marc Andreessen?

  Out of order, yeah, well, there were two problems, which is one is it was just hard to get it to work because you just, you needed a certain speed of, you know, you need a certain speed of network performance and graphics capability on the computers to make it work. And it was kind of, it was kind of choppy. And then the other problem was to get a, to get a real time collaborative system to work, people have to be online at the same time.

• 42:47Sonal?

  Yeah.

• 42:48Marc Andreessen?

  Right, and so you and I are, we're collaborating, we have to be online at the same time, and we might be in totally different time zones and, you know, like, it's just, it's, so it's hard to get, you know, critical mass for a network effect.

• 42:57Sonal?

  Yeah.

• 42:57Marc Andreessen?

  If you have to be online at the same time, whereas, you know, things like email worked if, you know, regardless of when you're online, you know, so-called asynchronous. And so, yeah, collage was, I was, is a good idea, it just wasn't, wasn't quite clicking. And then it just, it kind of became clear to me and a few of the other folks that I worked with there at the time, that it's just like, okay, that something else is going to pop here and it's going to pop hard. And it's going to be something involving like this, you know, the web, go for waste, like this confluence of basically new thinking of, of user interfaces that's going to take place. And then, and then by the way, it's basically two, two big things, the two big things that sort of we insisted on, the two big leaps was, one is, we're just going to assume that everybody has a graphical computer. We're just going to assume that everybody has like Windows or a Mac or a Unix workstation. We're not going to support not DOS, right?

• 43:41Marc Andreessen?

  And, and, and all systems up until that point, you know, including, by the way, the early, you know, the first web browser, the first web browser was a text-based, text-based browser. You know, the, the Tim Berners-Lee browser, it was a browser that, actually was a text-based browser that ran on the next cube, of which there were maybe 5,000 in the world at that point, so.

• 43:55Ben Horowitz?

  Because that was like one of the most graphical machines ever.

• 43:58Marc Andreessen?

  But he had this problem, he had this problem is, he had the problem, so first of all, the problem of just like, there was no graphical content, there was no graphical, you know, you just like, it just, the assumption was that it was going to be text-based. And then the other, the other problem was, we just assumed that the internet was going to be fast. And that was a, again, a heretical assumption, that was a heretical assumption at the time, because at the time, the internet was really slow. And most people were on very slow connections. And so, you know, the, the experience a lot of people had the first time they used Mosaic, on, even, even on a broadband connection, the first time they had it, is you would literally watch the page load line by line. And then you would watch the images load line by line, right? And so. But it was a heretical idea at that point to say, no, we're just going to assume everybody's on a graphical interface and we're going to assume that everybody's on a fast broadband connection and we're just not going to compromise.

• 44:41Marc Andreessen?

  We're going to build the correct user interface for that new world on those two fronts. And we're not going to compromise to try to be backward compatible with the old text-based UIs or with the old narrowband connections.

• 44:51Ben Horowitz?

  And in a way that you were a university student with no company, no need to sell anything in the beginning. So it was like, fair enough.

• 45:01Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, and my computer, because I worked at IBM and then I worked at NCSA and we had all this money for the government at that point. My computer was an SGI Silicon Graphics at the time, company, leading Unix computer company at the time. You know, amazing company, but they, you know, they made these workstations and the workstations cost $50,000 in $1992. You know, it's like a hundred and some thousand today. But my computer was one of those. And so, and on a fast connection. And so I'm just like, look, I'm just going to build it for that. And then my colleagues built it versions for Windows and Mac, but like, we're just not going to compromise for the old hardware that everybody else is on. We're just going to assume that in the future, everybody gets something like this.

• 45:36Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 45:36Marc Andreessen?

  And then, yeah, to your point, like, we were running on federal research money, so we had no commercial, we had no commercial incentive. We had no reason to go for, you know, large numbers of users or, you know, try to, you know, make money or whatever at the time. So we just basically, again, the heresy, we just designed for the future. And then there was a little bit, I had a little bit of a glimmer, I wouldn't say I was confident on this, but I had a little bit of a glimmer at the time. It was like, look, if we design for broadband, like, if it's compelling enough user interface, it will actually cause broadband to happen.

• 46:05Ben Horowitz?

  That was aggressive.

• 46:06Marc Andreessen?

  Right. This is a, my favorite philosopher, Nick Land, has this term called hyperstition, which is the idea of sort of, you know, sort of willing an idea into existence just by proposing it, sort of like pulling the future forward. And it's basically, and the idea basically was if people could just see what was possible with a modern, you know, Unix workstation on a modern broadband network, with, you know, with what we then built, if they could just see that with Mosaic. They would be like, wow, I need that. And then they would price it and they'd be like, oh my God, I can't afford that. But then they would say, well, I need a version of that that I can afford. And then that, and then that would be a motivation for the phone companies to start to offer broadband and for the, you know, for the PC, for, you know, for the PCs to start to get built in internet connectivity and

• 46:45Marc Andreessen?

  for people to upgrade from DOS to Windows and, and, and all these other things that, that followed. And so I, as I said, I wasn't confident about that, but I had a glimmer of it because I was like, look, like if, if you could get through this knot hole and if you could get the world to the other side where everybody has a GUI and everybody has broadband, then all of a sudden it's just very clear that you, you just, you have all of these incredibly compelling things that you can do that are impossible otherwise. And so it, it was kind of a hard shove in that direction. And then the other, the other, I would say, big breakthrough, or I would not breakthrough, the other really important conceptual rule that we had at the time, which was, which was sort of consistent with the internet philosophy of the time was it had to be an open platform. And specifically it had to be whatever it was, it had to be where anybody could create servers and anybody could create content.

• 47:25Marc Andreessen?

  And so it had to be very easy to do that. And so, and you remember in those days, it was sort of famous that you could implement a web server in four lines of, of Perl script. Right. To do whatever you wanted. And so, and you could create a webpage just by writing HTML by hand.

• 47:37Ben Horowitz?

  And then, by the way, people did and there, there were scaling issues with those four.

• 47:44Marc Andreessen?

  That's how a lot of the big internet companies started out that way. Yes. And then that's one of the reasons why the sites always crashed is exactly, but, but the point was, the point was to optimize for, it was to optimize for the quality experience, then optimize for the openness and the creativity that would follow.

• 47:57Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 47:57Marc Andreessen?

  And again, there was a leap there, right? And we got, you remember, we got a lot of criticism at the time, which was, wow, you know, these, a lot of computer scientists at the time were like, wow, these guys are building the most inefficient, you know, computer systems ever been built. This thing is incredibly inefficient. It's unoptimized. It's, you know, wasting network bandwidth.

• 48:11Ben Horowitz?

  Where's the A's and one encoding? Like this is strings. You guys are crazy. You're wasteful.

• 48:18Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, we were wasteful. Yeah, yeah. Big, you know, environmental arguments, wasting, you're burning, you know, power, you're causing pollution. Yeah, we, these are all text based protocols. So one of the, one of the design principles was all protocols have to be text based. There were no binary protocols. Text based protocols are much less efficient, much, much slower. But the enormous advantage is you can program a text based protocol by writing text. And you can read it by reading text, whereas if it's in a binary format, you're always dealing with an intermediary system and it's just harder to develop for and harder to understand. Source, you know, the.

• 48:47Ben Horowitz?

  Little counter to.

• 48:50Ben Horowitz?

  The belief of the computer science world at the time, I mean, everybody

• 48:55Marc Andreessen?

  Oh, yeah.

• 48:56Ben Horowitz?

  Read on ASM1 encoding is that you have to do that.

• 48:59Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, any CS professor of that era who looked at this said they're doing it wrong. A hundred percent. They said they're absolutely doing it wrong because it's not optimized. It was so much of computer science at that point was about optimizing scarce resources because that was all you had at that time. And they had spent decades figuring out how to do that. And we just decided, we collectively decided to just break that rule. And again, it was not to break the rule, just to break it. It was because what was on the other side of breaking that rule was openness and creativity and empowerment and anybody can do anything. And then

• 49:23Ben Horowitz?

  Inclusivity, right? You didn't have to be a computer scientist, networking expert to build a web server.

• 49:31Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, that's right. And the experience people had, the killer kind of version of this that ended up working really well was this idea of view source. So there was this feature built, we built in a mosaic and it was built into browsers, which was, I forget exactly when it popped up. But view source, the idea basically was you're looking at a webpage, you're looking at the rendered version of a webpage, but you could click on view source and it would show you the HTML source code for the page. And so anytime you wanted to see how a webpage had been created to accomplish something that you wanted to do, you could just look at it and then it made it easy to learn and replicate. And again, that was like, that was not, that was like, there was no, there was no view source for like network protocols before that. That was like, that was a new idea.

