Netscape

“We are probably in like the Yahoo era where we don't actually have, or at least widely recognize The Googles of the world, or like the sort of the thing that comes after. And so today, when I look at OpenAI and Anthropic, there are, I think, more analogies to …”

“So that hundred and forty million they raised makes it the largest IPO of the year. Larger than Netscape.”

“I think they're creating the tooling layer. That then a lot of us are now using to create real businesses on top of. So I kind of go back to the internet breakthrough and internet revolution and think about, okay, like the browsers, everybody was super excited…”

“So there were like a dozen of us in there. And I remember that dinner very, very precisely for two reasons. Number one is I was the only one of the dozen to basically to say yes.”

“We actually went, he actually went back to Nintendo, and we almost Pulled the trigger on basically building what today you'd call like Xbox Live, or what is it called? It's a PlayStation Network or Xbox Live, like an online gaming service for the Nintendo. 64 …”

“So Netscape was the largest internet advertising company until, I think, 97.”

“OpenAI wants to be the place you do everything. They want to be like the aggregator. I think a critic would say people compare them to Netscape. I think the better analogy if you're an OpenAI skeptic would be AOL, where they want to be sort of like the interfa…”

“In 1999, they shut Google down so that they could serve Netscape's users.”

“I mean, so the Netscape deal brought in three million total searchers per day.”

“Netscape, we almost bought Yahoo. There was like a bid ass spread between like 3,000,005 million dollars.”

“My company Netscape was always very active with defense and intelligence. We always leaned hard into it.”

“These two partners include America Online, Yahoo, I guess Yahoo kind of exists still Apollo still owns it, but you get the point. Excite, Netscape, GeoCities, Alta Vista, At Home, and Prodigy, all gone.”

“The reason that Microsoft was looking to elbow out Netscape was not because Netscape risked replacing it as the dominant operating system. It was because Netscape risked disintermediating it and making it irrelevant whether you were using Microsoft or somethin…”

“We basically took, I think it must have been like a year or something, we were just like, look, we're gonna pause feature development of the company, because it's hard enough to do a rewrite, right? So if you look at, like, the history of the tech industry, th…”

“We basically took, I think it must have been like a year or something, we were just like, look, we're gonna pause feature development of the company, Because it's hard enough to do a rewrite, right? So if you look at, like, the history of the tech industry, th…”

“Netscape, we should say, goes from one million to fifteen million users in one year.”

“If your distribution decides to compete with you, and decides to make that a priority, your business is over in a minute.”

“And so instead of suing us, what they did instead was they called Spyglass, any situation we were in where we were competing with Spyglass for a sale they, the University of Illinois administrators would call the customer and tell them that they were going to …”

“Yeah, that decision on their part yeah, cost them at least a billion dollars in direct stock, plus all the downstream philanthropy from me plus, plus all the downstream philanthropy from Jim Clark, plus all the other founding engineers.”

“At the beginning of the internet, literally the first company of import was Netscape. I mean, in some ways it was probably the open AI of its day.”

“So one of my classmates, Jim Clark, would go on to found Silicon Graphics and Netscape.”

“And there were a couple of phases to this, you know, Netscape, Netscape came public in 1995. And it was literally the most popular IPO at Morgan Stanley since Apple in 1980.”

“96, I think we had 90% browser share mark and we had fifty million users. So there was like fifty five million people on the internet.”

“And I think the generation that built the first version of all these tools and products that we use, like Netscape and everything, we maybe weren't a part of it because there wasn't a lot of black folks that were in technology at the time. And now there are, a…”

“The listing raised a hundred and forty million dollars for Pixar and beat Netscape as the biggest IPO that year.”

“He was definitely intense. I remember coming out of the meeting calling John Doerr and saying, let's just do this. Remember, the internet was this ambiguous thing. It was one of these triggering moments I call instigations for me. That's what he was like. It d…”

“The first unique cookie was invented in 94 by Netscape by a young engineer who was simply trying to allow a browser to remember privately and anonymously remember a user that had signed in or had something in their shopping cart or preferred a certain language…”

“So David ends up doing the CEO searches for Netscape. He brings in Jim Barksdale, which of course is a Kleiner company and a John Doar company. He does the same for Excite.”

“In the eighties, SGI had to have three profitable quarters before it could IPO, whereas Netscape just went on forward speculation and forward multiples, and it was not profitable.”

“They had the Windows Monopoly, but what they did in tying the browser to it and threatening Compaq with revocation of the Windows license if Compact Shift Netscape as the default browser was illegal, and they got convicted for it.”

“A lot of companies like Netscape, TiVo, like all this, like digital recording, all these are SGI technologies. And it's so funny that then permeated to other companies like Nvidia. So many of these companies have Silicon graphics heritage.”

“Seeing some of my classmates end up going to Yahoo, end up going to Netscape, end up going to some other internet startups, It's kind of like what you see with crypto today, and you just see, wow, anything's possible”

“When Netscape launched in 1994, there were less than a hundred million PCs on us. And probably three quarters of them were in company. So there were like twenty-five million consumer PCs on the planet.”

“Even when Netscape launched there in 94, there were like 75 to a hundred million PCs on earth, like on the whole planet. And now it's four and a half billion smartphones.”

“When the internet, when Netscape started in 1994, there were like a hundred million PCs on earth. And now something over five billion people have a smartphone.”

“There were only maybe a hundred million PCs on earth when Netscape launched.”

“Bug bounties were invented in 1995 by Netscape, which was a browser that came before Firefox, for those of you who weren't born then.”

“You can't apply this encryption to blockchain, because all this encryption from Julius Caesar to Alan Turing to Netscape is point to point.”

“Because then I was able to start a company, it doubled every year, went public, one week before Netscape, actually, and so for one week, we were the big topic.”

“Netscape and Pixar were the two hottest IPOs of that year in 1995, but Netscape went first.”

“So we applied for NSF funding to basically build a customer support team. And they informed us very kindly that that wasn't part of what NSF funds. So that was a good catalyst to go start a company which was very helpful.”

“When we invented JavaScript at Netscape in 1995, the concept of cross-site scripting was a complete unknown.”

“We had at one point over 90%, you know, market share for all people on the internet using our browser, and it turned out there were fifty million people on the internet. Like, fifty million people around the world were on the internet. By the way, twenty-five …”

“So I co-authored one of the first reports, if not shamefully the first report on the internet, And then was an internet analyst for the first wave of the internet, so from 94 to 99, and I had all buys on all my universe of stocks, so we took Amazon public, and…”

“I think Netscape at their peak was, like, fifty million users or something. I mean, the numbers, like, crypto's probably above that right now.”

“Netscape created SSL in the nineties, which is the, you know, the encryption protocol of the internet. They were like hauled in front of, you know, regulators and things, because The thought at the time was, who would want to encrypt it except for criminals?”

“But in the same time, you look at like, this is the beginning of a new era, the beginning of a digital assets era. This is like a, this is the same thing as a, let's say internet was 1996 after Netscape and stuff.”

“We applied for NSF funding to basically build a customer support team. And they informed us very kindly that that wasn't part of what NSF funds. So that was a good catalyst to go start a company”

“As a consequence, we've also moved on from the single unified paradigm of Google, because Google is fundamentally about analyzing links and sending you to web pages, but if the internet is no longer just about web pages, then that PageRank model breaks down, j…”

“Netscape had a lot of opportunities it didn't actually successfully achieve, because if you think about so many of the things that came after, you think, why didn't, you know, why wasn't Netscape the company that did web mail and instant messaging and just so …”