Why Marc Andreessen Hates UIUC?

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Marc Andreessen recounts his early days at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he helped create Mosaic and later Netscape.

However, his deep anger toward the university stems from their legal tactics when they sabotaged his business by making legal threats over the “Mosaic” name.

This forced him into a costly lawsuit and a forced rebranding to Netscape. Even to this day, he’s still seething over how the university played these games to get money.

Interviewer: When did you switch from Mosaic to Netscape?

Marc: Mosaic had been the name of the project at Illinois. We didn’t bring any of the code with us; it was open-source, but copyright was held by the University of Illinois. We decided to rewrite it anyway because we needed a lot of things the original code didn’t have, like security. So we wanted to do a clean rewrite with everything we knew at the time. But, the name was tied to the research project, and I knew that “SUN” — the name of the company SUN Microsystems — was based on the Stanford research project, the Stanford University Network.

Interviewer: Right.
Marc: Exactly. So I thought, “It’s just like the name of the research project, it’s a free thing. It’s not proprietary.” So we figured, we’d call the company Mosaic Communications and figure out the product name later.

But then, the University of Illinois did a very clever thing I don’t think I have seen since — they didn’t sue us directly. Instead, they sent lawyers to all our potential customers and told them they were going to sue us.

Interviewer: Oh.
Marc: Yeah, they freeze us in our tracks. They basically blocked our ability to do business, claiming we were in violation of a range of trademark and copyright laws. The copyright violations weren’t true because we didn’t take any code, but they still threatened to sue us. The problem was, there was ambiguity around whether the name Mosaic was trademarked or not, and it was hard to explain away.

Interviewer: It was hard to explain.
Marc: Inconvenient fact as they say. So actually, we ended up suing them for, I believe, restraint of trade.

Interviewer: So, are you feeling kind of pissed at them right now? Like Thermonuclear pissed?
Marc: Oh, yeah. Right now, sitting here? Even now, very much so. Yes. I’m still extremely angry. Thank you for asking. (laughs)

Interviewer: How does that make you feel, Marc?
Marc: Exactly. We’ll pick that up in part two, the psychotherapy session.

So we sued them, and then we ended up negotiating a settlement. We paid them, and as part of the settlement, we changed the name. And that was the last penny.

We changed the name to Netscape.

Here’s the whole transcript of The Journey from 0 to 1, from Mosaic to Netscape.

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 A16Z Co-Founder, Marc Andreessen. The episode is cross-posted from the new show, Starting Greatness, hosted by Mike Maples Junior.

In the show that follows, Marc shares some rare behind-the-scenes details on his journey to product market fit from 0 to 1, from the University of Illinois and Mosaic to Netscape. 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 is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed.

And so this was a great example of that. 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 junior of Floodgate, and it’s go time with Marc Andreessen. Welcome to Starting Greatness, a podcast dedicated to ambitious founders who wanna 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 gonna help you win by curating the lessons of the super performers, but before they were successful. So without further ado Ignition sequence starts.

Let’s get started. I decided to do some things a little differently with this interview because I wanted to capture things about Marc’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 Marc 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. 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 3 things he wishes Netscape had done differently that would have made the internet better today. I’m Mark Andreessen, welcome to the podcast.

Hey. It’s great to be here. 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 wanna build something great? So the first piece of advice is don’t do it.

It’s impossible. 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 1, if you can be talked out of it, you definitely shouldn’t do it. So if you listen to advice number 1, you definitely shouldn’t do it. Yeah.

If you ignore advice number 1, you might have the personality type to be to be a founder. So that’s the that’s the first gut check. 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 this sort of synthetic startups. It’s like I want to start a company and I am now going to apply myself. Market white space companies. Yeah. Exactly.

Boy, wouldn’t it be great if x, right? Yeah. For x is just something I, you know, read in a magazine that day or, you know, just, you know 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. Yeah.

Right? The odds are just going to be like a flash of inspiration or very low, but like if it’s a field that you’ve been working in for 5 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. But you got to like really deeply like, you number 1, 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.

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. 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. You know, Apple, they were building their first computers by hand. Yeah. You know, there was no abstraction to it.

