The Journey from 0 to 1, from Mosaic to Netscape

with @pmarca and @mjr2 In this special guest hosted episode -- cross-posted from the new show Starting Greatness (featuring interviews with startup builders before they were successful, hosted by Mike Maples jr) -- Marc Andreessen shares some rare, behind-the-scenes details of his story from 0 to 1... from the University of Illinois and Mosaic to Netscape.

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

• 0:01Sonal?

  Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A6andZ Podcast. Today, we have one of our special guest-hosted episodes as part of a new series where we share select A6andZ partner appearances elsewhere here. This one is with A6andZ co-founder Marc Andreessen. The episode is cross-posted from the new show, Starting Greatness, hosted by Mike Maples Jr. In the show that follows, Mark shares some rare, behind-the-scenes details on his journey to product-market fit from zero to one, from the University of Illinois and Mosaic to Netscape.

• 0:34Marc Andreessen?

  So it was a strange time. There's an old William Gibson quote, the author of Neuromancer, all the great science fiction books. He says, "The future's already here, it's just not evenly distributed." And so this was a great example of that.

• 0:45Speaker 02

  That's Marc Andreessen, who's now a famous venture capitalist at Andreessen Horowitz. At age 22, he founded Netscape, the company that kicked off the internet age. How did Netscape even happen? And what was it like when it was about to blow up? This is Mike Maples Jr. of Floodgate, and it's go time with Marc Andreessen.

• 1:07Speaker 02

  Welcome to Starting Greatness, a podcast dedicated to ambitious founders who want to go from nothing to awesome, super fast. When you're a startup founder, you have to channel your inner James Bond, your MacGyver, your Wonder Woman. I'm going to help you win by curating the lessons of the super performers, but before they were successful.

• 1:28Speaker 02

  So without further ado,

• 1:30Sonal?

  ignition sequence start.

• 1:34Speaker 02

  Let's get started.

• 1:39Speaker 02

  I decided to do some things a little differently with this interview because I wanted to capture things about Mark's startup journey that most have likely not heard. I wanted to get a level deeper about how Netscape and the early web grew out of the Mosaic project. But I also wanted to help people see a side of Mark that few people see in public. While you might see him share books he likes on Twitter, it's hard to connect this to what it's like to spend time with him. He's an incredibly avid reader in diverse areas like technology, science, art, literature, science fiction, history, politics, economics, psychology, and he can synthesize ideas and connect the dots in a blink of an eye. And that curiosity combined with his technical depth is definitely a superpower.

• 2:23Speaker 02

  If you've wondered about the origin stories of the web, what it was like to be in the middle of it, Mark goes into a depth that I haven't seen before. And he also reveals the three things he wishes Netscape had done differently that would have made the internet better today. I'm excited about how the conversation went and hope you enjoy it too. Let's talk to him. Marc Andreessen, welcome to the podcast.

• 2:48Marc Andreessen?

  Hey, it's great to be here.

• 2:49Speaker 02

  So Mark, you've been involved with some pretty big wins. So why don't we just start out by asking you, what's your advice to people who want to build something great?

• 2:57Marc Andreessen?

  So the first piece of advice is don't do it.

• 3:00Speaker 02

  It's impossible.

• 3:02Marc Andreessen?

  It's impossible. So it's so hard. Sean Parker has the best line on starting companies. Starting a company is like chewing glass. Eventually you start to like the taste of your own blood. And so, don't do it. And the reason that's the first piece of advice is because, number one, if you can be talked out of it, you definitely shouldn't do it. So if you listen to advice number one, you definitely shouldn't do it. If you ignore advice number one, you might have the personality type to be a founder. So that's the first gotcha. And then you see this a lot, I'm sure, is there are a lot of people who would like to start a company, the goal is to start a company and then they kind of try to back into an idea. We call this sort of synthetic, we call these sort of synthetic startups. It's like, I want to start a company and I am not going to apply myself.

• 3:43Speaker 02

  Market white space companies.

• 3:44Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, exactly. Boy, wouldn't it be great if X, right? Or X is just something I read in a magazine that day or just a... You know, by the way, there have been some successful synthetic startups, like some have worked. The more common thing is an actual honest to God, organic idea that is actually something that you are like deeply immersed in.

• 4:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:02Marc Andreessen?

  Right. The odds that it's going to be like a flash of inspiration are very low, but like if it's a field that you've been working in for five or 10 years and you know it inside out and it's just like obvious to you that it should work a different way, you know, then maybe you've got something.

• 4:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:14Marc Andreessen?

  But you gotta like really deeply, like you, you, number one, you have to deeply believe because you have to really be rationally committed to it because it is so hard. But the other thing is like you have to actually validate your beliefs. Like it has to actually like, you have to be right.

• 4:23Speaker 02

  And gates and jobs are the same way in PCs. You're obsessed with a field for its own sake and you start noticing things because you're down the rabbit hole.

• 4:31Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, that's right. Yeah, it's very hands on and you know, both the Microsoft and Apple founding stories, both companies started very small and very humble because they were literally working like, you know, Apple, they were building their first computers by hand.

• 4:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:40Marc Andreessen?

  You know, there was no abstraction to it.

• 4:42Speaker 02

  Right.

• 4:42Marc Andreessen?

  There was no master plan. There was no theory. It was can we build a hundred computers made out of wooden boxes?

• 4:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:47Marc Andreessen?

  And sell them at the trade fair and it built out of that. But they write to your point, like they were living in that world.

• 4:51Speaker 02

  I would love to just know about just how you got to building Mosaic. How did you get involved with the internet in the first place?

• 4:58Marc Andreessen?

  So it was a strange time. There's an old William Gibson quote, the author of Neuromancer, all the great science fiction books. He says, "The future's already here, it's just not evenly distributed." And so this was a great example of that. And so what I sort of semi-realized, when I chose to go to Illinois, part of it was because they, they had a top flight engineering program, computer science program. But in particular, they had, they, they were picked in the mid eighties to be one of four federally funded centers for supercomputing at the time. And this was a specific government program that basically had two parts. One was to basically buy these, you know, $25 million supercomputers from companies at the time like Cray and Thinking Machines and basically put them in, you know, basically with four locations in the U.S. And then, and then, you know, for scientists to be able to use for drug design and studying black holes and doing all kinds of stuff.

• 5:42Marc Andreessen?

  A $25 million computer, you know, occupied a full room. And in fact, in those days, what they would do is they actually build an entire building for the computer and then they would actually, they'd build the shell of the building, they build the walls, they leave the ceiling open, then they lower the computer down through the ceiling up, but you were using a crane.

• 5:56Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 5:57Marc Andreessen?

  To lower in a place and then they'd finish the building. So this was a big deal at the time. These things were super expensive and so they only put them in four locations and they wanted other scientists and researchers all over the country to be able to use them. And so the part two of the program was this program called NSFNET, so it's National Science Foundation Network. Which was the funding group that paid for this whole thing. So those programs are authorized in the mid 80s. And then I got to Illinois in 89. And so they basically had been rolled out at that point. And so Illinois, in those days, it was like a fully broadband-wired internet-native campus.