• 50:09Ben Horowitz?

  That created so many web design jobs. It was crazy, like which could never have come about. You know, like that little, or a seemingly small thing was a massive thing.

• 50:20Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, no, look, I meet people, I met people, I met, I met, I met somebody just the other day who, you know, literally it's like that. It's like, you know, they first got, you know, their first got access to the browser and, you know, from their, you know, high school or whatever and college. And then they literally, they literally did the view source thing and they're like, oh, I can write HTML. And then they got a job as a web designer. And then that paid their way through, you know, whatever to, you know, get to the career going or start their company. And yeah, so that was, yeah, economic empowerment, yeah, inclusivity, yeah, maximal, I would say maximal inclusivity, you know? And look, you know, technical whizzes could do more, but like you did not have to be a technical whiz to get started and get going. And then it gave you a very powerful motivation to learn more and a very easy way to learn more. Yeah, and so that that worked out really well. And then basically, the Mosaic idea basically was, okay, pull all this stuff together. So build basically the unified visual interface.

• 51:05Marc Andreessen?

  And Mosaic out of the gate actually supported all three of the systems that I described. So we supported out of the gate with the web in its sort of text form at the time. And then Gopher, and then Waze. And we actually also supported FTP. We supported, actually had native support for Internet news groups. And so it was sort of a single graphical user interface to rule them all. So we had support for all this. And then the web, obviously, is the one that took off. And then the other part of it for Mosaic was to then make the web graphical. And so to transition it from a text-based, kind of text prompt DOS kind of situation to be full graphical web pages. And that was, of course, that was then the thing that really kind of just got lit on fire.

• 51:42Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, you famously invented the image tag, if I recall.

• 51:48Marc Andreessen?

  So there was a big dispute. There was a big dispute early on. So there was a big dispute. So there was opposition early on within the Internet community. And I won't name names. But within the set of people who were into this kind of thing, working on it, there was actually a lot of controversy around the idea of adding images. And there was a big argument. There are actually multiple arguments to not add images. And by the way, to not images means not make it graphical, right? Not bring it into the GUI world. And one argument was just efficiency, again, network optimization, use of resources. And by the way, sort of equality argument, not everybody has a graphical workstation.

• 52:22Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, right.

• 52:23Marc Andreessen?

  Right. It would be unfair to them if there's webpages that they can't view. So that was part of the argument. There was certainly a speed performance, waste argument to it. And then there was also a cultural argument. And this was around the time that the Internet was starting to really open up. And that kind of nirvana I was mentioning, where everybody is like a CS degree holder, is starting to become a consumer thing early on. And there was a lot of anxiety around that. And so there was an argument at the time that content of the Internet should remain only scientific and technical, right? And if you add features and capabilities like images and graphics, then you are encouraging the creation of sort of mass market content, right? And if you have mass market content, that's going to draw more of the wrong kinds of users.

• 53:03Ben Horowitz?

  A valid argument.

• 53:05Marc Andreessen?

  It turns out, it turns out that argument was correct. But, but, but, well.

• 53:13Marc Andreessen?

  Well, it was, it was, it was correct. The people who made that argument were correct based on their own presuppositions.

• 53:17Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 53:17Marc Andreessen?

  I, I was, I was on the other side of that argument and I was on, I was on the other side of each, each of those arguments. But specifically on that argument is I, I just always thought everybody should be able to use this. I, I was very much on the side of this is amazing. Everybody on the planet should be on the internet. Everybody on the internet should be on the web. Everybody on the web should be graphical. Like there, there should, yes, there should be content all over the internet that's graphical. There should be, you know, all kinds of pictures and movies, animations and streaming and games. And like, yes, you should have all this and everybody should be on it and we should, we should maximize this. And that, that made, and again, heretical idea that, that was, there were a lot of people at the time who were very important at the time, who were very anxious about that. And then, and basically we, we just, so there was a big fight argument around that and we weren't making progress on it. And then I just did a, cause I controlled, you know, I controlled Mosaic at that point.

• 54:01Marc Andreessen?

  So I just did a fait accompli and I just declared it and I created the image tag.

• 54:05Ben Horowitz?

  And people put up images.

• 54:08Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah. So I, I won the, what's the, I won the, I won, I won the de facto argument, just through, through sheer authoritarian action.

• 54:14Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah. You, you were a king of the internet. And then it's called, tell us about like, okay, how did it take off? When did the press recognize it? And then how did you become, go from king of the internet to customer support for the entire internet?

• 54:30Marc Andreessen?

  It's the same thing. It's the same thing. Also the main, the main blogger, um, and maybe the first blogger, depending on, on how you score it. So it was also the sort of, I was the front page for a while. So yeah, so we, we started basically a, a group of us at, at, at NCSA basically kind of went rogue in 1991. And, you know, started kind of working on this idea on nights and weekends. And in, in particular, uh, my partner at the time, Eric Beena and, and myself, you know, we were the first two to kind of work on this. And, and just a, you know, full, full kind of acknowledgement here. Eric and I co-wrote the first version of Mosaic, which was for Unix workstations. And then we, we had other colleagues who, you know, who are, you, you are, you know, very, very famous in the history, who developed the Windows version and developed the Mac version. And, and so we, you know, we did develop for all three, three of those platforms. But the, the first version was the Unix version.

• 55:14Marc Andreessen?

  Eric and I built it. I always, I always credit it as I did the front end and then Eric did all the hard work.

• 55:19Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah. Yeah. He was a great programmer, I guess. Yeah.

• 55:21Marc Andreessen?

  He was fantastic. Absolutely outstanding programmer, uh, is an outstanding programmer. And, and so I, I did the UI and Eric did the rendering engine. And so Eric built, the rendering engine is the core of it. Like the rendering engine is the thing that actually renders the page and has all the user interface elements and makes the links work and displays the images and all this stuff. And, and that was, that was definitely the harder, the harder half of it from a programming standpoint. So I give Eric, you know, I give Eric like at least half the credit, if not more for that. And then, and then my role was, was the front end. So it's kind of everything around the rendering engine. And so it was the rest of the UI. And then it was the other, you know, the, I did the networking protocols and all the, you know, user, everything, user preferences and all the cache, you know, sort of caching and all the, all the things to kind of make the rendering engine work. Um, so it was the two of us and it was really like, uh, the, the core work was sort of a crash renegade project kind of off books.

• 56:06Marc Andreessen?

  And for me, it was like off books in two ways. It was not what I was supposed to be doing at work, but it was also, I was doing this instead of going to class. This is when I almost got kicked out of college also. Uh, yeah. So we, it was sort of a crash course over the course of, I guess, the fourth quarter of 92. And then the, you know, we kind of worked really hard over the holiday break in 92 to kind of get it working. And then I, I forget the exact sequence, but we had put out the first kind of acceptable version, which I think was the 0.9 version and like around Christmas or a little bit after 92. And then I think got to quote 1.0 and kind of the spring of 93. And yeah, and basically it, it went vertical, basically out of the gate with the point nine version. So it was basically a, yeah. So it's sort of a, it's sort of a year of preparatory work in 92. And then it was sort of 93 was the vertical takeoff. And, and 93 was a very important year for me because it was my senior year in college also.

• 56:51Marc Andreessen?

  And so, and I was off a semester, I was, I was off cycle by a semester for, for reasons. And then, and so anyway, so, so, so January to December 93, where my, where it's my, that was my senior year in college. And so this was like my, my chance to like really do that. And then, cause I, I just assumed I was going to graduate and, you know, leave and get a job at, at, at the end of the year. So I had about a 12, 12 month run there where, where the thing really took off. And then, yeah, look, it was the tiger. Oh, and then we had other colleagues who did the, did the, did the, the, the, what was the, the, not the first web server, but the first kind of widely used, I would say robust, scalable web server. And again, that, that also again, gave us a lot of ability to move quickly because we can, we actually controlled for, for that period, we controlled both the client and the server.

• 57:27Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 57:28Marc Andreessen?