Right. There was no master plan. There was no theory. It was, can we build 100 computers made out of wooden boxes Yeah. And sell them at the trade fair and it built out of that.

But they’re right to your point, like, they were living in that world. 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? 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 the future is 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 had a tough flight engineering program, computer science program. But in particular, they had they were picked in the mid eighties to be one of 4 federally funded centers for for supercomputing at the time.

And this was a specific government program that basically had 2 parts. 1 was to basically buy these, you know, $25,000,000 supercomputers from companies at the time like Cray and Thinking Machines and basically put them in, you know, basically with 4 locations in the US 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. $25,000,000 computer, you know, occupied a full room. And in fact, in those days what they would do is actually build an entire building for the computer and then they would actually They they 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 using a crane Yep. To lower it into place and then they’d finish the building. So this is a big deal at the time. These things were super expensive and so they only put them in 4 locations and but they wanted other scientists and researchers all over the country to be able to use them. And so the part 2 of the program was this program called NSF Net.

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 eighties. 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. Wow.

And it was one of exactly 4 of those. Just because you have to 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 gonna 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. So then, you’re building these early systems. Where does the idea for the Mosaic browser come from?

So funny story there. So so basically so the project I ended I I got hired into work on was a project called Collage, which basically was sort of sort of I don’t know. Maybe Zoom’s the current comp or something, or, you know, Skype. So 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 when 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. Yeah.

Right? Like Zoom goes public now. Yeah. Right? It’s like 30 years later.

Right? So so, you know, the lag on these things can can can be quite something. Okay. So you’re trying to help these ideas take some early baby steps. How did you think about what to work on?

Well, there were a few things. So there were a few things. And so then you basically say, okay, real time isn’t gonna work. It was sort of Internet variations on the bulletin board systems of the PC hobbyists in the mid eighties. 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 in Switzerland at CERN, but it it that was, like, super early. And there were, like, I don’t know, 2 or 3 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 would be, like, why would anybody wanna use 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 and then if you really wanna get weird, you can, like, be on Gopher and WAIT. You can, like, go to Gopher and view menus. You can go on WAVES and do searches, you know, kind of clay, clay to be molded. And 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 had to be pretty sophisticated and installed. By the way, it seems obvious that, like, everybody’s gonna have this stuff. It seems obvious that kids are gonna wanna keep using this stuff once they graduate from college. It seems obvious that there’s gonna be, you know, software on servers and clients that’s gonna be used to share information.

It’s, like, why wouldn’t you be able to have a link? Well, what number 1, you don’t have a text based display because you won’t be able to read stuff. Like, most computer UIs up until that point were not text based. Right? They were they were, like, you know, they were, like, buttons and switches and levers.

Yeah. Right. Like old style nuclear control panels or something. And this software metaphor was like put everything in a document. So that was new, but we thought that was obvious because you’d like to be able to read things.

And then we thought, okay, hypertext is probably obvious. So 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? Yeah. And I remember, like, 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. 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 so stressed. Again, this like, free free Google. Like, this is, like, go to the card catalog. Right.

And try to figure out, like, can I swear on this podcast? Yeah. It’s okay with me. Okay. Go to the card catalog if you’re 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, there had basically, tracing back in time, there had been 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. Contemporaneous, but even before that was Ted Nelson Uh-huh. Who had sort of invented the term hypertext.

And so there was this idea of linking Yep. That kind of existed. But, like, Ted is the guy who kind of picked up those ideas and kind of put them in the idea that a computer should be able to do this. And so there was kind of that heritage. And then there was, as you alluded to, there was this guy named Vannevar Bush who in 1945 that 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 science advisor during the development of the nuclear bomb. And so he was, like, a very important guy.

And he he basically he defined basically how the federal government would fund research for the next, like, basically 70 years. So it 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. 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. Yep. And he didn’t but like these ideas go way back. Yeah.

You know, they’re fairly obvious fairly quickly. Right? Yeah. 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 amounts of information, retrieve it, share it, transmit it over log distances, search it.

Yeah. There we were sitting in like 1992 being like, okay. Yeah. And so basically it’s like are we crazy? Right?