• 6:27Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 6:27Marc Andreessen?

  And it was one of exactly four of those. But just because you have the internet doesn't mean that it's actually all that useful for anything, right? That there's, and you know, like if you're a scientist, like how exactly are you communicating with every, you know, with your colleagues on different campuses? How exactly are you, you know, storing and analyzing your research? How exactly are you going to share your research with the world? That stuff was all yet to be built. And so the purpose of this group was to build, you know, basically to build the early systems that would let people collaborate.

• 6:50Speaker 02

  So then you're building these early systems. Where does the idea for the mosaic browser come from?

• 6:56Marc Andreessen?

  So funny story there. So, so basically, so the project I ended, I got hired in to work on was a project called Collage, which basically was sort of, it's sort of, I don't know, maybe Zoom's the current comp or something, or Skype. So it was sort of, but sort of general-purpose, real-time conferencing, right? So video, you know, video, video, you know, audio, video, but also like what, you know, it's all the standard complement, whiteboard sharing, you know, document and collaborative document editing, Google Docs kind of thing. You know, this is like, what, in 1991, 1992, right? So they kind of had all those ideas back then. It's one of those funny things, like it's, it's, we will talk about this, but like the role of timing in this stuff is always so interesting because like that stuff's all happening now.

• 7:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:33Marc Andreessen?

  Right? Like Zoom goes public now.

• 7:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:35Marc Andreessen?

  Right? It's like 30 years later, right? So, so, you know, the leg on these things can be quite something.

• 7:41Speaker 02

  Okay, so you're trying to help these ideas take some early baby steps. How'd you think about what to work on?

• 7:46Marc Andreessen?

  Well, there were a few things, so there were a few things. And so then you basically say, okay, real-time isn't going to work. It was sort of internet variations on the bulletin board systems of the PC hobbyists in the mid 80s, right? And so it's sort of those ideas being transplanted to the internet, which is kind of what all of social networking has been doing for the last, you know, 30 years. There was that, and then there was this new thing called the web, which had been, you know, developed in Switzerland at CERN. But that was like super early. And there were like, I don't know, two or three websites at the time. And like the software was like, you know, just, it was just very early. And so if you, if you would read like an article about, you know, the internet at that point, it would, the article be like, well, why would anybody want to use the internet? And then a lot of the articles just ended there. But if they would go on to describe why you might use the internet, it's like, well, you can kind of do email. And then there's this FTP thing, you can download files.

• 8:30Marc Andreessen?

  And then if you really want to get weird, you can like be on Gopher and way you can like go to Gopher and view menus. You can go on Waze and do searches, you know, kind of clay, clay to be molded. And so, so basically the original idea for Mosaic was, okay, how about the universal client? Right? How about, okay, because the problem is like, all this stuff was like, these are all fragmented programs. They were hard to use. They were hard to install. But most of this stuff was open source. It was like you, you had to be pretty sophisticated and install it. By the way, it, it seems obvious that like, everybody's going to have this stuff. It seems obvious that kids are going to want to keep using this stuff once they graduate from college. It seems obvious that there's going to be, um, you know, software on servers and clients that's going to be used to share information. It's like, why wouldn't you be able to have a link? Well, what, number one, you don't have a text based display because you want to be able to read stuff. Like most computer UIs up until that point were not text based, right?

• 9:13Marc Andreessen?

  They were, they were like, you know, they, they were like buttons and switches and levers. Yep. Right. Like old style nuclear control panels or something. And this, this software metaphor was like, put everything in a document. So that was new, but we thought that was obvious because you like to be able to read things. Um, and then we thought, okay, hypertext is probably obvious. So there, there were a set of these things that we thought were obvious, but it's kind of like, okay, if they're so obvious, why haven't they happened?

• 9:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I remember like, uh, was it Vannevar Bush wrote something about, he talked about this thing called the Memex, I think. And it hypertexts like in the forties, maybe even like a long time ago.

• 9:42Marc Andreessen?

  So I started to do a lot of research. So luckily Illinois has a big library. So I started to do, and, and again, I was just stressed again, this is like pre, pre Google. Like, so this is like go to the card catalog, right? And try to figure out like, can I swear on this podcast?

• 9:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's okay with me.

• 9:55Marc Andreessen?

  Okay. Go to the card catalog and feel like, who the fuck wrote a book about this? Like, please God, could somebody have written a book about this? So basically the history was, um, uh, there had basically tracing back in time, there had Doug Engelbart, basically, who, who basically developed a lot of these ideas and demonstrated a lot of them working in prototype form in the late sixties. And so there was like an intellectual heritage going back to Doug. Contemporary, but even before that was Ted Nelson, uh, who had sort of invent, sort of invented the term hypertext. And so there was this idea of linking.

• 10:22Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 10:22Marc Andreessen?

  That kind of existed, but like Ted is the guy who kind of picked up those ideas and kind of put them in a, in the idea that, that a computer should be able to do this. Um, and so there was kind of that heritage. And then there was, as you alluded to, there was this guy named Vannevar. In 1945, I wrote a paper called As We May Think, which is one of those great old-style, 1940-style titles for papers. And it basically outlined a hypothetical system. This is 1945. So, Vannevar Bush is an important guy. He was FDR's science advisor during the development of the nuclear bomb. And so he was like a very important guy. And he basically, he defined basically how the federal government would fund research for the next like basically 70 years. So he was like a very important guy, pillar of the establishment. So he wrote this document, which The Atlantic at the time published, back when they used to publish things like this.

• 11:05Marc Andreessen?

  Today they publish a piece about how bad it is, but at the time they just like published a piece describing it. Basically outlined a system called Memex, which was, which is funny because 1945, so it's actually like pre-digital computer. Like digital computer was like a brand new idea.

• 11:18Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 11:18Marc Andreessen?

  And he didn't, but like these ideas go way back.

• 11:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:22Marc Andreessen?

  You know, they're fairly obvious fairly quickly, right? You know, because it's like, okay, that would be a good idea. It'd be a good idea to be able to store a large amount of information, retrieve it, share it, transmit it over long distances, search it.

• 11:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:33Marc Andreessen?

  There we were sitting in like 1992 being like, okay.

• 11:35Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 11:35Marc Andreessen?

  So basically it's like, are we crazy? Right? Is the rest of the world crazy or is it just the right time?

• 11:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. And it's funny because it's one of, to me, you know, we both know this guy well, Balaji Srinivasan. One of the things I really like is his notion of this idea maze. I think Chris Dixon talks about it too, right? It's, to me, it's a way better way to come at the question because a lot of the, like, all of it will happen someday, right? And so the question is just what's the right time for it to happen? And the idea maze is kind of this technique for understanding all the attempts that have occurred in the past and kind of understanding why those ideas got blocked and now do they get unblocked all of a sudden? How do you decide what to build first and which ideas are worth pursuing?

• 12:16Marc Andreessen?