  And so we, we can move very fast. Yeah. So that, yeah, so that, the, the two of them came out and then, and then people started to figure this out and it started to get, you know, widely used among existing internet users. And then, and then it was an immediate reason for people to get online at home. And it was really the first reason for a lot of people to try to get online at home. And so it also, I think helped catalyze the boom in what were called at the time, consumer ISPs. And for people to upgrade their PCs to be graphical and then have network, you know, have the network stack. And so the 93 was like this upward, you know, the straight kind of upward hurricane. But again, it was in this context of we're working for a research institute funded by the federal government. And so, you know, we have, you know, we have no money, we have no revenue, we have no business model, you know. If we got a product out there that's taking off. It's taking off like crazy. And then we did, we put it out as open source, but

• 58:12Marc Andreessen?

  under what's what is called a hybrid license. We put it on under a hybrid license that says it's free for, it's all free for academic and individual use and nonprofit use. But if you want to use it for commercial applications, you have to come talk to us. Oh, right. And then, and then I had the, I had the mailbox for the incoming commercial queries. And I remember when it hit like 400 of basically, of basic companies, you know, like general councils and, you know, procurement officers at big companies saying, you know, we want to deploy this throughout our company, you know, who do we pay? And we had no way to take the money. We didn't even have like a price sheet. We didn't have any of this. And then, and then very critically, we didn't have any support, right? So we didn't have any customer support resources. And so we had the support email address and I also had that email box. Yeah. And so in my spare time between coding sessions, I would literally just like answer questions. Yeah. And, and but it was literally, it was, you know, it was supposed to be tech support

• 58:57Marc Andreessen?

  for Mosaic, but it turned into tech support for the entire internet. And so I helped a lot of people. You know, the difference between, that was the internet for everybody, you know, and a lot of ways still is. Exactly. And so, so it really started to take, it then sort of became a formal project. It kind of got, got embraced and became a real project and got more resources. And then, but we were, you know, we were kind of just dying from the overhead and, you know, we needed more servers and we needed more people and the whole thing. And so we wrote, I remember we wrote a proposal to, for a grant, we wanted an incremental grant from the National Science Foundation, and it was to staff a customer support desk so that we could support, so we could hire like, you know, whatever, four people. Customer support. Yeah. So this is actually my first trip to Washington DC is we, we, we issued this grant, we sent it to Dan. And, and the National Science Foundation people, to their

• 59:42Marc Andreessen?

  credit, they were fascinated by this whole thing and they were glad that it was working. But we sent in this grant. It was the only place we had any sense of wanting to get money. And we sent in this grant and literally it came back denied. You know, the National Science Foundation is not in the business of, you know, funding customer support. One of the, one of the sort of fun twists here is, okay, you idiot, like this giant commercial opportunity is staring you in the face. Like you've, you, you literally have like inbound sales leads like coming out of your ears. Like, why don't you go raise venture capital and start a company?

• 1:00:10Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:10Marc Andreessen?

  And of course, the answer was because I had no idea that there was such a thing as venture capital.

• 1:00:14Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, venture capital.

• 1:00:16Marc Andreessen?

  I literally.

• 1:00:16Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, you know what a tractor was.

• 1:00:19Marc Andreessen?

  Yes, exactly. You know, I had no conception whatsoever for, you know, for, I had no, just no clue at the time that it was actually a tractable thing that you could, you could, you could do that. And that was like something that like, you know, really, you know, rich, famous fancy people did, or, you know, I don't know, some people got luckier, people in Silicon Valley or something, but like people in Illinois certainly were not doing that. And so, you know, and there was no venture capital in Champaign or Baton at that point. And then there was exactly, there was exactly one software startup at that point called Spyglass, which, which is a name that will come up later in the story.

• 1:00:46Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:47Marc Andreessen?

  But, but it was not doing well. And so it was like, it was more of a cautionary tale. And so we, we basically just, yeah, we had the tiger by the tail and then we just kind of held on, held on for dear life, kind of through that year.

• 1:00:56Ben Horowitz?

  Incredible. And then when did the, kind of, when did the kind of media and the press get wind of it?

• 1:01:02Marc Andreessen?

  So this is a funny story. So, so there was a Wall Street Journal reporter named Jared Sandberg.

• 1:01:07Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah. Well, yeah, I remember Jared Sandberg. He was a funny guy.

• 1:01:11Marc Andreessen?

  He was a great guy. He was a great guy. You know, this is 30 years ago, so we're using the was here for people who are still in perfectly good health.

• 1:01:17Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was a great character.

• 1:01:22Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, yeah. And it was and is a great writer, great reporter. And so he, he had sort of the tech beat at the Wall Street Journal at the time. And he figured this out early and called me up the blue, probably in, I don't know, late 92, early 93, like super early. And he had the story ready to go and he was intensely frustrated because he could not get his editors to run it. Because, because it was not an important story.

• 1:01:41Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, of course. What are you talking about? It's just a bunch of idiot kids with bad grades. Couldn't do writing software.

• 1:01:46Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, yeah. On this internet thing that nobody cares about, that's never going to be a thing, that's about to get quashed, you know, squashed by MSN and AOL and interactive television. And like, I tell you again, just talk about the, the heresy aspect of this, like, this is, you know, this is why I'm so distrustful of experts. Like this is my origin story for why I don't trust anybody with credentials on anything anymore. So I remember, another one, like, so I was working on, I remember working, it was, it must have been, it was like December of 92 or January 93. So I'm like, working around the clock in my little office at NCSA. And you know, this is at Urbana-Champaign is also, you know, it's a little further south where I grew up, but it's still frozen tundra most of the year. And the wind comes whipping over the Illinois plains and everything is frozen. And you know, you're slip and fall every 10 feet, you know, in the middle of winter and just this, this kind of crazy thing. And I'd be working in the middle of the night and none of the restaurants

• 1:02:31Marc Andreessen?

  are open and I'd be, you know, I'd get hungry. And so I'd walk down to the one convenience store that was open 24 hours and I'd buy my whatever, my hot dog or my cookies and, and something to drink. And I remember walking in one night and there was this new magazine on the newsstand called Wired. And it was Wired issue number one.

• 1:02:46Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:46Marc Andreessen?

  And I was like, oh, that's interesting. It's, you know, it's, it's a magazine about, it appears to be a magazine that's about things that I'm interested in, which was a novel, novel concept at the time. And so I bought it and I took it back to my office and I read it cover to cover and they did not have the word internet in it once.

• 1:02:59Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:02Marc Andreessen?

  And I was like, okay, you know, I was like, okay, like, I guess I don't, you know, I guess, I guess, I, you know, I don't count, we don't count, this whole thing doesn't count. You know, these are the experts, like, they have a magazine, right?

• 1:03:14Ben Horowitz?

  They're pros.

• 1:03:14Marc Andreessen?

  You know, these, yeah, these are the pros. And like, you know, what we're working on is clearly not important enough to merit the magazine. And so I was just like, okay, I guess we're just going to keep working on our thing. But like, you know, it's sort of like this constant message from the media, which is like, this is not important, this is not important, this is not important. So anyway, so Jared had this whole story is ready to go and, and he could not get his editors to run it. And then later in 93, John Markoff at the New York Times figured this out and he was-

• 1:03:37Ben Horowitz?

  A good tech reporter. I mean, John Markoff's a smart guy, yeah.

• 1:03:41Marc Andreessen?

  And legendary, legendary, legendary, you know, tech reporter going back, you know, quite, quite a bit, you know, still very active, but at the time he, he was like a veteran and was very well respected in the industry and wrote a bunch of good books and so forth. And so he wrote a story for the New York Times. And so the good news is he wrote a story. The bad news is it, it featured my boss and my boss's boss.

• 1:03:58Ben Horowitz?

  Who had nothing to do with the project. Who had you work on something entirely else?

• 1:04:02Marc Andreessen?

  My, my boss, my boss at the time, to his credit, you know, he, he was aware and he, you know, he, he kind of, you know, he kind of, you know, he didn't vigorously oppose us and then he supported us and then he ultimately sort of adopted as a project. And so he, he kind of eased his way into it, but he ultimately was very supportive. And then, but my boss's boss was the director of NCSA at the time. And yeah, and look, this is one of those things where I like, I owe these guys a tremendous amount because they created this environment that I was able to do my, my, my work in and I wouldn't be here today if not for them. But, you know, You know, I kind of, I kind of a little bit of an iffy relationship with my boss to start with. And then I had never met my boss's boss, right? And there was no reason for me to meet my boss's boss because I'm like an undergraduate like staff member, like, you know, he's a big, like a huge, he's like a huge important researcher, astrophysicist, and you know, directing this huge supercomputing center. So he had no reason to meet me, but you know, the story shows of the New York Times,

• 1:04:46Marc Andreessen?

  it's smiling photos of the two of them and not, you know, Eric and me. And I'm like, oh, okay, I see how this works.

• 1:04:52Ben Horowitz?

  And how did you feel at the time? Because I know how you would feel now if that had happened, but like, how did you feel then?

• 1:04:59Marc Andreessen?

  It was just a little bit, I don't know, it was a little bit, it was a little bit annoying, but it was also a little bit of like, look, it's the New York Times, like, I don't know, you know, I don't, I guess they write about important people, right? And these are important people because they're running this thing and I'm not an important person because I'm only writing code.