Is the rest of the world crazy, or is it just the right time? Yeah. And it’s funny because it’s one 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 kinda 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? So the what we needed to have was a network effect. We needed to have a 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 Yep. Of that web server, over over the last 25, 30 years. And what we needed was a was kind of a ping pong effect. Right? Where because what you want is a flywheel where, like, more people reading with the browser, at least more people wanting to publish with the server.

The more people who publishes the server, the more incentive there is to read and then you get the the flywheel effect. 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 gonna 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 flywheel catching.

And so our hack actually was was actually it was the fact well, the Internet it was the the, you know, sort of NSF net. The other hack actually was at the time Internet news groups. And so we were actually the 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 were it kind of goes back to what they were. 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 to, 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.

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 that 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, literally, I would update it every you know, 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.

It 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 and, you know, Cardiff.

Yep. I’ve got a new website that has, you know, lyrics for the REM songs. Right? It was just like random stuff like that. Yeah.

A lot of it was just people experimenting. And so it was literally And, you know, it started out being like 1 a day. I was like, okay. And then it started being 2 a day and then it started being 3 a day and then it went to 5 and 10, 20, 30 a day. And so you could you could just you could kind of There were 2 ways to see the flywheel.

1 was the incoming email. There were 2 incoming email boxes where you could see the flywheel kick in. 1 was entries for the what’s new page because the what’s new page was the main distribution method. It was the main way people were finding out about new web pages. Right?

Because this is pre Google and everything else for Yahoo. But the other, the other email was customer support email for the browser. Uh-huh. Which was the thing that the thing that almost The ones you didn’t wanna get. The thing that almost killed me.

Okay. It was providing customer support for the entire Internet. But that’s another part of the story later on. So basically, so literally what happened was so we this whole thing started taking off. The more and more people 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 2nd round of NSF National Science Foundation funding. This is all all this is happening. I mean, I was making minimum wage $6.25 an hour, but that $6.25 an hour is being paid for by the National Science Foundation through a very generous, generous grant.

I’m grateful for that. At least you didn’t get diluted. No. It was hard to dilute $6.25 an hour in fairness. They say keep your burn rate low.

Yeah. That’s a good way to do it. Mission accomplished. So we actually went We actually So literally what was happening was we were just It was working and so we have the We were the dog that caught the bus, you know, kind of thing where it just like the 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 into the right. So we went to NSF for grant number 2 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.

Well, we we don’t wanna pay money to take all these support emails. Yeah. Exactly. Which is literally and and what I at the time, I was like, well, that’s kinda you’re it’s kinda you know, they have a thing that’s working and they’re shutting off the money. Like, okay.

That seems kinda 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 intended to fund scientific research. And so clearly, yeah, customer support emails are, like, you know, the 14th version of the back client, like, is not Yeah. So maybe that’s, 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 we’re done with you using our resources here.

You’ve outgrown this university. Exactly. That happened kind of with Google too, I think, later on. Right. Right.

Right. At some point, Google would have taken over the entire computer science department Yeah. Writing all the computers, and it was yeah. You get kicked out of the nest. Yeah.

So so so they were kind of pushing you out of the nest. So I think so in retrospect, they did exactly the right thing. They did exactly the right thing at exactly the right time. So did you decide, okay, I wanna start a company or were you just like, well, that’s a bummer. My grant money just went away.

The second Okay. Of the 2nd. So then so the so, like, now you’re just answering customer support emails. I was, like, shit. I have to get a job.

Okay. So what year were you in college? I was graduating. Okay. So you’re about to graduate.

You coincided with graduation. Okay. Okay. I coincided right around that time, and I was, like, well, shit, I gotta 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.

Okay. So now you gotta get a job. Yep. You’re interviewing for jobs. Nope.

No? What was this about? Well, I had a slight advantage in my job search. Okay. Oh, which is like You controlled Mosaic.

I controlled Mos Mosaic. And specifically I controlled Mosaic, which is like I got to decide what people saw. Uh-huh. Okay. And so I made sure they saw my resume.

Okay. Nice. Yeah. Yeah. And so I I That’s a growth hack?

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, yeah, a button to see your resume.

And so I in fairness, I didn’t put it on the home page, which I could have done. That was a step too far, but I put it in the about page. Okay. And so, I got I got a set of offers, some on the East Coast, some on the West Coast. I almost joined the Java team.