  So what we needed to have was a network effect. We needed to have a flywheel kick in. We did the browser. We also did the web server at the same time. And then that web server actually now is, Apache is the modern descendant of that web server over, over the last 25, 30 years. What we needed was a kind of a ping pong effect, right? Where, because what you want is the flywheel, where like more people reading with the browser, at least more people wanting to publish with the server, the more people who publish with the server, the more incentive there is to read, and then you get the flywheel effect. And so what we needed for that, the advantage we had, is we, you know, we basically had a hack. One of the things we say at our firm is if you're going to start a new, network effects are like the best businesses in the world, but to get a network effect going, to get through the bootstrap phase, you need some hack, you need some strategy to kind of get you through that, that initial phase to the, to the flywheel catching.

• 12:59Marc Andreessen?

  And so our hack actually was, was actually, was, it was the fact, well, the internet, it was the, you know, sort of NSF net, the other hack actually was at the time, internet news groups. And so we were actually the carrier. Yep. And so it just like, it turned out, and this is one of those kind of stroke of luck things, it just turned out there was like, there was latent demand, there were enough people on this thing. There weren't, it kind of goes back to, they weren't online at the same time, but they were online. Yep. And so there were enough people online where you could, you know, there was a big incentive to be able to share, even to the number, small number of people who were there. And then there was a big incentive to consume if there was anything at all to read. Yep. And then this was like the prototypical early adopter crowd, where they just like, you know, like to try new things. And so there were a set of internet news groups that were kind of actively debating, discussing, you know, all these kinds of topics.

• 13:44Marc Andreessen?

  And so we were basically able to, you know, just kind of use that as the carrier wave. One of the first blogs was a page I maintained, I wouldn't say it was the first one, not necessarily, but it was one of the first ones. So we had what was called the what's new page. And the what's new page, later I would update it every, you didn't get into work and update it every morning, or say, when I got into work late in the afternoon, as the case might be. Probably started out as just everything that's there. No, it's literally every new website. Right? And it was literally like, I would just get emailed, like, okay, you know, I launched a new website that's got the menu of my favorite Indian restaurant in, you know, Cardiff. I've got a new website that has, you know, lyrics for the R.E.M. songs, right? It was just like random stuff like that. A lot of it was just people experimenting. And so it was literally, and you know, it started out being like one a day. I was like, okay, and then it started being two a day, and then it started being three a day,

• 14:29Marc Andreessen?

  and then it went to five and 10, 20, 30 a day. And you could, you could just, you could kind of, there were two ways to see the flywheel. One was the incoming email. There were two incoming email boxes where you could see the flywheel kick in. One was entries for the what's new page, because the what's new page was the main distribution method.

• 14:42Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 14:42Marc Andreessen?

  It was the main way people were finding out about new webpages.

• 14:44Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 14:44Marc Andreessen?

  Because this is pre-Google and everything else, pre-Yaho. But the other, the other email was customer support email for the browser.

• 14:50Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 14:51Marc Andreessen?

  Which was the thing, the thing that almost-

• 14:53Speaker 02

  The ones you didn't want to get.

• 14:53Marc Andreessen?

  The thing that almost killed me.

• 14:54Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 14:55Marc Andreessen?

  Was providing customer support for the entire internet.

• 14:59Marc Andreessen?

  But that's another part of this, part of the story later on. So, so basically, so literally what happened was, so we, this, this whole thing started taking off. The more and more people at, at Illinois started working on this. The team size started to expand. We became more ambitious. And then we went, we actually went for the second round of NSF, National Science Foundation, funding. This is all, all this is happening. I mean, I was, I was making minimum wage, $6.25 an hour. But that $6.25 an hour was being paid for by the National Science Foundation through a very generous, generous grant. And I'm grateful for that.

• 15:26Speaker 02

  At least you didn't get diluted.

• 15:27Marc Andreessen?

  Uh, no.

• 15:29Marc Andreessen?

  It's hard to dilute $6.25 an hour, in fairness. They say, keep your burn rate low.

• 15:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:35Marc Andreessen?

  That's a good way to do it.

• 15:36Speaker 02

  Mission accomplished.

• 15:36Marc Andreessen?

  Um, so we actually went, we actually, so literally what was happening was we were just, it was working. And so we had the, we were the dog that caught the bus, you know, kind of thing, where it just like, like literally what happened was, you know, the number of customer support emails per day was like, you know, 100, and then 200, and then 300. And then, you know, kind of up and to the right. So we went to NSF for grant number two, to basically like, you know, basically make this thing real, like, and kind of fully build it out. And of course, they denied the grant.

• 16:02Speaker 02

  Well, we, we don't want to pay money to take all these support emails.

• 16:05Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, exactly. Which is literally, and what I, at the time, I was like, well, that's kind of, you're, it's kind of, you know, they have a thing that's working and they're shutting off the money. Like, okay, that seems kind of dumb. And then I realized, actually later on, I was like, oh, that was actually smart. Like, so specifically, like, it's, it's a research institute, it's NSF, it's research, it's initiative on scientific research. And so clearly, yeah, customer support emails are like, you know, the 14th version of the Mac client, like, is not-

• 16:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. So maybe that's a, an initial sign of product market fit, is when the university says, you know what, we're, we're done with you using our resources here. You've outgrown this university.

• 16:35Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 16:35Speaker 02

  That happened kind of with Google, too, I think, later on.

• 16:38Marc Andreessen?

  Right, right. At some point, Google would have taken over the entire computer science department.

• 16:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:41Marc Andreessen?

  Right, eating all the computers. And it was, yeah, you get kicked out of the nest.

• 16:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, so, so they were kind of pushing you out of the nest.

• 16:46Marc Andreessen?

  So I think, I, so in retrospect, they did exactly the right thing. They, they did exactly the right thing at exactly the right time.

• 16:51Speaker 02

  So did you decide, okay, I want to start a company? Or were you just like, well, that's a bummer. My grant money just went away?

• 16:57Marc Andreessen?

  The second.

• 16:58Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 16:58Marc Andreessen?

  Of the two.

• 16:59Speaker 02

  So then, so like now you're just answering customer support emails?

• 17:02Marc Andreessen?

  No, I was like, shit, I have to get a job.

• 17:04Speaker 02

  So what year were you at college?

• 17:05Marc Andreessen?

  I was graduating.

• 17:06Speaker 02

  Okay, so you were about to graduate.

• 17:07Marc Andreessen?

  It coincided with graduation.

• 17:08Speaker 02

  Okay, okay.

• 17:09Marc Andreessen?

  It coincided right around that time. And I was like, well, shit, I got to get a job. And so like, and they were, you know, basically there's not, you know, very, there's very little actually in Champaign, Urbana.

• 17:15Speaker 02

  Okay, so now you got to get a job.

• 17:17Marc Andreessen?

  No.

• 17:17Speaker 02

  Um, you're interviewing for jobs?

• 17:19Marc Andreessen?

  Nope.

• 17:19Speaker 02

  No?

• 17:20Marc Andreessen?

  Well, I had a slight advantage in my job search.

• 17:22Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 17:23Marc Andreessen?

  Which is I

• 17:24Speaker 02

  You controlled Mosaic.

• 17:25Marc Andreessen?

  I controlled Mosaic. And specifically, I controlled Mosaic, which is like, I got to decide what people saw.