• 1:05:14Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:15Marc Andreessen?

  And, you know, there's, it's like the project is important enough where they write about the project, but like the people actually writing the code are not important enough to talk about. And so it's like, it's kind of the same reaction I had to Wired Magazine, which is like, it's a little bit annoying, but I guess it means I just need to go back to work because there's, there's nothing else to be, it's not like I can call the, it would never occur to me to call the editor of the New York Times and complain.

• 1:05:36Marc Andreessen?

  Nor would he have taken my call, you know? And so he certainly didn't know who I was because it certainly wasn't in the story. So, so it was, you know, it was just like, it was like, whatever. But it's like this weird, you know, it's like the Plato shadows on a cave wall thing. It's like, okay, there's this, there's all these things that people believe, right? Including up to the internet is like doomed and is never going to be a thing and it's going to get swamped and, and all these things. And then, and then we're, we're just like, okay, no, we, we just have this stuff in front of us and it just plainly works and we believe in it. And I guess we're just going to keep working on it. And maybe people will figure out, maybe they won't. Anyway, so Jared Sandberg calls me up, I remember the day that story broke in the New York Times, Jared Sandberg calls me up and he's just absolutely livid. And he, he told me that he, he got the morning paper and you know, this is like six months later or something after he, you know, he, he would have had the scoop, he would have had the first story on basically the, on all of this stuff. And he, he literally told me the story.

• 1:06:21Marc Andreessen?

  He said he charged into his office that morning and slapped the New York Times down at the desk in one of these dramatic moments and said, you know, see, I told you so, you know, John Markoff, front page of the business section, I told you this was actually a story. And his boss is like, oh yeah, I guess, I guess you were right.

• 1:06:33Ben Horowitz?

  Oh my God, that's so crazy.

• 1:06:36Marc Andreessen?

  So that's how, again, the heresy, like, that's how heretical it was. It was like, actually, it was actually hard to get it in print. And, and I think the only reason it showed up in the New York Times is John Markoff was such a legend, he was just a legendary, he was further along in his career at that point. So 93 was a phenomenal year because it was the takeoff year for the web, for the browser, for all this stuff, for Mosaic. Yeah, and so it was, and then the other part of it was just the ping pong effect was very interesting, which was, it was basically was, you know, it started out with like a few people with browsers and then a few people with web servers putting up, you know, these little individual pieces of content. But then you got in this kind of feedback loop, back and forth, kind of ping pong thing, where basically every time there was a new compelling piece of content put online, there was a reason for people to start using the browser. And then every time more people started using the browser,

• 1:07:21Marc Andreessen?

  there was an additional incentive to put more content online, right? And so it was like the writers, you needed writers and readers. And so more writers meant more readers, more readers meant more writers. And so, and this is what our partner Andrew Chen refers to as the cold start problem, right? Is by default, if you have a situation like that where you're going to have a network, you know, at scale, it's going to be great, but like to actually get it to scale is actually really hard. And most things that need to have that kind of network effect never get past the cold start problem. Right? They just, they strangle early because, you know, there's just not enough writers, which means there's not enough readers, there's not enough readers, there's not enough writers.

• 1:07:58Ben Horowitz?

  But this openness completely was a winner for you, yeah.

• 1:08:02Marc Andreessen?

  That's right. And so what happened from the very beginning was people all over the world started creating web servers and started putting up content. And they either used NCSA Mosaic, the NCSA web server, which actually later became Apache. So it's actually still kind of in use today, you know, it's derivations much later. Or they literally could write their own web servers for the reasons we described earlier. And so there was new content arriving online. Just to give people a sense of this, in early 93, it was like one new website a day. And by the way, by one new website, I don't mean like one new, I don't mean like a new eBay a day or something, I mean like a new webpage. Yeah, well, I remember it was a big day, the first restaurant menu came online. It was like a big, it was like an Indian restaurant in like some second tier city in England. Just decided to, somebody put the menu online.

• 1:08:44Marc Andreessen?

  And then it was, I remember the first webcam, so the first streaming video for a webcam was a coffee pot. And it was literally a coffee pot because the guy had actually rigged up a camera, an early webcam at the time, camera at the time, with the coffee pot down the hall in some computer science department somewhere so that he could see when the coffee pot was empty and go refill it. And then he basically just, so just pure utility for him. And then he put the coffee pot online. It was the first webcam. And so we all sat for like a week and just watched the coffee pot.

• 1:09:08Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, why put it on the land when I can put it on the internet?

• 1:09:11Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, exactly. And then, you know, you can see it from home, right? And so, you know, we all watched the communal coffee pot. And so, you know, there was that. And anyway, so then one of the features built into Mosaic was what was called, we had what was called the What's New page. And that was another, something that I had at the time, which was basically, it was sort of one of the first blogs, or maybe the first one, where it was every day, it was, okay, it was literally, here are the new webpages for that day. And it was this period doubling thing where it started out being, here's the new webpage for today.

• 1:09:37Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:38Marc Andreessen?

  Right? And then it was, and then it was a big deal when it started to be two a day. Right? And then four a day, and then six a day, and then eight a day. And then, you know, by the end of the year, you know, I couldn't, couldn't keep up anymore.

• 1:09:48Ben Horowitz?

  Add the What's Cool webpage.

• 1:09:51Marc Andreessen?

  Well, then we added the What's Cool page. Right. And the What's Cool page was the good stuff. Exactly. The editorial function. So, yeah, so that was, yeah, that was a key moment. Getting to the Windows and the Mac versions were a key moment, because, you know, they followed, and those guys did a great job on those. And that, that really opened things up. And then, and again, this was leading up to, I guess AOL formally interconnected into the internet in September 93. So this was leading up to that period. And they, I don't remember when AOL released their first built-in, I don't remember when they first built in a web browser into AOL.

• 1:10:19Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, that was, I think, yeah.

• 1:10:20Marc Andreessen?

  I think it was, yeah. But you could kind of, you could kind of get a sense, you know, it started to become clear that, number one, that they were going to interconnect to the internet, that they were going to bring their users out of the internet. And then it seemed inevitable that they would build in a web browser. So that you started to get momentum from that. And then, oh, and then the NSF, basically, this coincided with the NSF handing off the NSF net to the commercial telecom companies. So this was, this was what happened. So, all of this activity, like Mosaic, was driving network bandwidth, right, on the backbone, crushing the backbone. The NSF was not in the business of providing commercial backbone services. And so they did a handoff to the big, three big telcos at the time. And, you know, did the handoff as part of that. The acceptable use policy was revoked. And so then, commercial use of the internet became legal.

• 1:11:04Marc Andreessen?

  Immediately after that happened, there was a really pivotal, pivotal moment in history, which is, there was a big computer company at the time, you'll remember, called DEC. And they had a research lab in Palo Alto called the DEC Western Research Lab. And there was a guy there, whose name I'm blanking on, but he, I think it was Brian Reed, if I remember correctly. And he was a, he was a computer science guy there and he was into this stuff. And there was a cult science fiction book retail store, tiny little hole in the wall bookstore on El Camino Real in, I think, Mountain View, called Future Fantasy Books. And it was a cult retailer of like obscure science fiction and fantasy novels. And it was, it had, you know, it's local clientele, but it also had a lot of, especially Japanese and German tourists. When they were in town, they would go buy, and they would buy all these science fiction novels that they couldn't get back in their, their own countries. And

• 1:11:49Marc Andreessen?

  so he had this international clientele. And so this guy at Dec, I remember, went and talked to the, you know, kind of very hippie, you know, kind of pony, you know, ponytail, old school, you know, owner of the Future Fantasy Bookstore, and said, oh, you know, let's put your bookstore, you know, on the internet. And the guy's like, I have no idea what any of those words meant. Could you please explain each of them to me in sequence? And Brian basically described, he's like, we're gonna, we'll put your, we'll create a website for you, we'll put a catalog online, and we'll let people, you know, all these people, all these foreign buyers will be able to buy books from, you know, Japan and Germany. They'll be able to see the catalog on the web and they can click and buy, which was a new idea. And then, you know, you can ship to the books and your, your business will, will grow so much. And the, and the guy's like, that's great. He said, the, the problem is I don't, I don't actually own a computer. And Brian's like, well, what do you have? And he said, well, I do have a fax machine. And Brian said, let me get back to you. And

• 1:12:34Marc Andreessen?

  so the, the Dec guys literally created the Future Fantasy website, and they, they got, they figured out how to digitize his inventory, and they created the first e-commerce site, at least for books.

• 1:12:44Ben Horowitz?

  Original Amazon.

