Netscape, every mention
140 scenes, the whole family · ← back to Netscape
tap a year for its mentions
every year anyone David Rosenthal 57Ben Gilbert 41Brendan Eich 38Mark Zuckerberg 2Brian Koppelman 1Brad Gerstner 1
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Netscape comes up
Disney: The Renaissance and the Empire · Acquired
- ▶ 1:55:12 Ben Gilbert His classmates are famed computer scientist Alan Kay, Jim Clark of Netscape and Silicon Graphics, and John Warnock, who founded Adobe.
- ▶ 2:21:30 Ben Gilbert Larger than Netscape.
Google Part II: Alphabet (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 13:40 David Rosenthal Brendan Eich created it at Netscape back in 1995.
- ▶ 13:57 David Rosenthal The problem was it was kind of this casualty of the browser wars with Microsoft and Internet Explorer and everything that killed Netscape, and so up until this time, kind of, 2001, JavaScript existed, but, like, it wasn't super popular.
- ▶ 1:03:30 Ben Gilbert Of SGI and Netscape?
- ▶ 1:03:33 David Rosenthal Of Silicon Graphics and Netscape.
- ▶ 1:58:19 David Rosenthal Mozilla was the nonprofit organization that was founded and spun off from Netscape when AOL bought Netscape.
Google Part I: Origins of Search. How the Best Business in Human History Happened (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 16:19 David Rosenthal Or, what, a year after Netscape was started?
- ▶ 45:27 David Rosenthal Which, depending on who you ask, is either very good or very bad, because in the intervening months, Dave himself decides to throw in another 100,000 dollars to the funding here, and Larry and Sergey meet a former Netscape guy named Ram…
- ▶ 45:55 David Rosenthal Rom had left Netscape and joined a startup called Jungly that Amazon.com then acquired, and so Rom had a little bit of liquidity.
- ▶ 1:23:06 David Rosenthal Larry and Sergey meet a guy from Netscape named Omid Kordestani.
- ▶ 1:23:12 Ben Gilbert And the first time they meet, I think Omid is thinking about it in the context of, oh, I'm wearing my Netscape hat.
- ▶ 1:23:22 Ben Gilbert And I think he quickly gets the sense, maybe, but Netscape just got bought by AOL.
- ▶ 1:23:31 David Rosenthal And Omid was the VP of sales and biz dev at Netscape.
- ▶ 1:31:47 David Rosenthal Netscape, Yahoo, AOL.
- ▶ 1:32:52 David Rosenthal So pretty quickly after Omid joins from Netscape back in 1999,
- ▶ 1:32:58 David Rosenthal He goes back to his old colleagues at Netscape slash AOL and gets essentially like a proof of concept deal done with them.
- ▶ 1:33:07 David Rosenthal And that's for Google to backfill organic search results on Netscape's own directory service that they just launched to compete with Yahoo.
- ▶ 1:33:17 Ben Gilbert We always think about Netscape the browser, but this was presumably like the Netscape homepage whenever you opened up
- ▶ 1:33:23 Ben Gilbert You know, it would go to Netscape.com or something, and there'd be all these Netscape services there available, one of which was Search.
- ▶ 1:33:30 David Rosenthal And I presume, having been acquired by AOL, this was now more of a strategic priority for Netscape, because this is AOL's, like, whole business model at this point, besides the, you know, monthly dial-up fees.
- ▶ 1:34:05 David Rosenthal It's still big enough that when they flip the switch and Google on Netscape goes live with Google powering the organic search results, there's so much traffic that it blows out Google's infrastructure.
- ▶ 1:34:32 Ben Gilbert If they prove that they're untrustworthy to Netscape and can't deliver, then how are they going to keep Netscape's business, let alone get any other portal deals?
- ▶ 1:34:52 Ben Gilbert We are shutting off google.com for today, and we are going to prioritize all traffic from Netscape for our servers until we can stand up more machines.
- ▶ 1:35:15 David Rosenthal In 1999, they shut Google down so that they could serve Netscape's users.
- ▶ 1:35:49 Ben Gilbert I mean, so the Netscape deal brought in three million total searchers per day.
- ▶ 1:36:25 David Rosenthal So over the next year or so, obviously they're working on the other business models too, but Omid keeps signing up, you know, some smaller portals, some international portals on the success of the Netscape deal, getting more of these OEM…
- ▶ 1:40:08 Ben Gilbert June of 2000, we're now a year later than the Netscape deal.
- ▶ 1:40:32 David Rosenthal And again, to underscore, between the ten million dollar investment, this revenue, the other portal deals, Netscape, others, and then others that they're able to get on the back of Yahoo,
The Steve Ballmer Interview · Acquired
- ▶ 56:10 David Rosenthal This is a heyday of Netscape, right?
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:47:35 Mark Zuckerberg So if you look at, like, the history of the tech industry, there are all these examples like Netscape and, you know, these things that, like, they tried to do a rewrite.