• 17:30Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 17:30Marc Andreessen?

  And so I made sure they saw my resume.

• 17:32Speaker 02

  Okay, nice.

• 17:34Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, yeah. And so I

• 17:35Speaker 02

  That's a growth hack.

• 17:36Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, yeah, it's a growth hack. It's a growth hack for your career. You, you just go in the browser and you, you add to the browser, uh, yeah, a button to see your resume. Um, and so I, in fairness, I didn't put it on the homepage, which I could have done. Although that was a step too far, but I put it in the about page.

• 17:49Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 17:50Marc Andreessen?

  Um, and so, um, I got, I got a set of offers, uh, um, some on the east coast, some on the west coast. I almost joined the Java team.

• 17:56Speaker 02

  No kidding?

• 17:56Marc Andreessen?

  Uh, in 94, yeah, 94, when I first came out here, but they offered

• 18:00Speaker 02

  When it was called Oak?

• 18:01Marc Andreessen?

  It was called Oak at the time. Uh, so it's Java pre-Java. Um, and, uh, they, but they, at the time, it was, it was a spin out from Sun, but it was only a partial spin out. And so they offered me something called Phantom Stock Options.

• 18:11Speaker 02

  So, uh, you know, but it's also funny because, um, all of us were thinking about, okay, there's going to be this network centric future. But most people were, were, were framing it in yesterday's metaphor. They were talking about the digital superhighway. And so as a result, people thought the center of gravity is going to be like set top boxes and video game consoles. And, and the, I don't know if others had this reaction, but when I first saw the Mosaic browser, it was instant, like instant ignition. This is how it's going to play out, right? I just immediately knew the way we've been thinking about this is wrong. It's not going to happen on these set top boxes. It may someday, but like the browser is going to happen right here, right now. Like there was just no doubt in my mind, right?

• 18:51Marc Andreessen?

  Well, no, so what I would nominate on the point that you made, I think a point you made is an important point that we, we, we see all the time in our day job. And we see it every, all the time today, which is, it's like, it's, I nominate two kind of dynamics to that. So, um, uh, top down versus bottoms up.

• 19:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:03Marc Andreessen?

  Um, and one way versus two way.

• 19:05Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 19:06Marc Andreessen?

  Right. And these are still battles that are playing out. I mean, this is, you know, the whole battle on cryptocurrency that's happening right now. Like you see this all over the industry, all over the world, like this battle. And by the way, this is like many of the, many of the global politics are based on this battle right now. And so top down versus bottom up, like the view at that time, right? It was the information superhighway. It was going to be, um, you know, sort of, it was to be set top boxes, interactive television. But it was going to be provided by big companies.

• 19:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. Or should the government?

• 19:27Marc Andreessen?

  The government.

• 19:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. They built the regular highway. Should they build a digital superhighway and that'll help us against Japan, quote unquote.

• 19:34Marc Andreessen?

  Exactly. That was the big thing.

• 19:35Speaker 02

  That was the thought process.

• 19:36Marc Andreessen?

  Company that was going to, the country that was going to take everything at the time. So, um, but it was going to be top down. And so the magazines and newspapers, a hundred percent of the coverage, a hundred percent of the commentary, like all of the media coverage, it was all around. It was going to be right. The government or it was going to be Time Warner in those days, or AT&T, or Verizon, or, um, you know, the big cable company with the predecessor to Comcast. Um, and so it's going to be these giant media telecom companies, right? And then Microsoft and Oracle, giant software companies were trying to kind of wedge their way in to kind of be part of it. This is top down thing, but like they would decide what it was going to be. And then, and then, and then that goes to the second thing, uh, which is one way versus two way, which was it was going to be a, it was going to be a one, one primarily video, but like a one way push. Right? And so this was, this is why the whole metaphor at the five hundred channels, like the whole thing was, oh, today you've got like 14 TV channels and the future you'll have 500. That's the information.

• 20:20Speaker 02

  And it'll be interactive TV.

• 20:22Marc Andreessen?

  Well, it'd be interactive TV.

• 20:23Speaker 02

  You'll be able to push a button and order a pizza.

• 20:24Marc Andreessen?

  You'll have a remote control. You won't have a keyboard.

• 20:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:27Marc Andreessen?

  Right. Or a mouse.

• 20:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:28Marc Andreessen?

  Or anything that lets you get into trouble.

• 20:30Speaker 02

  Button that has a slice of pizza on it.

• 20:32Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

• 20:33Speaker 02

  We really had those.

• 20:34Marc Andreessen?

  Or like, you know, American Idol, American Idol, basically everything. I'll be like American Idol. I'll just be like, oh, you can vote for the person who's, you know, singing in the vest or something like that.

• 20:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:40Marc Andreessen?

  But the idea, the idea that an individual user was going to be contributing into this environment, then the idea that an individual user would be publishing a video. Right? Or making a post or anything like that was just like, you're setting up a website. There was just, there was no incorporation of that kind of two way idea at all. And so I think what put the whammy on people was if you were, if you came from the established power structure, if you came from the big companies or the press that was used to covering the big companies, it obviously had to be top down in one way.

• 21:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:10Marc Andreessen?

  Right. And by the way, the press, the press was one way at that time.

• 21:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:13Marc Andreessen?

  This is before the audience could talk back. And so if you were at Time Magazine or NBC News or the New York Times, like you were used to.

• 21:19Speaker 02

  You controlled the conversation.

• 21:20Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, exactly. And like, maybe you publish the occasional letter to the editor, but like you constrain that shit. Like you don't let people get carried away.

• 21:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:26Marc Andreessen?

  And that's, you know, one 48th of the space on, you know, one page of the paper. And so, so there was that. And so that all the people who thought that they were in a position to decide had this, had that view. But then all the regular people, right, or at least especially the, let's just say the nerds, including ourselves, the regular people, the people who were just like, look, I just want to be able to do things.

• 21:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:47Marc Andreessen?

  Right. And I want, by the way, do things, I want to be able to consume, but I also want to create and I want to contribute and I want to build.

• 21:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. And the, the thing that I've just seen time and again, it's like you think about it, when you were at the University of Illinois, you're hanging out with these supercomputers and you're building a browser. It's almost like the world was thinking in Cartesian coordinates and you were raised to only think in polar coordinates.

• 22:07Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah.

• 22:07Speaker 02

  Right. And so like, your mind was prepared to receive the insight because like you said, you were living in the future. You may not have even known it at the time that you were living in the future.

• 22:17Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah.

• 22:17Speaker 02

  But it just, and like so much of entrepreneurship I've found is it's like noticing. It's, it's, you're living in the future and you notice something and you solve your own problem. And you're not necessarily trying to get rich at the time. You're just like, I'm working on cool stuff and to do more cool stuff, I gotta build this thing. So, yeah.

• 22:35Marc Andreessen?

  What I found with myself, what I found with the other founders who are like, like what you're describing is, it's just obvious. Like it's, it's, it's, it's just like, it's just like, oh, obviously this should be this way. But then there's like cognitive dissonance, which is like, if it's so obvious, why hasn't everybody figured this out yet?

• 22:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:47Marc Andreessen?

