The Art of Leadership

Act I. Netscape: Manager

THE STORY AS I HEARD IT WAS Jim Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics, wanted to do something with his money. He talked with a lot of folks and eventually found Marc Andreessen, who if you ever have a chance to meet him just reeks bright. They tried to do something with Nintendo but that didn’t work out, so Marc suggested they work on the project he’d begun at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign—a web browser, named Mosaic. It was 1994.

Most of Marc’s cohorts at Urbana-Champaign were still there, so Jim and Marc got on a plane with a plan to hire them all as cofounding engineers. They mostly accepted, moved to the Bay Area, did a death march or two, and then released early versions of the browser for Windows, Mac, and Unix.

They gave this software away.

More death marches followed, as did more releases of the software on all the platforms, additional hires, more office space, the thrill of a start-up atmosphere, and eventually an IPO that changed everything.

I arrived in 1996, after the IPO, at peak hype. Not remotely my first job. I’d left the University of California, Santa Cruz, to be an engineer at Borland. After Microsoft monopolistically clubbed Borland to the brink of death I escaped to Symantec, another early Silicon Valley darling, but nothing compared to the buzz around what had become known as Netscape.

Early in my tenure as an engineer, Tony, my first manager, walked into my taupe cubicle on the second floor of the Netscape Middlefield ...