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview · Acquired
- ▶ 39:35 Mark Zuckerberg So if you look at, like, the history of the tech industry, there are all these examples like Netscape and, you know, these things that, like, they tried to do a rewrite, they needed to reestablish their technical platform, and they also…
Microsoft Volume II: The Complete History and Strategy of the Ballmer Years (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 13:24 David Rosenthal After the Netscape IPO has already happened, and Windows 95 has shipped.
- ▶ 16:43 Ben Gilbert This is a few months before Netscape is even founded.
- ▶ 16:47 David Rosenthal Netscape as a company does not exist yet.
- ▶ 19:02 David Rosenthal And it takes place on April fifth, 1994, which is the very next day after Netscape was incorporated on April fourth.
- ▶ 19:56 David Rosenthal So, speaking of Netscape being incorporated the day before, remember I said to put a pin in the name Jim Clark.
- ▶ 21:08 David Rosenthal And the initial goal of Electric Media, soon to be Netscape,
- ▶ 24:20 David Rosenthal And by October, the newly christened Mosaic Communications Corporation posts the first version of its browser, Mosaic Navigator, for free to download on the web.
- ▶ 24:20 David Rosenthal And by October, the newly christened Mosaic Communications Corporation posts the first version of its browser, Mosaic Navigator, for free to download on the web.
- ▶ 24:58 Ben Gilbert He said it's the Mosaic Corporation, and then you said it's Mosaic Navigator.
- ▶ 24:58 Ben Gilbert He said it's the Mosaic Corporation, and then you said it's Mosaic Navigator.
- ▶ 25:04 Ben Gilbert Even though it's called Mosaic, because Marc Andreessen wanted to draft off the success of the previous project he had done called Mosaic, this is completely new code.
- ▶ 25:23 Ben Gilbert This is a new thing called Mosaic that does the same thing, architected for commercial use.
- ▶ 26:03 Ben Gilbert You have a new thing that will become Netscape called Mosaic that is totally separate code, and Mosaic, Marc Andreessen's new Mosaic, keeps trying to go do deals, like sell their server software,
- ▶ 26:03 Ben Gilbert You have a new thing that will become Netscape called Mosaic that is totally separate code, and Mosaic, Marc Andreessen's new Mosaic, keeps trying to go do deals, like sell their server software,
- ▶ 26:33 Ben Gilbert Marc Andreessen's Mosaic realizes that this is gonna be a existential problem for them, unless they do something about it.
- ▶ 26:45 David Rosenthal Well, the net of all this is that Marc and Jim's company, let's call it that, changes its name in the fall of 1994 to Netscape.
- ▶ 27:58 David Rosenthal So Netscape isn't interested in licensing because they have their own business model selling web server software, and they want to allow free downloads of the Navigator client.
- ▶ 27:58 David Rosenthal So Netscape isn't interested in licensing because they have their own business model selling web server software, and they want to allow free downloads of the Navigator client.
- ▶ 29:04 Ben Gilbert There's Netscape Navigator.
- ▶ 29:07 David Rosenthal Netscape Navigator.
- ▶ 32:30 Ben Gilbert So they actually go to Netscape and say, hey, we have this great HTTP stack, we have the HTML engine, we have these wrappers to go around it.
- ▶ 32:46 Ben Gilbert Famously, you know, Netscape did not do that, and so IE, Internet Explorer, actually ends up being kind of the only application that used all these Windows components, and once they got going on the browser, they convinced the Windows…
- ▶ 36:14 David Rosenthal On August-ninth, a couple weeks beforehand, Netscape goes public with a market capitalization of three billion dollars.
- ▶ 36:28 Ben Gilbert Netscape, we should say, goes from one million to fifteen million users in one year.
- ▶ 36:50 David Rosenthal In the IPO press cycle, Mark Andreessen is quoted as saying that, quote, Netscape will soon reduce Windows to a poorly debugged set of device drivers.
- ▶ 38:54 Ben Gilbert Bill writes, a new competitor born on the Internet is Netscape.
- ▶ 39:25 David Rosenthal You can see why it was so important to Microsoft to beat Netscape, to bring the Internet in the form of Internet Explorer into Windows and have Windows maintain its role as the dominant platform.
- ▶ 39:59 Ben Gilbert The way that Netscape could get to consumers was because Microsoft had all these computers out there running Windows.
- ▶ 40:13 David Rosenthal So, Windows 95 launches a couple weeks after the Netscape IPO.
- ▶ 40:24 David Rosenthal You can buy it for 50 dollars as part of the plus pack that I was referencing before, and install that and add it into Windows, and Microsoft will make money on the sale of that software, but that of course does nothing to make a dent in…
- ▶ 40:42 Ben Gilbert If Microsoft's goal is to cut off the air supply, David, as you already quoted, of Netscape,
- ▶ 40:59 David Rosenthal Netscape's run continues.
- ▶ 41:01 David Rosenthal The Netscape stock triples over September, October, November.
- ▶ 41:07 David Rosenthal Netscape is now a ten billion dollar public company.