  Now, most of the time, when people come to that conclusion.

• 22:50Speaker 02

  They're just wrong.

• 22:51Marc Andreessen?

  They're just wrong or insane.

• 22:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:53Marc Andreessen?

  Right?

• 22:53Speaker 02

  They have a vision, but it's like a hallucination vision.

• 22:56Marc Andreessen?

  Exactly, exactly. But every once in a while, you've got somebody who really does decode something. And I think to your point on kind of the preconditions for it, some of it is you get to see the, you get to see the early kind of pings. I always talk about like, they're pings from the future. Is the way they like, you can see these things actually running today. And so you get, you get in a position where you can see something like that. So that's part of it. But the other thing that happens is just like, you get to operate, it's the people who get to operate with the new assumptions.

• 23:21Speaker 02

  Right, right. Yeah. And like when, when you're your age, starting Netscape, you don't have to translate, right? Like people who lived in Cartesian coordinates, they have to translate to go to Polar, right? And so people who lived in the world of tops down, one-way, digital superhighway, interactive TV, they had to like, they had to translate that to what you were already doing, but to you, it's just obvious, right? It's like there, there, there wasn't anything for you to unlearn.

• 23:44Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah. And then on top of that, you know, I had no power, right? And so like, you know, I was not the CEO of AT&T. Like I couldn't, you know, I couldn't do any of the stuff that all these fancy people could do. I didn't have any of that level of control. And so like, anything that I was going to do was going to have to be bottomed out.

• 23:58Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 23:59Marc Andreessen?

  It was going to have to be two-way, like, you know, kind of by def, if it wasn't two-way, I'd be blocked out.

• 24:03Speaker 02

  So then, speaking of powerful people, how did you find Jim Clark? Or how did you guys connect?

• 24:08Marc Andreessen?

  And this is where I got, I got really lucky. So, so Jim Clark, kind of quick recap, Jim Clark at that time, Jim Clark had been the founder and original CEO of Silicon Graphics, which was at the time, you know, the company, as you said, you were there. It was the, the company at the time is probably most analogous today to, I don't know, some combination of, I don't know, Google and, I mean, it was like, it was the company. It was, it was the company that all the smart, it was like, if you were a smart person in the computer industry, it was the company you either worked for or wanted to work for.

• 24:36Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 24:37Marc Andreessen?

  It was like the brain, the brain center of the industry. And this was when they, they drove, really drove computer graphics to be what they are today.

• 24:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. Total gee whiz company, right? Best graphics engineers in the world, best networking engineers in the world, because you have to push the pixels over network. It was just an incredible place to be.

• 24:52Marc Andreessen?

  Fortunately for me, Jim had a problem. And the problem was Jim had grown very dissatisfied with the state of affairs at Silicon Graphics at the time. He got frustrated by a number of things. He left the company. He decided to start his second company. But he had a very specific problem, which was that he had an unsolicited at SGI. So he had spent the previous 15 years hiring all the smartest people he knew in the world into SGI and now he couldn't take them with him. Yep. And so he literally had like a, he had a, what's that called, a warm meat problem. As in, he didn't have any, any bodies to, to work on, to, to, to work with them. And so he literally went out to a whole bunch of people in the industry who he knew, you know, who weren't at SGI and he talked to them about maybe, you know, you want to start something or work on something.

• 25:35Marc Andreessen?

  And then he, he met me through a friend, a mutual, a guy, actually a guy he worked with at SGI who I didn't know, but who knew about me. He was actually one of the, one of the guys at SGI who actually was responsible for all the demos. Yeah. They were a famous demo company. Oh, yeah. That's how we sold our computers. Yeah. And so the guy who ran the, I think it was designed the demos or built the demos for like the, for the briefing center, you know, basically was like up on all the leading edge stuff because he was the demo guy. And so he basically knew about all this stuff. And so he, he, I apparently happened to mention to Jim that like, A, that I existed and that B, B, that I had just recently moved out here. Yeah. And so like I get a random call from Jim Clark like one afternoon. Okay. And did you know who he was? Oh, yes. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's like, literally, it's like, you know, Steve Jobs calls you or, you know. Yeah. You're like, this is hot shit. Larry Page calls you. Yeah. You know, hey, you know, this is Larry Page.

• 26:19Marc Andreessen?

  Would you like to talk about starting a new company? You know, you're like, oh, okay. You think? All right. You know, gee, I don't know. Let me check my calendar, right? Yeah. Um, so I'm like, yeah, you know, basically, yeah, you know, sure. Name the time and place. And so did you guys get on pretty well in the early days? Yeah. So a couple of things happened. So one is to my enormous shock, the other people he were talking to, he, the other people he was talking to were too risk averse and they didn't, and, and I should also, this was during a very sort of down period in Silicon Valley. Yeah. This was not an exciting time. Yep. Uh, this was like 93, 94. So there, there had been a really big recession and a lot of companies had failed. And so there were a lot of people who just like wanted a job. Yep. Um, but he did not get as nearly a positive response as I would have imagined. Yeah. Uh, from a lot of people who had like actual, you know, had, had careers, let's say.

• 27:02Marc Andreessen?

  Um, and so through process of elimination, in part, I think it came down to me. And then, and then he and I started brainstorming and we actually, well, yeah, and then we started, we started working together on plans.

• 27:14Speaker 02

  So, so, so he's, he wasn't saying, I want Marc Andreessen because he invented the mosaic browser. It's like, I can't get any of these killer SGI engineers. He's maybe another new smart guy that I can get and not get sued.

• 27:27Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, I think, I think, I think that's part of it. And I think that's, he's, you know, probably just channeling Jim, he probably, you know, at the very least, he knows how to build something new.

• 27:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:33Marc Andreessen?

  You know, which not everybody does. And so at least he's done it once before. But the reason why the Netscape idea was not obvious is because even after all of that, it still wasn't obvious that the internet would be a business.

• 27:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:43Marc Andreessen?

  And part of that was it wasn't a business, like nobody had made it into a business.

• 27:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:47Marc Andreessen?

  And so there was just, it was just this thing, which is, it goes to the top down, bottoms up thing, which is just like, even after all that, and I saw the adoption cycle and the whole thing. And I stayed on all the mailing lists and I saw everything. It was just like, okay, like, I don't know, like, what are we gonna, like, this is all open source, like, you know, there's no commercial transactions on the internet. It had been illegal to do commercial transactions on the internet until 1993. And this is only the spring of 1994, so there was no e-commerce.

• 28:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:07Marc Andreessen?

  There's no Amazon, there was none of that stuff.

• 28:09Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 28:09Marc Andreessen?

  There was literally nothing to buy. There was no money, there was no nothing, right? And so it was just like, okay, there was not an obvious business to be built.

• 28:16Speaker 02

  And I remember for a couple of years, right, Upside Magazine at the time and things like that would say, you know, when's the internet gonna have a business model?

• 28:24Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah.

• 28:24Speaker 02

  Right? For about two years, people said, nobody's gonna have a business model.

• 28:27Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, this is absurd, everybody knows this.