• 1:12:45Marc Andreessen?

  Amazon. And, and then they set up a fax gateway where you, you would order on the web, and then it would, it would fire off a fax message to this guy's store. And then he would ship you the book. And then, of course, in sequence, you can imagine what happened next. So, so step one, his business doubled overnight.

• 1:13:00Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:01Marc Andreessen?

  It's like the best thing that ever happened. And then, of course, step two is Jeff started Amazon and then, you know, destroyed, destroyed, you know, destroyed, destroyed, destroyed him. And that's like, but there was like a year there where he had like the best year of his life.

• 1:13:12Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:13Marc Andreessen?

  Shipping books all over the world. And so that was the, that was the, I think that may have been the first e-commerce, like, at least the first, like, formally commerce, e-commerce thing. And so that, that was in that period.

• 1:13:21Ben Horowitz?

  Wow, wow, wow. Okay. So then, you graduate. So what do you do?

• 1:13:26Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, so yeah, so I, and I just, look, this was like a, this was, I was an undergrad staff member. I was getting paid $6.25 an hour capped, I think, at 30 hours a week. It was fine. You know, it was fine. I was having a great time, you know, and I just assumed I was graduating with a computer science degree. I'd go get a job. I, you know, I didn't, I didn't know where or what, but I figured I'd do it. And again, that, like, it was weird. It was like a schizophrenic experience because like all of this stuff was, it was just like, you know, like all day long, I was just dealing with like this just tremendous cascade of incoming, you know, stuff and seeing this activity, but like, there was no money in it. There was no funding. There was no venture. There were no startups. There was no business. There was no nothing. And then the media was telling me it's, you know, primarily it's stupid and the magazines, you know, and all this stuff. And it just, and so again, I was sort of still, I was sort of halfway between this, like, I'm

• 1:14:09Marc Andreessen?

  seeing the future in front of me, but also it was like, the rest of the world is not taking it seriously. And so maybe I'm just like, you know, I just like smoking my own exhaust and maybe this is just like, all gonna get crushed next year by MSN and it's just all gonna be over. And like, it's just like some weird, you know, it's like, like I said, it's just like, the assumption was you left this stuff behind when you, when you graduated. And so I had, I had like the advanced version of that, of that conundrum. And so I was just like, well, I, you know, I guess I need to get a job. I, I talked to the NCSA guys about staying there. They, they did offer me a job to stay there, but, you know, it to kind of keep doing what I was doing, but it would have been a, you know, would have been a staff programming job and, and, you know, staying in Urbana. And I kind of wanted to get to, I wanted to get, I wanted to get to A coast. I was somewhat ambivalent as to which coast, but I definitely wanted to get to A coast. And,

• 1:14:52Marc Andreessen?

  and so I decided I needed a job. And so I, I, I, one of the things I had control of was the about page for the web browser. And so I added to the about page for the web browser that everybody used at the time, I added saying, by the way, you know, one of the primary authors of this browser is graduating and is available to be hired.

• 1:15:08Ben Horowitz?

  Good classified.

• 1:15:10Marc Andreessen?

  Please send job offers to, you know, this mailbox.

• 1:15:12Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:12Marc Andreessen?

  And I got, you know, to my credit, I got about a dozen job offers and a bunch of offers in the East Coast, a bunch of offers in the West Coast. And I got an offer from a little software company out in California. I got two, basically two offers in Silicon Valley that I strongly considered. One was a little software company that I joined. And then the other was, I got an offer actually from Sun at the time. Which had a had a unit, they had a software unit of Sun at the time called First Person, which was creating what became Java later with James Gosling. It was his project and they, I almost went there, but they had a phantom stock option program.

• 1:15:45Ben Horowitz?

  That doesn't sound good.

• 1:15:47Marc Andreessen?

  I didn't know much, but like if you're applying the word phantom to your stock option program, that's not a good sign. Well, they had a classic problem, which is they had a software group that they wanted to give an incentive to and they wanted to kind of have a-

• 1:15:58Ben Horowitz?

  Hardware company where you have small stock options, right?

• 1:16:01Marc Andreessen?

  And so they, and so they, and they wanted this thing to be like a separate research thing, but they didn't want to spin it off. They wanted to retain control of it. And so they were creating basically a shadow, yeah, a shadow, a shadow stock option program. And I was just like, I don't understand this. This, this sounds like a scam. So I turned that down and then I went to this little software company called EIT. So yeah, so I literally got a job and yeah, and then moved, yeah, moved, moved out to California in basically January 94. Yeah. So basically I went to work for, you know, there's this little software company called EIT and you know, they were sort of a, they were a little basic contract research organization, very smart, like CS people in Palo Alto doing like work for the government, for, for companies, you know, kind of very leading edge stuff. And then they, they just had, you know, they, to their credit, they were on the internet idea early. And, and so, you know, they, they, they wanted to kind of create, see if they could create like internet software products, which was a very kind of new idea at the time.

• 1:16:45Marc Andreessen?

  And so, you know, they made me an offer and they flew me out and I moved out and it was great and I, and I went to work there and, you know, and I was like, okay, you know, I'll work on some internet, see if there's a way to make money on internet software. And then, you know, what happened was just, I just kept having this kind of out of body experience though, which was just like, and then at that point, the, the internet started to get like serious media coverage and you know, and if you remember those days, the books started to show up. And so, you know, before people had the internet, what, what happened was there were books about the internet. And these, these, this is where the O'Reilly, you know, O'Reilly Publishing Company became famous at the time and so forth is, is you, you'd have, actually at the peak of this in 94, 95, you'd have walls and walls of books about the internet in bookstores and they'd be like, guys to the internet, how to use the internet, how to write webpages, how to do all these things.

• 1:17:27Marc Andreessen?

  And then there would often be like a floppy disk in the back of the book, which would have the software, you know, the TCP IP stack.

• 1:17:33Ben Horowitz?

  Your TCP IP stack for Windows, all that, yeah.

• 1:17:37Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah. And then they'd have mosaic or they'd have, you know, whatever on the, on the, on the, on the disk. And so it, you know, this started to become a thing and people started to figure this out and the press started to take it seriously and there started to be more interesting content. And so it's like, okay, the thing is going and I'm like, you know, I kind of like, I left mosaic behind and so I, you know, I didn't have the, you know, the email addresses anymore and so forth, but I knew how much commercial demand there was. And so, and so they get, but it was this like really schizophrenic thing. It was just like very unclear. And again, like I said, I had never heard of venture capital. So I didn't really have a sense that you could start a company. I didn't really know what to do. And then, you know, another great kind of stroke of luck in my life was I got a call from Jim Clark, who's the, you know, co-founder of our company Netscape, you know, who was this legendary figure. And I won't do the full version of all this because this gets into stuff that has already been, people have talked about a lot in the past. It's already plenty, plenty well documented.

• 1:18:21Marc Andreessen?

  But, you know, he had, he had been a co-founder of, of the founder of this company, Silicon Graphics, which was one of the leading tech companies of the era. And then he got sideways with the CEO there. He decided to leave and start his second company. But he had a non-solicited agreement with, you know, all the great people that he had. You know, he couldn't hire the people at SGI.

• 1:18:37Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, SGI was an amazing team that he had put together.

• 1:18:39Marc Andreessen?

  It's amazing team, but he had a formal, you know, he had a formal agreement that he couldn't, couldn't hire them. So, and he, and he had stocked SGI with every, every smart person he knew. So he, you know, most of the people who he wanted to work with were, he couldn't get. And so he, he basically was like, he was literally like sniffing around for talent. And a guy who worked for him, Bill Foss, who later joined Netscape, apparently mentioned to Jim one day, he's like, you know, you know, one of the guys who made this mosaic browser is like, apparently he just like moved to Silicon Valley. And he likes, you know, the, the about page of the browser says he's, you know, he's available, you know, should, maybe you should go talk to him. And so Jim called me up and, and we had breakfast and, which was a very traumatic experience for me because I was not eating breakfast in those days because I was not getting up early enough to have breakfast.

• 1:19:18Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, I remember those. He used to wake up much later.

• 1:19:23Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, it's like programmer hours. And so I had to be up at seven in the morning to meet Jim for breakfast at El Fronio in Palo Alto at, at 7:00 AM on a Sunday. So I had to recalibrate my entire sleeping schedule that week to try to make the meeting. And I was still bleary eyed when, when I got there, but they had good coffee. And so anyway, so Jim and I, you know, again, without belaboring it, Jim and I decided to start a company. But it, it, it was still this weird thing where, and Jim knew all about the internet, the browser. And, you know, I was still watching everything, but it was still this thing of like, it's just not, it's not a, it's just the overwhelming assumption in the industry was this is not a serious thing. This is not a real thing. This is a momentary thing. It's going to go away. The big companies are going to take over. This is not going to be a, the internet's not going to be a commercial medium. It's not going to happen. And so our first two business plans for our company actually were not this.