- ▶ 41:24 David Rosenthal Basically, all of the hype train that had been behind the information superhighway has now completely ported over to Netscape.
- ▶ 41:33 Ben Gilbert Netscape.
- ▶ 41:57 David Rosenthal And on that day, Netscape stock drops by about a third and never recovers.
- ▶ 42:03 David Rosenthal That was the high watermark for Netscape.
- ▶ 43:35 Ben Gilbert Why did Netscape's business dry up?
- ▶ 46:07 David Rosenthal But then the fourth point, which I didn't even remember at all, was that Internet Explorer would become the default browser on the Mac displacing Netscape.
- ▶ 48:18 David Rosenthal So, to close the book on Netscape, in November, 1998, AOL acquires Netscape in an all stock deal for just over four billion dollars, but again, all stock.
- ▶ 49:00 David Rosenthal They have completely crushed Netscape, you know, quote unquote, cut off the air supply.
- ▶ 1:05:41 Ben Gilbert And they're starting to realize, hmm, there is a lot of lobbying going on behind the scenes of Netscape and everyone else we're competing against trying to find a way to call us anti-competitive.
- ▶ 1:22:15 Ben Gilbert To the point where they were trying to refute Netscape, we don't view Netscape as an existential threat to us, and they should have just probably acknowledged, you know, Bill literally wrote a letter that got published, a memo saying that…
Microsoft Volume I: The Complete History and Strategy of founding through Windows 95 (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 3:57:14 David Rosenthal Microsoft could make Netscape successful.
Nvidia Part III: The Dawn of the AI Era (2022-2023) (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 2:47 Ben Gilbert In November of twenty-twenty-two, AI definitely had its Netscape moment.
- ▶ 1:33:54 Ben Gilbert Again, that's the Netscape navigator here, of this whole boom.
Benchmark Part I · Acquired
- ▶ 10:02 David Rosenthal And then when the internet started, man, he did Netscape.
- ▶ 12:47 David Rosenthal This was the AOL days leading into the Netscape days.
- ▶ 13:54 David Rosenthal And when your portfolio companies include Netscape and Amazon and Excite, these would be quite valuable deals, both for Excite and for the young startups.
- ▶ 32:17 David Rosenthal Like, Netscape, you know, what's happening here?
- ▶ 59:26 David Rosenthal So David ends up doing the CEO searches for Netscape.
Amazon.com · Acquired
- ▶ 37:30 David Rosenthal Well, they definitely were because at the same time, the internet is, it's so early, you know, we're in like early, you know, mosaic Netscape days, like 92, 93.
- ▶ 1:35:00 Ben Gilbert He's got, what, Netscape?
- ▶ 1:35:03 David Rosenthal Netscape, Compaq, Sun Microsystems, Intuit.
- ▶ 2:23:02 David Rosenthal It was a comparison shopping site started by three Stanford computer science PhDs and a business guy from Netscape.
- ▶ 2:23:10 David Rosenthal That business guy from Netscape, his name was Ram Sriram.
- ▶ 2:24:04 David Rosenthal Rom, the business guy from Netscape, I assume through his co-founders, the Stanford CS PhDs, he gets hooked up with two other Stanford computer science PhDs.
Nvidia: The GPU Company (1993-2006) · Acquired
- ▶ 21:55 David Rosenthal So many great things that come out of there, you know, Jim Clark, Netscape, like all this great stuff.
Altimeter (with Brad Gerstner) · Acquired
- ▶ 19:31 Brad Gerstner So, 1996, when I'm graduating from law school, I also have this ah-ha moment, like so many people did with the Netscape browser.
Super Pumped (with Brian Koppelman and Joseph Gordon-Levitt) · Acquired
- ▶ 29:20 Brian Koppelman Because like, if I think about your episodes about A-sixteen Z and Mosaic to, uh, Netscape, like at Mosaic, Mark Indreason's an artist.
The Browser (with Brendan Eich, Chief Architect of Netscape + Mozilla and CEO of Brave) · Acquired
- ▶ 0:01 Ben Gilbert Dude, I cannot believe that in recording this we asked the chief architect of Netscape to restart his browser to see if that fixed the problem.
- ▶ 1:14 Ben Gilbert He holds the credential of inventing JavaScript, a source of much joy and also much pain for many of you out there, and Brendan was the chief architect of Netscape and eventually became the CEO of Mozilla, the makers of Firefox.
- ▶ 5:31 Ben Gilbert Grew up using Firefox and the Mozilla browser before that, and Netscape before that, and God knows I use plenty of JavaScript every day in all facets of my life, so my life would not be what it is without your work over the years.
- ▶ 9:34 Brendan Eich You know, I was part of a project at Netscape that made the browser mass market.
- ▶ 9:42 Brendan Eich Before Netscape, there wasn't a way to trust your credit card number flying across the wire.
- ▶ 9:47 Brendan Eich Netscape did so-called secure sockets later.
- ▶ 9:52 Brendan Eich So Netscape was working on making the web safe for e-commerce and useful for the site you went to.
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