Netscape, every mention
28 scenes (2025), the whole family · ← back to Netscape
tap a year for its mentions
every year 2025 anyone David Rosenthal 57Ben Gilbert 41Brendan Eich 39Mark Zuckerberg 2Brian Koppelman 1Brad Gerstner 1
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Netscape comes up
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?