• 1:20:07Marc Andreessen?

  It was, we, we had a business plan. We had, our first business plan was to do interactive software for interactive television. So the, to build software to replace the guy on the roller skates that I told you about.

• 1:20:16Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:17Marc Andreessen?

  Jim had, cause Jim's company had been one of the main companies building those systems. And so he had the insight on that. And so we were going to do that, but then we, we sort of priced out like what, you know, we'd sort of modeled out sort of how interactive TV was going, what it was going to cost and how it was going to work. And we actually concluded it wasn't going to work. It was, it was, it was, it was too expensive and the technology wasn't ready. So we gave up on that idea. And then, and then plan number two was Jim had a really good relationship with the CEO of Nintendo because SGI had done this deal to do the first 3D graphics chip for a game console, which is the Nintendo 64. And so he went to visit the guy in, in Japan who ran Nintendo. This super genius guy, Yama Uchi-san, who ran, basically built modern Nintendo as we

• 1:20:58Marc Andreessen?

  know it today and basically struck a handshake deal to basically build, you know, the online service for the Nintendo gaming machines. And so to, to build basically what today you would call Xbox Live or the PlayStation Network, but to do that, you know.

• 1:21:11Ben Horowitz?

  Also probably a little early for that idea.

• 1:21:14Marc Andreessen?

  Also too early.

• 1:21:15Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah. That was closer though.

• 1:21:18Marc Andreessen?

  It was closer, but like, again, it was modems, right? It would have been all dial-up. And so you would have, you would have been doing interactive gaming on dial-up modems with like 14, 14 kilobit modems and with low latency. And so it, and, and actually Nintendo actually had had an online service on their earlier devices in Japan. And they actually had an early online Nintendo Online or whatever they called it that had like, it had like early e-commerce and it was a proprietary system, but it had like early e-commerce and I think it had food delivery in the eighties. And so there was like an early version of this, but it didn't quite take. And so this idea was to do the modern version of it. But we, again, we modeled the whole thing out. I like built all the spreadsheets and all the modem banks you would need and all this stuff. And we just, we figured out that it, it, it couldn't quite work. And so literally we, we, we took a walk and it was like, it was like, it was like a discouraging thing because it's like, we had these two ideas, they didn't pan out.

• 1:22:03Marc Andreessen?

  And it's like, you know, should we like, you know, should we still, is there still anything to do together? And, you know, and I remember saying on the walk, I was like, you know, well, you know, this, this internet thing keeps going, right? Like. It's going and think about what we had just experienced there between Gemini, which is like, okay, basically what the press was telling everybody and all the experts were telling us was it was either going to be the big companies were going to do interactive television, or it was going to be these, you know, home, you know, sort of video game like service. It was going to be, the assumption is it was going to be one of those. Those were going to replace the internet when this stuff got serious for consumers. And then, and we basically concluded that the-

• 1:22:37Ben Horowitz?

  When daddy comes home, you little kids can go play in your room.

• 1:22:41Marc Andreessen?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. If you read, if you look at the magazines, and I keep bringing up the magazines, because at the time, again, this is like, internet's getting started. And so the way people got their news was literally reading one of the three big news magazines, or reading one of the three big newspapers, like, that's how you learned about things. And that's where all the experts showed up. And if you just go back and look at the magazine covers from that era, it's basically all these big company CEOs just pouring scorn on the internet, then declaring that it's a joke and a toy. And the thing that they're going to come out with, their proprietary thing is going to be so much better. And so, and so we literally had this moment where, you know, it was just like, well, if we have proven to ourselves that interactive TV is not going to work, and if we've proven to ourselves that you can't build this based on these video game boxes, then by process of elimination, it kind of has to be the internet. It's the only thing that works, right?

• 1:23:24Marc Andreessen?

  And it's like, and yes, it has every issue that people complain about. It's slow, it's inefficient, it's insecure, there's no business on it, there's no this and that and the other, and it's hard to get online. And, you know, all this stuff, you know, there's all these reasons to believe it wasn't going to work. But like, it was literally, we literally knocked out all the other ideas and said, okay, like, this thing is actually, it has to be, it has to be the thing. It's the only thing that works. And then, and you know, and Jim is a, Jim is a total, you know, whiz on these things, and knew all about this stuff. And so, you know, we sat down and said, well, what if we did this like incredible heretical idea? And again, very heretical, as late as, this is April 94, you know, so still very, very, very, very far into this, but still very heretical, which was like, how about we make it, build a software company to make internet software? And like, and that was just like, wow, this seems, you know, you know, that seems like a risky crazy idea.

• 1:24:08Marc Andreessen?

  Now, in retrospect, it was like the most obvious idea of all time at that moment.

• 1:24:12Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:12Marc Andreessen?

  But that's, that's the true story of how we actually got to that idea. So we, we, we, so we, anyway, we ended up basically commercializing, you know, we ended up basically building the commercial version of everything that we had built at Illinois. It just, we got there the hard way.

• 1:24:25Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:25Marc Andreessen?

  It was not the obvious idea.

• 1:24:27Ben Horowitz?

  Counter-programming conventional wisdom and media advice is still, still works now. It's amazing.

• 1:24:36Marc Andreessen?

  It's incredible. I just, I have this constant, I live in this constant state of out of body, you know, kind of experience amazement where these people just show up on TV or in the papers or whatever, and they're just, they have all these credentials and they've got all these degrees, they've got all these initials after their names, and they've got these incredible resumes, and they've got all these publication credits, and they've got all this stuff and these government grants and like on, like every possible credential and Harvard and MIT and like all this stuff. And they just, they say shit. And I just, I'm, and I'm just like, like, like, maybe they're right, but like, if they're wrong, and they're wrong, like a lot of the time, like, okay, what consequences do they bear for being wrong? And the answer is none at all. Zero. Yeah. And they're just back on tomorrow.

• 1:25:18Marc Andreessen?

  On tomorrow with some new line of bullshit. And, and they, there's this great book, I often tell friends, this great book, this guy Phil Tetlock, who's a professor who studies this exact topic. And it's this great book, it's called Expert Political Judgment. And he did this comprehensive study of the, he came at it through political predictions. So basically, you know, experts showing up and, you know, columns in the newspaper and on TV talking about like, is there going to be, you know, war here, or you know, what's going to happen at Israel or whatever, all these predictions. And he, he goes through and he basically, he basically, the conclusion of it is that the sort of average well-credentialed expert in the media on any topic involving sort of politics or global affairs is somewhat less, is somewhat less than random likely to be correct. So, so, right, the credential experts score at like 40%, and a monkey flinging, you know, shit at a dartboard is like 50%. A monkey.

• 1:26:04Marc Andreessen?

  And the big thing that he points out is there, there's no, there are no repercussions for being wrong. There are no, there's no career damage, there's no economic damage, there's no nothing. And then he says, the thing, if they were, if they were being, if they were being epistemically honest, the thing that they would do is, like, when a talking has on TV talking about something, there would be a scoreboard, and it would show like their last 20 predictions, and then it would have like, you know, red or green where they're right or wrong. It's because it'd be the only way to ever have a sense of whether you're talking to somebody who knows what they're talking about. And that scoreboard, of course, never appears. Never materialized, yeah. You never, ever, ever, ever see it. And he pointed that he wrote this book like 20 years ago and like everybody read it and they're like, yeah, that's right. And then everybody just completely ignored it and kept doing things the same as they're doing it.

• 1:26:44Marc Andreessen?

  And so I just, I had this like, I had this experience where I, I just feel, I just feel like a complete, like I, I, I mean, you know, it, it worked out, but like I, I still feel dumb. It is in the sense of like, I read all this stuff. I believed it all the time. It, it caused me to be insecure about the thing that I was actually doing. That I saw was actually working. I knew it was working like, and I knew why it was working and I knew why it would keep working. And even still, it was just this wall of, wall, wall of doubt and skepticism that kind of kept, kept, kept eating away at me. So, yes.

• 1:27:11Ben Horowitz?

  The good news is we've used that to our advantage, you know, many times since then. I, I remember when, when we made the Coinbase investment. I guess Bitcoin, which was the, the, the one cryptocurrency at the time was, I don't know, was some number of hundreds of dollars. And everybody, economists, everybody was writing that it was a complete scam and total bullshit and never be worth anything. And here it is. I don't know what it's worth today, like 63, 64,000 dollars, something like that. And all we, all you had to do is just listen to the experts and do the opposite and you've made so much money.