• 28:28Speaker 02

  Even Yahoo, people said, well, great, but no business model.

• 28:31Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, of course, yeah, and Google had no business model, like all those things, yeah.

• 28:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:34Marc Andreessen?

  None of these things had business models, right? Exactly, so, um, so basically, so, so, and then, and then Jim had been enmeshed, you know, selling graphics had gotten enmeshed in two areas. That were, goes back to the conversation we're having with Interactive TV. So they were actually the provider of the technology for the Time Warner Interactive TV project, which was like the most viable. It was the most actually developed version of the top-down information superhighway thing at the time in Orlando, Florida. This was written up in all the magazines and newspapers at the time. It was a really cool, like, system, it's kind of analogous to what you have today on a modern, you know, whatever Comcast or DirecTV set-top box or something, or like Netflix kind of experience. In 1994, it was impressive. It was just, it was like the capital cost per house was like, I don't know, $60,000?

• 29:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's crazy, we had some of our high-end gear, right?

• 29:17Marc Andreessen?

  Yep. It was not. So there was no. So we basically set out, plan number one was to build the software layer for interactive TV. And then we basically realized, oh shit, there's not going to be actually any interactive TV. Like, the economics actually don't work.

• 29:28Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 29:28Marc Andreessen?

  And then the other decision was, SGI was building the graphics chip for the Nintendo, the Nintendo 64, the first game console with 3D graphics. And so the idea basically was to build what today you call Xbox Live or PlayStation Live, to build basically the network for Nintendo 64. The problem was Nintendo 64 was not going to ship for another two years. So literally, we got to the point where we were like, okay, those two plans don't work. And then it was a little like, are we gonna, like, what are we gonna do? Process of elimination. Okay, so if top-down interactive TV isn't gonna work, and interactive gaming at that point wasn't gonna work, then what's left?

• 30:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:01Marc Andreessen?

  What's left is the internet, right? And so it's like, okay, process of elimination, this thing that nobody's taking seriously, that nobody thinks can be a business, that breaks all the rules, that bottoms up, that's organic, by the way, messy, and hackers, and crime.

• 30:12Speaker 02

  And you probably don't even think it's a business yet.

• 30:14Marc Andreessen?

  No. Yeah. Well, now, I have no actual business experience at that point. So I have no basis to evaluate anything in business. But however, it seemed like a stretch. But like, if it's the only thing.

• 30:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:24Marc Andreessen?

  Then it's gonna win.

• 30:25Speaker 02

  Right.

• 30:26Marc Andreessen?

  Because the only thing.

• 30:27Speaker 02

  Is the thing.

• 30:28Marc Andreessen?

  Is the thing. Right? And so it's weird, because Jim was like, oh, that makes total sense. And what Jim actually realized, I think to his credit, was he, he was so, he was so, SGI was so powerful at that point, that he was able, he was, he was in that, he was in that top-down world. And he, and so he, I think he would say, like, he was so fully in it and of it, that he thought that that was how the world was going to work. And he was doing his best to make it work that way when he was at SGI. But then he's got such amazing, sort of, mental flexibility, which is extraordinarily rare to have somebody who's this flexible in their thought process, where he was just like, when he got into this new context, he was kind of just shedding assumptions. He was able to replant himself into a true startup context.

• 31:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:04Marc Andreessen?

  And able to shed all the assumptions and say, okay, from a standing start, what would you do? And come to a completely different set of conclusions.

• 31:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. So then, so then you decide to start this thing.

• 31:11Marc Andreessen?

  Right.

• 31:12Speaker 02

  And you raise, you raise money from, well, he seed funds it at first. He's probably already been seed funding just your little vision quest.

• 31:20Marc Andreessen?

  No.

• 31:21Speaker 02

  No? No? Okay. So you're just on this vision quest, you, by process of elimination.

• 31:26Marc Andreessen?

  Next weekend.

• 31:26Speaker 02

  It's like, okay, we're Doing this.

• 31:28Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah.

• 31:28Speaker 02

  Uh, what you then you just go raise money from John Dorit, Kleiner Perkins or?

• 31:33Marc Andreessen?

  Say, we ran about six months with you. We ran about six months with Jim's money and then he was like, you know, I'm rich, but I'm not that rich. Um, and so, um, he was like, we were time to go raise money. So Jim zeroed in on Kleiner Perkins because KP had actually backed, um, Sun.

• 31:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:47Marc Andreessen?

  Which was SGI's big competitor. Um, and he had always really received. He told me he'd always really respected how he Sun, both companies ended up being very successful, but Sun had a much faster takeoff rate out of the gate.

• 31:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:57Marc Andreessen?

  And then, um, he had always respected how John went about being a board member at Sun.

• 32:01Speaker 02

  Okay. So you, you, you raised some money for Netscape, uh, not sure if it's a business yet, but hey, let's, let's go for it. And it, this must be around the time when, um, Mosaic is starting to see even bigger lift, right?

• 32:13Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah.

• 32:13Speaker 02

  Because I, because I seem to remember like the summer of, the summer of 94.

• 32:17Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah.

• 32:18Speaker 02

  It was starting to really become a thing.

• 32:19Marc Andreessen?

  So it just knew a snowball. It was a snowball rolling down the hill, picking up speed.

• 32:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:23Marc Andreessen?

  And it was starting to mainstream. And so you were starting to be able to, you're starting to get the first signs of consumers actually coming on the thing.

• 32:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:28Marc Andreessen?

  Just normal people.

• 32:28Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 32:29Marc Andreessen?

  Which is like a big, a big deal at the time. You're starting to have companies starting to start, you know, launch websites. So it was around that time. I think it was around that time that AT&T ran the first internet ad.

• 32:37Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 32:37Marc Andreessen?

  Um, on, on at the time and because Wired had created a website and they ran the first internet ad on the first, the reason we have all these banner ads is because the first ad was a banner ad for AT&T on the wired.com.

• 32:47Speaker 02

  When did you switch from Mosaic to Netscape?

• 32:50Marc Andreessen?

  Mosaic had been the name of the, had been the name of the, um, had been the, Mosaic had been the name of the project at, at, at Illinois. Um, we, we didn't bring any of the code with us. Um, it was, the code was open source, but copyright University of Illinois. Um, so we decided, and we needed to rewrite it anyway, because we needed a bunch of stuff in the code, like security that we didn't have. So we wanted to do, we wanted to do a clean, a clean rewrite with what we knew, what we knew now. But we did figure like it's, it's the name of the research project. I knew Sun, the name Sun was actually named after this, the research project at Stanford spawn Sun was actually called the Sun Research Project.

• 33:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. Stanford University Network.

• 33:22Marc Andreessen?

  Exactly. Exactly. So I was like, it's just, it's, it's not a, it's not, it's just like, it's the name of the research project. It's like, it's like a, just a, it's a free thing.

• 33:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:29Marc Andreessen?

  So it's just obviously we'll just call this thing Mosaic Communications. We'll figure out the product name later.

• 33:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:33Marc Andreessen?

  Um, and, um, and then University of Illinois then did a very, um, sort of clever thing I had not seen before. And I don't think I've seen since, which is they didn't sue us. Instead they went, they sent lawyers to all of our potential customers and told them they were going to sue us.