No kidding. In 94. Yeah. In 94 when I first came out here. But they offered me When it was called Oak?

It was called Oak at the time. So it’s Java, pre Java. And, they but they at the time, it was a 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. So, you know, but it’s also funny because all of us were thinking about, okay, there’s gonna 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 gonna 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 gonna play out. Right?

I I just immediately knew the way we’ve been thinking about this is wrong. It’s not gonna happen on these set top boxes. It may someday, but, like, the browser is gonna happen right here, right now. Like, there was just no doubt in my mind. Well, no.

So what I would nominate on the point you made, I think the point you made is important point that 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 2 kind of dynamics to that. So, top down versus bottoms up. Yeah. And one way versus two way. Yep.

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 global politics are based on this battle right now.

And so top down versus bottom up, like, the view at that time, right, was the information superhighway. It was gonna be, you know, sort of it should be set top boxes, interactive television, but it was gonna be provided by big companies. Yeah. Or should the government Who was the government? Yeah.

They built the regular highway. Should they build a digital superhighway and that’ll help us against Japan, quote, unquote. Exactly. That was the big thing. That was the thought process.

Yeah. It was gonna the country that was gonna take everything at the time. So, but it’s gonna be top down. And so the magazines and newspapers, a 100% of the coverage, 100% of the commentary, like all of the media coverage, it was all around. It was gonna be right the government or it was gonna be Time Warner in those days or AT and T or Verizon or, you know, the big cable company with a predecessor to Comcast.

And so it’s gonna 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 gonna be and then and then that goes to the second thing, which is one way versus two way, which is it was gonna be a it was gonna be a what primarily video, but like a one way push. Right?

And so this was this is why the whole metaphor is a 500 channels. Like the whole thing was, oh, today you’ve got 14 TV channels. In the future, you’ll have 500. That’s the information And it’ll be interactive TV. Well, it’d be interactive TV.

We’ll be able to push the button. Have remote control. You won’t have a keyboard Yeah. Right? Or a mouse Yeah.

Or anything unless you’re gonna You’ll just have a button that has a slice of pizza on it. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Like, we really had those.

Or, like, you know, American American Idol basically they will all be like American Idol just be like, oh, you can vote for the person who’s, you know, singing the best or something like that. Yeah. But the idea the idea that an individual user was gonna be contributing into this environment, The idea that an individual user would be publishing a video, right, or making a post or anything like that was just like 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.

Yep. Right? And by the way, the press the press was one way at that time. Yeah. I mean, this this is before the audience could talk back.

And so if you were a Time Magazine or NBC News or The New York Times, like, you were used to You controlled the conversation. 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.

Yep. And that’s, you know, 1 48th of the space on, you know, one page of the paper. And so so there was that. And so 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 wanna be able able to do things.

Yeah. Right? And I want by the way, do things. I wanna be able to consume, but I also wanna create, and I wanna contribute, and I wanna build. Hey, it’s Steph.

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Hosted by my friends, Sam Parr and Sean Curry, who have each, by the way, built and sold 8 figure businesses to Amazon and Hub Spot, this show explores business ideas you can start tomorrow. Plus, Sam and Sean jam alongside guests like mister Feast, Rob Dyrdek, Alex von Mosey, and every so often, you’ll even find me there. So go ahead. Search My First Million in your favorite podcast app, just like the one you’re using right now. Yeah.

And the the thing that I’ve just seen time and again, it 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. 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, but it just and like so much of entrepreneurship I 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.

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? Yeah. Now most of the time when people come to that conclusion They’re just wrong. They’re just wrong or insane.

Yeah. Right? They have a vision but it’s like a hallucination vision. 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 was talking about like their pings from the future is the the way they’re like they’re you can see these things actually running today. And so you get you get 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.

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 Yeah. 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. 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 and 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, like, that level of control. And so, like, anything that I was going to do was gonna have to be bottoms up. Yeah.

It was gonna have to be two way, like, you know, kind of by definition. If it wasn’t 2 way, I’d be blocked out. So then speaking of powerful people, how did you find Jim Clark, or how did you guys connect? And 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 companies, 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 you either worked for or wanted to work for. Yep. It was like the brain the brain center of of the industry.