• 1:27:49Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, it's amazing. Yep, it's amazing. But it, it, I tell you, it's hard. Like I, you know, a lot, I, I don't know about you, like, I feel like I still have this problem. Like I, I, I now have like 30 years of evidence that this, this is all the case and, and, and even still. It's just like, I still have this problem where I'm like, okay, the experts say it's still like a real effort of will, you know, basically.

• 1:28:06Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:07Marc Andreessen?

  They, they, they, they don't actually know what they're talking about. They don't actually have any predictive capability. They're, they're in a system where the incentives are absolutely terrible.

• 1:28:14Ben Horowitz?

  Well, I, I always find like, if somebody's super dismissive about something, that's a great thing to study. Cause it's almost surely not a dead zero, right? Like it may not work, but there's no way it's as bad as they're, you know, saying it. If somebody says something is like a scam or a Ponzi scheme or a bullshit or this, then that's almost always worth looking into.

• 1:28:40Ben Horowitz?

  So you started Netscape with Jim Clark. It was actually called Mosaic, right, at the time?

• 1:28:45Marc Andreessen?

  Mosaic, Mosaic. Yeah, so, so we, so we, you know, again, I had graduated, we, you know, the, the, the other people, the other, you know, the other, our other colleagues at Illinois were, you know, working either, they were either students or staff members there. Everybody was working under federal research funding on a specifically non-commercial project, you know, which was open source, you know, there was, and so, and, you know, like I said, there was no, you know, there was no, the, the university didn't have, there was no commercial anything, you know, of value, at least according to what everybody thought at the time. And so we, we start Netscape, we, we actually go out, Jim and I actually flew back out to Urbana in the middle of, it was still in an incredible snowstorm and hired, you know, I think, basically, all but one, I think, of the original Mosaic team members to, to join us at Netscape. So that was the original, the original thing. Most of them were able to move out to California and were core members of, of what followed at Netscape.

• 1:29:30Marc Andreessen?

  And so, and then we, we booted up the company, we, and then we, we named it Mosaic, and, and that was sort of the first issue that got us in trouble. And I should say, the reason we named it Mosaic was not because we planned to literally, like, offer Mosaic as a product. We, and we very specifically decided we were going to leave the source code behind.

• 1:29:44Ben Horowitz?

  You, you wrote it like when you were skipping class.

• 1:29:48Marc Andreessen?

  Yes. We, we knew it was not a commercial, we knew it was not commercial grade. We knew it, it had all, you know, just had, it had just issues, it had issue, performance issues, it had, you know, you just, you create one of these things, you know all the issues. And so we, we just knew it had all these issues. And so we knew we needed to start from, we, we wanted to start from scratch and build kind of the correct commercial product. And we, we, and we, we knew what we needed to do to do that. And so we, we, we very specifically did not bring the source code with us. But, you know, all, all the stand, HTML and HTTP and all these standards were open, open standards, and they were all free to, you know, people on the internet were able to use them and do whatever they wanted. So, so we're like, okay, we, we have no, like, we have no copyright issues here, but, you know, we're not taking the code.

• 1:30:23Marc Andreessen?

  And then on the, on the trademark side, you know, we, we, there, there's a long history in Silicon Valley of companies that are sort of named after the projects that spawned them, often out of a university setting or some other setting. And so there, there were two, two famous examples, Sun Micro, Sun Microsystems at the time, which was, you know, a huge, a huge successful company. The, the name Sun actually came from the pro, project at Stanford, which was Stanford University Network, S U N. And so that was like, that, the name of that company was like an homage to the Stanford environment that those guys came out of. And then Oracle was the codename of a project that Larry Ellison had done for the government in the 1970s. Right. And so there was this like, what I thought at the time was like a time honored tradition of like, you can basically use the name as an homage. And, you know, Illinois, they don't have a commercial, you know, interest in this. And so we'll just do it. But in retrospect, that was sort of the crack. You know, we sort of introduced a crack in

• 1:31:08Marc Andreessen?

  the armor from the very beginning by doing that. And then basically what happened was as I was leaving, moving to California, the other people at Illinois started to figure out that there was actually, you know, they got access to the commercial mailbox that had all the commercial inbound licensing requests. And so they started to get a sense that there might be money in it. And so the founders of this, that company Spyglass I mentioned, which was like the one software company in Champaign-Urbana, actually approached, without me having any awareness of this, they approached the University of Illinois Administration, and they basically struck a deal to license the mosaic, our code, to license the mosaic software code that we had written for commercial sales. And they started offering a commercial product called Spyglass Mosaic, you know, and, you know, totally within rights of the university to do this, and with Spyglass to do this. And

• 1:31:53Marc Andreessen?

  that deal was great. And off they went. But then we then announced Netscape. And of course, we were the team that had written all that code. And then this started to become, you know, by now, the press had started to take it seriously. So we started to become, you know, famous and well-known. And Clark was this legend. And so we started to get all this press coverage. And so Spyglass started to get really worried that we were going to, you know, snuff them, you know, and we were going to lap them with the products. And so Spyglass enlisted the administration of the University of Illinois to basically try to kill us. And the form of the murder attempt was to, they didn't sue us. And they didn't sue us because they didn't have a good claim because like, we weren't actually violating copyright. And, you know, the trademark, you could just change the name. So they didn't actually have like, a good legal case to sue us. And so instead of suing us, what

• 1:32:38Marc Andreessen?

  they did instead was they called Spyglass, any situation we were in where we were competing with Spyglass for a sale, they, the University of Illinois administrators would call the customer and tell them that they were going to sue us.

• 1:32:49Ben Horowitz?

  That's a

• 1:32:49Marc Andreessen?

  Which is like a

• 1:32:50Ben Horowitz?

  Thing to do to a startup. That's like the dirtiest thing you can do to a startup.

• 1:32:54Marc Andreessen?

  It's like a super nefarious, you know, you know, cause like who wants to, you know, any, any big company doesn't, you know, is already kind of, you know, worried about doing business with the startup to start with. And if the startup's literally about to get sued, like why, why take the risk? And so our whole sales pipeline froze up and you know, we're running on, you know, we're running a venture capital and like, you know, money's getting, you know, and so like, we don't have that, you know, not, you know, VC wasn't in those days what it is today. We didn't have that long of a runway. And so we needed revenue and, and so this, this became a big problem. And so we, we kind of got everybody together and talked about it. And so we, we then decided, and I'm very proud of this decision. We preemptively sued the University of Illinois on this case. And we sued, we sued them for, you know, certain interference of trade. There's, there's these, there's these sort of laws that are not great laws to sue on, but they worked in this case, which is this thing called tortuous interference.

• 1:33:38Marc Andreessen?

  You can kind of, you can, in theory, there, in theory, it's illegal. It's like just gratuitously interfere in somebody else's business. Try to unhook other people's contracts. It's, it's not great law. It doesn't often get enforced, but like at least it is on the books. And so we sued Illinois. They furious negotiation followed. We offered them at the time $4 million worth of stock in the company. When the company was worth, I don't know, 20 million or something and

• 1:34:01Ben Horowitz?

  Most of you youngsters, it eventually sold for 10 billion. So you can do that math.

• 1:34:07Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah. So it was, yeah, it was a bill, you know, it was a billion plus or, you know, some depending on exactly what, but you know, but it would have been, it would have been a lot of money. And they turned that down and instead they demanded cash. And so

• 1:34:16Ben Horowitz?

  One thing you didn't have.

• 1:34:18Marc Andreessen?

  We didn't, we didn't have, well, no, you know, we, we, at that point it was starting to work. And so we, we raised money from Kleiner Perkins and we had other investor interest. And so we, we, and we had sales, you know, starting to come in. And so we, we, we, we paid them the cash and did the settlement and, and got them off our backs. Yeah. That decision on their part, yeah, cost them at least a billion dollars in direct stock. Plus all the downstream philanthropy from me, plus, plus all the downstream philanthropy from Jim Clark, plus all the other founding engineers.

• 1:34:43Ben Horowitz?

  They lost a few buildings, I would think.

• 1:34:47Marc Andreessen?

  They lost, I think, a campus. You know, I'm just gonna speculate, they lost probably $3 billion in, you know, 1990s dollars. With that decision. Now, again, this is why I gave the disclaimer upfront, like, you know, look, like, the alternate universe Mark with a different skillset would have, would have had a very different way of dealing with this. But like, Mark, as he actually existed on Earth one, like, I never met the University of Illinois administrators. Like, I didn't, you know, I didn't know the president of the university. I'm like a random undergrad, right? And so, like, I didn't know the president of the university. I, you know, I could have called him.