• 33:46Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 33:47Marc Andreessen?

  Um, and so they freeze us in our tracks. Um, they basically blocked our ability to do business. Because then they alleged to basically have a broad range of trademark and copyright violations. The copyright violations weren't true because we didn't take any of the code. But they threatened us with for that. And then we had this problem, which is we had, we had this name, which there's some ambiguity as to whether there was a trademark on it or not. But like, you know, there, there, there did seem to be a clear.

• 34:10Speaker 02

  Hard to explain away.

• 34:11Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just like inconvenient fact, as they say. And so we actually ended up suing them for, I believe it's, what is it? Restrain to trade and purchase interference.

• 34:21Speaker 02

  Are you feeling kind of pissed at them?

• 34:23Marc Andreessen?

  Yes.

• 34:23Speaker 02

  Right about now, like thermonuclear super pissed?

• 34:25Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, right about now, like today, sitting here.

• 34:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, even now.

• 34:28Marc Andreessen?

  Very much so, yes. Yes, I'm still extremely angry. Thank you for, thank you, thank you for asking.

• 34:34Speaker 02

  How's that make you feel, Mark?

• 34:35Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, exactly. We'll pick that up in part two, the psychotherapy section of the, of the thing. So we actually ended up suing them and we actually ended up suing them and, and then we negotiated a settlement.

• 34:46Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 34:46Marc Andreessen?

  And we paid, we paid them and as part of the settlement, we changed the name.

• 34:48Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 34:49Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah. And that was, that was, and that was the last penny.

• 34:52Speaker 02

  So you changed it to net, you changed the name to Netscape. So then, so you do the Netscape browser, did it just immediately blow up? I mean, it was just, everybody knew who you were, everybody knew that you were the voice of browsers. It just.

• 35:04Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah.

• 35:05Speaker 02

  So like, what?

• 35:05Marc Andreessen?

  So that was a super fat, well, it was, it was this thing of, it was basically continuation of the mosaic phenomenon. And, and we were the clear inheritors of that because we had built it. And so it was just one of these things where like, it, it, it was a cold start as a company.

• 35:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:17Marc Andreessen?

  But it was building directly on the momentum from the previous thing. And then we, we knew, what else do we know? We knew Illinois was not going to continue the mosaic project because we knew that.

• 35:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, they didn't want to do it.

• 35:24Marc Andreessen?

  Right, exactly. And so we, we kind of knew that it had to be picked up. And then, look, the other thing was like, there were just a set of things that you just, you'd needed. Like it was time, it was time to be able to like do financial transactions, right? So it was time, like you need a secure, you needed encryption, which the original browser didn't have.

• 35:38Speaker 02

  It's, it's so then, so, so was there any sort of palpable moment where you're just like, holy crap, this is blowing up or had it kind of already blown up? Even before Netscape really got started, like was there, was there any moment where you're inside a Netscape and you're just like, holy shit?

• 35:56Marc Andreessen?

  Well, the big moment was the night of the original release of the browser where, you know, you, we hooked up one of the computers to the, to the stereo system and had the cannon fire sound effect for every time somebody downloaded it.

• 36:05Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 36:05Marc Andreessen?

  And the cannon started to go off.

• 36:07Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 36:07Marc Andreessen?

  Before long, the cannon was going off continuously. Right, so.

• 36:10Speaker 02

  Like how, like how long?

• 36:11Marc Andreessen?

  Oh, that was like in a couple, that was a few hours.

• 36:13Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 36:14Marc Andreessen?

  But I mean, that was, but again, it was feeding on this moment. It was just like everybody.

• 36:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:17Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, we, we knew everybody who was using Mosaic. We knew how to get to them. We just said, hey, there's this new thing.

• 36:21Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 36:22Marc Andreessen?

  It was much better. I mean, it was built correctly.

• 36:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:24Marc Andreessen?

  It was our second, second implementation.

• 36:26Speaker 02

  It's, and so.

• 36:27Marc Andreessen?

  We just, we knew it was better.

• 36:28Speaker 02

  Okay. And so now it's probably what the, the, this is probably late 94?

• 36:33Marc Andreessen?

  Uh, yeah.

• 36:34Speaker 02

  Okay. And so, and, and if I remember, you went public like in early 95.

• 36:39Marc Andreessen?

  Uh, yeah.

• 36:40Speaker 02

  With no profits.

• 36:41Marc Andreessen?

  August.

• 36:41Speaker 02

  Did you have any revenue yet?

• 36:42Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, yeah. So we had revenue, we doubled revenue every quarter that year. So their revenue that year was, my quarter was 5 million, 10 million, 20 million and 40 million.

• 36:50Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 36:50Marc Andreessen?

  Um, and we went cash flow positive, like I think right around the time we were, we went public. And I think we were, if I remember correctly, we were cash flow positive continuously.

• 36:58Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 36:59Marc Andreessen?

  All the way to when we sold the company. So one of the, one of the legends that, one of the legends, myths that built up around the company is that it was this early precursor for these unprofitable companies.

• 37:06Speaker 02

  Really?

• 37:06Marc Andreessen?

  Uh, and actually, we, we actually prided ourselves at the time of like delivering cash flow.

• 37:10Speaker 02

  So, so.

• 37:10Marc Andreessen?

  Basically through the whole thing.

• 37:11Speaker 02

  So was the decision to go public pretty obvious then at the time? It was just like, your revenues are exploding, people want the product?

• 37:19Marc Andreessen?

  It was obvious to Jim.

• 37:22Speaker 02

  So, see, yeah, so like, what's it like? So you're just barely out of college.

• 37:25Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah.

• 37:25Speaker 02

  And all this stuff's happening around you. Like what, what's that like?

• 37:28Marc Andreessen?

  Uh, you know, it was just, I mean, it was literally, we were so heads down. Um, it was just like, you know, go work somewhere. It was one of those things. There was so much to do.

• 37:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:37Marc Andreessen?

  There was so much to do. I mean, it's like, it's building a company, which is incredibly hard, but on the top of, on top of that, like the whole thing started to work. And then there's just like, you have like a thousand ideas.

• 37:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:44Marc Andreessen?

  Right, and then it's just.

• 37:45Speaker 02

  Well, and a few more customer support calls now.

• 37:46Marc Andreessen?

  And all that, yeah, all this, all this other infrastructure to build. And, and you know, and then look, I'm learning business, I'm learning like basically all the business on the fly, right?

• 37:52Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 37:53Marc Andreessen?

  I'm basically learning like, you know, I don't know, whatever is in an MBA plus another 10 years of operating experience.

• 37:57Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 37:57Marc Andreessen?

  You know, and like as, as fast as I possibly can, right? So I basically either like, I'm either at work or I'm like at home reading business books. Like those were the only two. Things that I did.

• 38:06Speaker 02

  It would so you now you know about the theories of product market fit and all that stuff like how do you reconcile what happened at Netscape with the notion of product market fit like yeah just how do you reckon because it just seems like one of these rare cases where it's just like lightning just struck and it was like huge right away.

• 38:23Marc Andreessen?