And this was when they they they drove really drove computer graphics to be what they are today. Yeah. A total gee whiz company. Right? Yeah.

Best graphics engineers in the world, best networking engineers in the world because you have to push the pixels over network. I mean, it was just an incredible place to be. 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 they call the warm meat problem.

He didn’t have any bodies to work on to to work with him. 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 wanna start something, or work on something. And then, he he met me through a friend a mutual a guy actually, a guy he worked with 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 I apparently happened to mention to Jim that, like, A, that I existed and then 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 being like 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 Larry Page called you. Yeah. You know, hey, you know, this is Larry Page. Would you you like to talk about starting new companies?

And, you know, you’re like, oh, okay. You think? Alright. You know, gee, I don’t know. Let me check my calendar.

Right? Yeah. Yeah. So I’m like, yeah. You know, I’m basically, yes.

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. So it’s like 90 3, 94. So 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. But he did not get as nearly positive response as I would have imagined. Yeah. From a lot of people who had, like, actual, you know, had had careers, let’s say.

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 and then yeah. And then we started we started working together on on plans. 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. Yeah. I think I think I think that’s part of it. And I think it’s he’s, you know, probably just channeling Jim.

He probably you know, at the very least, he knows how to build something new. Yeah. You know, which not everybody does. And so at least he’s done it once before. But the reason why the Netscape ID was not obvious is because even after all of that, it still wasn’t obvious that the Internet would be a business.

Yeah. Right? And part of that was it wasn’t a business. Like, nobody had made it into a business. Yeah.

And so there was just it was just this thing which is it goes to the top down bottom sub 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 list and I saw everything, it was just like, okay, like, I don’t know what what are we going to 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. There was no Amazon. There was none of that stuff.

Yep. 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. 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? Yeah. Right? For about 2 years, people said nobody’s gonna have a business model.

Yeah. This is absurd. Everybody knows this thing. Even Yahoo, people said, well, great, but no business model. Yeah.

Yeah. Of course. Yeah. Google had no business model like all these things. Yeah.

Yeah. None of these things have business models. Right? Exactly. So, so basically so so and then and then Jim had been enmeshed, you know, selling graphics had gotten enmeshed, in, 2 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 that’s kind of analogous to what you have today on a modern, you know, whatever, Comcast or Direct TV 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.

Yeah. It was crazy. We had some of our high end gear. Right? Power those boxes.

It was not. So there was no so we basically set out plan number 1 was to build the software layer for interactive TV, and then we basically realized, oh, shit. There’s not gonna be actually any interactive TV. Like, the economics actually don’t work. And then, the other decision was, SGI was building the graphics chip for the Nintendo.

The Nintendo 64. The first game console with 3 d graphics. And so the idea basically was to build what today you call, like, Xbox Live or PlayStation Live to build basically the network for Nintendo 64. The problem was Nintendo 64 was not gonna ship for another 2 years. So literally we got to the point where we would they’re like, okay, those two plans don’t work.

And then it was like, are we gonna like, what are we gonna do? Process of elimination. Okay. So if top down interactive TV isn’t isn’t gonna work and interactive gaming at point wasn’t gonna work, then what’s left? Yeah.

What’s left is the Internet. Uh-huh. 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 and And you probably don’t even think it’s a business yet.

No. Yeah. 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 Yeah. Then it’s gonna win. Right. Because the only thing Is the thing.

Is the thing. Like, the thing. Right? And so it’s weird because Jim was like, oh, that makes total sense. And what 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 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 in SGI but then he’s got such amazing sort of mental flexibility which is extraordinarily rare to have somebody who’s just flexible in their thought process where he was just, like, when he got into this new context, he’s kinda shedding assumptions, he was able to replant himself into a true startup context Yeah.

And able to shed all these assumptions and say, okay, from a standing start, what would you do and come to a completely different set of conclusions? Yeah. So then so then you decide to start this thing. Right. And you raise you raise money from well, he he seed funds it at first.

He’s probably already been seed funding just your little vision quest. Nope. No? No? Okay.