• 1:35:19Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, that's true, that's true. Although it's still like, you know, the calculus that they made, but it's a bureaucracy, to harass their own students and side with like, somebody who wrote them a check is still a little on the evil side, I would say.

• 1:35:36Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, I, I thought it was really bad. I got really upset. I was really upset for a long time. To be totally honest, I'm still upset. Every, every subsequent administration, every subsequent new administration at the university has attempted to reach out and repair the bridge. I have not returned the calls.

• 1:35:52Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, yeah, no, you're a grudge holder. You and my wife are the biggest grudge holders, I know.

• 1:35:58Marc Andreessen?

  I greatly value my grudges, they're very important to me. So, yeah, so, yeah, and, you know, the broader point, Ben, that you brought up is really key, which is like, look, there are a small number of universities in the world that, and you'd put certainly Stanford in this category and MIT and a bunch of others, but, you know, there's a certain number of them that really understand, and this is maybe Stanford's great genius over the last 50 years, as an institution is, you kind of understand that it's actually really good if this kind of thing happens. Like, if your students or even your faculty, you know, go off and do something new and are successful in business, and then the, you know, the, you know, the money that you'll get, the money that you'll get back in philanthropy is going to be orders of magnitude higher than whatever technology licensing fee you could extract, or whatever threat you could extort people, you know, money you could extort people out of, or whatever.

• 1:36:38Ben Horowitz?

  Well, it goes back to the original Mosaic story, you know, like, it seems like you're giving a lot up by being open, but, you know, you're, you're actually opening the whole world to you. It's actually a great metaphor for life, which is, you know, if you live in abundance, you will get abundance. And if you live in scarcity, you'll screw yourself. And it's good that those universities are abundant, and it's good that you are abundant with the internet, and that's how we live in the world we are in today, so. What an amazing. Yeah, I often think about the alternate universe if, you know, if you don't write Mosaic, if it doesn't work, if you don't start Netscape, like,

• 1:37:20Ben Horowitz?

  it does seem like we would have had, like, most systems or many systems are proprietary, right? Like, the smartphones are, you know, everybody pays a tax to download their app from the App Store, because Apple owns it, it's not open. And, you know, you know, Google is an extremely powerful company, because, you know, if you want to search something, that's where you have to go, and so forth. And these, you know, it was just such an amazing anomaly in the industry that the Internet happened, and that anybody could join, and anybody could put up a website, and anybody could build a great business. And, you know, in fact, including Google, including, you know, some of the big tech today, was all created because of the openness of the Internet. So, thank you for that. And thank you for the conversation. What a good story.

• 1:38:04Marc Andreessen?

  Oh, I'm not done yet.

• 1:38:04Ben Horowitz?

  Oh, we got one more. Never mind. Pause.

• 1:38:07Marc Andreessen?

  I got more. I gotta bring it. I gotta bring it. I got a great climax to the whole thing.

• 1:38:10Ben Horowitz?

  Okay, okay.

• 1:38:11Marc Andreessen?

  Um, so let me, let's, let me just start with, you know, Ben, I'm glad you just went through what you just went through. I, I, I totally agree. And, and specifically, it looked like this has a lot to do with the debate raging around AI right now.

• 1:38:21Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:22Marc Andreessen?

  Which is, you know, these big companies, you know, the big companies in those days had every reason, you know, they had all these stories. By the way, a lot of the story that big companies told about the Internet early on was it's unsafe.

• 1:38:31Ben Horowitz?

  Unsafe. And it was.

• 1:38:32Marc Andreessen?

  And it was, it was some truth to that. It was, you know, but it was literally gonna be, I mean, there was an, it took a long time for e-commerce to take off, in retrospect, relative to how fast it could have taken off, because people literally just were worried that their credit card was gonna get stolen. Like, you had to, you had to get over that hump. And, and there was just this constant fear of, like, cybercrime, and this and that, and then spam, and like, all abuse, and like, all these things. And so, and so, the, the big companies always had, like, all these reasons why they needed to have total control. And, you know, the government needed to protect them, and they needed to have all these regulations, and they needed to have, you know, that it just, the world needed to be a world not of open systems, like, like the Internet, it needed to be a world of proprietary systems. And, and look, a lot of the way the world works today is proprietary systems. You know, the, the banking system is not open, right? You, you know, you're, you're, you're just, if the bank decides to de-bank you, they de-bank you, or whatever it is. Or if they

• 1:39:15Marc Andreessen?

  don't want to let the money go through, they don't let the money go through. And so, you know, most of the, most of the world, most of the economy was, is with these big companies with total control. And, and so, yeah, I, I think it's a, I wanted to go through that, because I think it's a, it's a, it's a major miracle, when you're able to actually get one of these open systems to work. And it's like, and then years later, you're just like, oh, my God, I can't believe we almost had the much worse world. Where the big companies ran everything, but it is amazing how the pattern keeps repeating. And it's specifically repeating again today with AI. Again, ironically, and to your point, ironically, some of the companies that are lobbying hardest for regulatory capture and cartel, you know, kind of government cartel status for AI are companies that exist today because the internet was open. And so they are engaged in a particularly advanced form of hypocrisy and mental gymnastics.

• 1:39:59Ben Horowitz?

  I think the founders are gone, so been taken over by the other people.

• 1:40:04Marc Andreessen?

  The other people, although I still blame the founders. Anyway, so, okay, so the climax of the story, because I just can't resist because I just think this is so amazing, given what happened, what followed. So, okay, so then we settle with Illinois, we get underway, we're shipping our products, we're starting to get revenue, it's starting to work. This is around, I think, you know, the time you joined us kind of during this period. And, and, and so, but we're competing, we're competing with, you know, there's a bunch of other companies that are starting, you know, people figured out that this was actually a, the internet was going to be a thing. And so a bunch of other software companies got funded and started. And then this company Spyglass was still out there and Spyglass was selling their, they were selling Spyglass Mosaic, they were selling our own code against us.

• 1:40:40Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:41Marc Andreessen?

  Right?

• 1:40:42Ben Horowitz?

  It's a little maddening.

• 1:40:43Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, it's a little frustrating, but, you know, again, they have the legal right to do it, but like, it's a little frustrating and it was fine and we're, you know, we're competing with them, whatever, but it's a little bit fine. And, you know, there's like price war going on and, you know, well, you know, it's sort of back and forth going on. And then Spyglass gets this call from Microsoft and said, the Microsoft guys call Spyglass and they're like, yeah, we want to license Spyglass Mosaic so we can build it into Windows. And the Spyglass guys say, you know, yeah, that sounds great. You know, basically how much per, you know, how much per copy are you gonna, you know, pay us for that? And Microsoft says, you don't understand, we're gonna, you know, we're gonna pay you a flat fee, you know, which is the same, you know, which is the same, you know, the same thing that Microsoft did originally license DOS way back when. And so, but Microsoft said, you know, basically, or at least my understanding is what Microsoft

• 1:41:26Marc Andreessen?

  said was, you know, don't worry about it, like, you know, we're gonna sell it as an add-on to Windows and, you know, so we'll have like Microsoft, you know, Mosaic and then, you know, you'll still have Spyglass Mosaic and you can sell it on, you know, other operating systems or compete with us or whatever, do whatever you want. And so they struck the deal. I think it was like a million dollar, one-time payment. And the Spyglass guys thought they had struck gold because they had this like massive endorsement. You know, it was a big blow to us because we didn't get the Microsoft deal. And then they were gonna, you know, sort of, you know, the whole industry is going to benefit from this. And then they're going to go out and sell lots of other versions of Spyglass Mosaic. And then there was this press, Microsoft had the press conference where they originally announced Internet Explorer, their browser, which was Spyglass Mosaic, again, our code, relabeled. And there's a famous, famous moment where the Microsoft guys are on stage and

• 1:42:09Marc Andreessen?

  they're, and then they do the, you know, the one more thing part. And oh, by the way, we're going to make it free. There's a famous moment, you know, the Spyglass CEO with his head in his hands in the front row, you know, of the, of the press conference, you know, realizing that his business had just ended. He just, you know, he sold out his entire business for a million dollars. So that was the end of Spyglass. So, you know, all's well that ends well.

• 1:42:30Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, happy ending.

• 1:42:32Marc Andreessen?

  Not that I'm competitive and not that I don't hold grudges.

• 1:42:34Ben Horowitz?

  Well, that's hilarious. Thank you all for listening to the Mark and Ben Show. We won't tell the Netscape story, which is also a good story. But, you know, maybe if you reply in the comments, you want to hear it. Well, we'll, we'll consider that one too. But thank you again. And we enjoyed it. We hope you did too.