  I think for B to B there's like there are deterministic ways to try to get to product market fit for consumer stuff it's less clear to me even still.

• 38:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:31Marc Andreessen?

  We actually use the term lightning strike. It may just be well here's one of the questions is like there are these companies there are quite a few companies that have had could lightning strike consumer hits in the last 20 years and that that led to the creation of like very interesting companies and there's probably I don't know in the US alone 50 or 100 or 150 of those right.

• 38:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:47Marc Andreessen?

  How many of those how many of those ever had another one?

• 38:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:49Marc Andreessen?

  Very few. In the same company.

• 38:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:51Marc Andreessen?

  That they didn't have to go acquire from outside.

• 38:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:54Marc Andreessen?

  And I think it's.

• 38:54Speaker 02

  Apple?

• 38:55Marc Andreessen?

  Maybe zero.

• 38:56Speaker 02

  Now people talk about the internet as being easy for hackers to get to fundamentally insecure as an architecture or or needs to be rethought in some ways. Knowing what you know now are there things that you think you could have done or that Netscape could have done that that may have made it play out a little differently?

• 39:15Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, so there's three big things there's three big things that we should have done. Would have made a big difference early on and one of them we well well there's one thing we did that mattered a lot I'll talk about that there's one thing we tried to do and couldn't get there which remains a hot topic today and there's a third thing that didn't even occur to us which I kept myself we didn't think about this but I'll explain why we didn't think about it so the thing that we did do is we got encryption.

• 39:34Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 39:35Marc Andreessen?

  In there.

• 39:35Speaker 02

  That's huge.

• 39:36Marc Andreessen?

  And and that was a fight then by the way it looks like it's going to be a fight again now. The various Western governments are once again pushing to try to restrict the use of strong encryption like we and for people don't know the history of that like we fought that battle and Netscape was Netscape Navigator was the first commercial implementation of encryption that became widely used.

• 39:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:55Marc Andreessen?

  There had been other products before but we were the first one that millions of people used and so we we we at the at the time we we developed Netscape to have strong encryption. In the browser method, the browser was classified under US federal law with criminal penalties as ammunition.

• 40:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:10Marc Andreessen?

  It's classified in the same export control category as tomahawk missiles. And so we were not allowed to export. The version with stronger encryption, we could sell it in the US, we couldn't export it. We had deliberately, we had to export a weakened version.

• 40:21Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 40:21Marc Andreessen?

  So our sales pitch to a user in, you know, France or Australia or something is like, hey, congratulations, you get the one that's easy to crack.

• 40:27Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 40:28Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, you know.

• 40:29Speaker 02

  US government can have their way with it.

• 40:31Marc Andreessen?

  I hope you like it. Right, exactly, yeah. NSA has it pre-wired effectively, because they could just crack it easily. And so we fought really hard in the 90s, since encryption wars at the time, and ultimately the government actually backed down. And as of like, was it 97 or whatever, they actually changed policy.

• 40:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:47Marc Andreessen?

  And they actually legalized, essentially legalized strong encryption globally for US companies to be able to build products globally. That battle keeps getting refought, and it has come, and probably in my view, it's come back to life. I think it's just, it's just an absurd thing to be, it's just like, do you want secure systems or not?

• 41:03Speaker 02

  Right.

• 41:03Marc Andreessen?

  Could somebody please decide?

• 41:04Speaker 02

  Right.

• 41:05Marc Andreessen?

  Do you want, if you don't want secure systems, fine, I guess we'll stop trying to build them. I guess they'll get built, you know, in other countries, and you know, the US tech industry will not be relevant anymore, so that's an option.

• 41:13Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 41:13Marc Andreessen?

  But like, if you want us, if you want American companies to win at tech, like, maybe we should be able to build secure systems. And if you want us to be able to protect and defend the United States against cyberterrorism and criminals and all this stuff, you know, presumably that's a good idea. Anyway, we got that one in there. The one that we tried to do was integrated financial transactions. So payments, obviously, was something that you would want. And we tried to build that in. We tried hard there. The problem there is, you know, obviously, money, payments, transactions, that have been historically highly regulated.

• 41:41Speaker 02

  Right.

• 41:42Marc Andreessen?

  And so we made arguably the mistake in that case of asking for permission, which is we went to the banks and the credit card companies.

• 41:48Speaker 02

  Should have let the pirates go crazy.

• 41:49Marc Andreessen?

  Probably. The problem was, we didn't have the technology yet, we didn't have Bitcoin, we didn't have cryptocurrency, this was pre-cryptocurrency.

• 41:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:55Marc Andreessen?

  And so had we let the pirates go crazy, we would have had to just implement a system that just let you transfer money with like, no, no permission.

• 42:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:02Marc Andreessen?

  And probably we would have gotten nuked for that.

• 42:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, that would have even been worse than the encryption.

• 42:06Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, like PayPal figured out a way to bootstrap a system, you know, a few years later, but you know, they almost died, like, they came close to dying.

• 42:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:13Marc Andreessen?

  They almost got regulated out of existence, they just barely got through it. And so that was the big one that we should have had and we missed. But we did try. And that's one of the reasons why I'm so strong now, so positive on cryptocurrency and blockchain and Bitcoin and Ethereum and all these things today. It's just like internet scale money and trust needs to happen.

• 42:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:31Marc Andreessen?

  It was a huge problem that we didn't have it early. Had we had internet scale money and trust wired in early, like the internet economy today would not be based on advertising.

• 42:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:39Marc Andreessen?

  Right? It would not be based on any of this privacy stuff that people are worried about today. It would be based on money and trust.

• 42:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:43Marc Andreessen?

  And it would be a fundamentally better, stronger system. And so, and so with our view is like with cryptocurrency, we have a chance to go back and kind of redo that.

• 42:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:52Marc Andreessen?

  Now, of course, they're trying to, in various forms, keep that from happening as well.

• 42:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:56Marc Andreessen?

  They, but we're going to try. And then the one that I wish we had had, but we just, it didn't even occur to us as real names.

• 43:04Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 43:04Marc Andreessen?

  Real identities.

• 43:05Speaker 02

  Oh, interesting.

• 43:06Marc Andreessen?

  Which is the other part of trust, right? Which is like, okay, who are you dealing with?

• 43:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:10Marc Andreessen?

  Right? And so all the issues, you know, spam and fraud and like all these issues, abuse and harassment, all that stuff, like it's basically, you can't solve any of that stuff if you don't have real names. And so, I mean, it's hard enough to solve those problems when you have real names.

• 43:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:22Marc Andreessen?

  It's impossible to do it if you don't have real names, I think.

• 43:25Speaker 02

  Okay. Well, thanks, Mark.

• 43:28Marc Andreessen?

  Good.

• 43:28Speaker 02

  That was great talking to you.

• 43:33Speaker 02

  Thanks for listening to Starting Greatness. You can follow me on Twitter, at M2JR, and please shoot me an email with any comments or questions to [email protected]. I hope you'll subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like the show, I'd be grateful if you could leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Never let go of your inner power to do great things in whatever matters to you. And until we meet again, remember, greatness is a decision.