So you’re just on this vision quest, you you by process of elimination weekends. It’s like, okay. We’re doing this. Yeah. What?

You then you just go raise money from John Doerr, Kleiner Perkins? Or Say, we ran about 6 months with Jim. We ran about 6 months with Jim’s money, and then he was like, you know, I’m I’m rich, but I’m not that rich. And so, he was like, we’re time to go raise money. So Jim zeroed in at Kleiner Perkins because KP had actually backed Sun Yeah.

Which was SGI’s big competitor. And he had always really 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. Yeah. And then, he had always respected how John went about being a board member at Sun. Okay.

So you you you raised some money for Netscape. Not sure if it’s a business yet, but, hey, let’s let’s go for it. And and it this must be around the time when, Mosaic has started to see even bigger lift. Right? Because I because I seem to remember like the summer of the summer of 94.

Yeah. It was starting to really become a thing. So it just knew it snowball. It was a snowball rolling down the hill, picking up speed. Yeah.

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, which is normal people Okay. 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’s around that time, I think it was around that time that AT&T ran the 1st internet ad.

Yep. On on at the time and because Wired had created a website and they ran the 1st internet ad. The first the reason we have all these banner ads is because the first ad was a banner ad for AT and T on the wired.com.

When did you switch from Mosaic to Netscape?

Mosaic had been the name of the had been the name of the, had been the Mosaic had been the name of the project at Illinois.

We didn’t bring any of the code with us. It was the code was open source, but copyright by the University of Illinois. 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 the name of the research project.

I knew SUN the name SUN was actually named after the the research project at Stanford. SPAWN SUN was actually called the SUN Research Project. Yep. Stanford University Network.

Exactly. Exactly. So I was like it’s just it’s it’s not a it’s not a it’s just like a it’s like a it’s like a it’s a free thing. Yep. So it’s just obviously we’ll just call this thing Mosaic Communications.

We’ll figure out the product name later. Yep. And, and then University of Illinois then did a very, 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.

Oh.

And so they freeze us in our tracks. 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 to sue us for that. And then we had this problem, which is we had we had this name, which there’s ambiguity as to whether there was a trademark on it or not. But, like, you know, there did seem to be a clear Hard to explain away.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just, like, inconvenient fact as they say. And so we actually ended up suing them, for I believe it’s what it’s it’s restraint of trade and purchasing So are you feeling kinda pissed at them Yes.

Right about now? Like, thermonuclear pissed? Pissed? Yeah. Yeah.

Right about now, like today, sitting here? Yeah. Even now? Very much so. Yes.

Yes. I’m still extremely angry. Thank you for thank you thank you for asking. How does that make you feel, Mark? Yeah.

Exactly. We’ll pick that up in part 2, the psychotherapy section of the of the thing. So we actually ended up suing them. We actually ended up suing them and and, and then we negotiated a settlement. Okay.

And we we paid them and as part of the settlement, we changed the name. Okay. Yeah. And that was the that was the and that was the last penny. 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 Yeah.

So like what So that was a super well, it was it was this thing of it it was basically a 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 Yeah. But it was building directly in the momentum from the previous thing. And then we we knew what else do we knew?

We knew Illinois was not gonna continue the Mosaic project because we knew that they didn’t Yeah. They didn’t wanna do it. Yeah. Right. Exactly.

And so we we kinda 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. We can need you needed encryption, which the original browser didn’t have. It’s and 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 kinda already blown up even before Netscape really got like, was there was there any moment where you’re inside of Netscape and you’re just like, holy shit?

Well, the big moment was the night of the original release of the browser where, you know, you we we hooked up one of the computers to the to the stereo system and the the Canon Yep. Fire sound effect for every time somebody downloaded it. Uh-huh. And the Canon started to go off. Okay.

Before long, the cannon was going off continuously. Right? So Like how like how long? Oh, that was like in a couple that was a few hours. Okay.

But I mean, that was but again, it was feeding on this one. It was just like everybody Yeah. 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. Yep. It it was much better. I mean, it was built correctly. Yeah.

It was our second second implementation. It’s and so we just we knew it was better. Okay. And so now it’s probably what the the this is probably late 94? Yeah.

Mhmm. Okay. And so and and if I remember, you went public, like, in early 95 with no profits. August. Did you have any revenue yet?

Yeah. Yeah. So we had revenue. We doubled revenue every quarter that year. So the revenue that year was by quarter was 5,000,000, 10000, 20,000,000, 40,000,000.

Uh-huh. 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. Okay. 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. Really? And actually, we we actually prided ourselves at the time of, like, delivering cash flow. So Basically through the whole thing. 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. It was obvious to Jim. Okay. So so yeah.

So, like, what’s it like? So you’re just barely out of college Yeah. And all this stuff’s happening around you. Like, what what’s that like? You know, it was just I mean, it was literally we were so heads down.

It was just like, go, you know, go work somewhere. It was one of those things. There was so much to do. Yeah. 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 that, like the whole thing started to work and then there’s just like you have like a 1,000 ideas. Yep. Right? And then it’s just Well, and a few more customer support calls. And all that.

Yeah. All this all this other infrastructure to build. And, you know, and then look, I’m learning business. I’m learning like basically all the business on the fly. Right Uh-huh.

I’m basically learning like, you know, I don’t know, whatever is in an MBA plus another 10 years of operating experience. Yep. You know, and like as as fast as I possibly can. Right? So I’m basically either like I’m either at work or I’m like at home reading business books.

Like those were the only 2 things that I did. And 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 product market fit? Like yeah. Just how do you rec because it just seems like one of these rare cases where it’s just like lightning just struck and it was just like huge right away.

I think for b to b, there’s like there are deterministic ways to try to get to product market fit. Yeah. For consumer stuff, it’s less clear to me even still. Yeah. We actually use the term lightning strike.

Like Yeah. It may just be well, here’s one of the questions. It’s like there are these companies, there are quite a few companies that have had lightning strike consumer hits in the last 20 years. And 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? Yeah. How many of those how many of those ever had another one? Yeah. Very few.

In the same company Yeah. That they didn’t have to go acquire from outside. Yeah. And I think it’s Apple. Maybe 0.

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? Yeah. So there’s 3 big things there’s 3 big things that we should have done, would have made a big difference early on. And one of them we 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’m I kicked myself if 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 Yep. In there.

That’s huge. And and that was a fight then. By the way, it looks like it’s gonna 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 who 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. There had been other products before.

We were the first one that millions of people used. And so we we we at the time we we developed Netscape to have strong encryption and the browser meant that the browser was classified under US Federal law with criminal penalties as ammunition. Yeah. It was classified in the same export control category as Tomahawk missiles. And so we were not allowed to export the version with strong encryption.

We could sell it in the U. S. We couldn’t export it. We had to deliberately export it a weakened version. Wow.

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. Okay. Yeah. You know.

The U. S. Government can have their way with it. Yeah. 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 nineties.

So encryption was at the time and ultimately, the government actually backed down and as of, like, was it 97 or whatever, they actually changed policy. Yeah. And they actually legalized essentially legalized strong encryption, globally for US companies to be able to build products globally. That battle keeps getting re flawed and it has come and probably in my view, it’s come back to life. I think it’s just an it’s just an absurd thing to be.

It’s just like, do you want secure systems or not? Like Right. Could somebody please decide? Right. Do Do you want secure 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. Yep. 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 cyber terrorism 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 we would you would want. 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. Right. 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. We should let the pirates go crazy.

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.

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 permission. Yeah. And probably we would have gotten nuked for that. Yeah. That would have even been worse than the encryption.

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. Yeah. They almost got regulated out of existence.

They just barely got through it. And so that was the big one that like 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 is just like internet scale, money and trust needs to happen. Yeah.

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

Now, of course, they’re trying to in various forms keep that from happening as well. Yeah. They. But, but we’re we’re gonna try. And then the one that I wish we had had, but we just it didn’t even occur to us as real names.

Okay. Real identities. Oh, interesting. Which is the other part of having of trust. Right?

Which is like, okay, who are you dealing with? Yep. 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. Yeah. It’s impossible to do it if you don’t have real names, I think. Okay. Well, thanks, Mark.

Good. Thank you, Mike. It’s great talking to you. 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 greatness at floodgate.com.

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.