Clark, Jim with Edwards, Owen. Netscape Time: The Making of the
Billion-Dollar Start-Up That Took on Microsoft. New York: St.Martin's
Griffin, 2000. 276 pages.
This is billionaire Jim Clark's version of events at Netscape, which
wowed Wall Street with a wildly-successful IPO in August 1995. It could be
said that Netscape started the dot-com gold rush. Clark, who grew up poor,
went from Stanford professor to found Silicon Graphics in the early 1980s.
He left in 1994 with just $20 million, after losing control and becoming
bitter. Then he started Netscape by enticing some nerds at the University
of Illinois, who had programmed Mosaic, to the high-caffeine lifestyle of
Silicon Valley. The first and most important of these was Marc Andreessen,
the co-founder of Netscape.
Everyone at Netscape got rich because their timing was good, their
browser was better than Mosaic, and Microsoft was still asleep. Clark kept
control at Netscape, but brought in Jim Barksdale to run things. When
Clark's Netscape stock went from $2 billion to $200 million in 1998
(Microsoft was no longer asleep), he started looking for a way out. AOL
bought Netscape, and Clark focused on a third startup. All three of Clark's
companies are now on the rocks, but Clark knows when to jump ship. He's got
his new $30 million yacht, bought a building for Stanford, still has his
airplane, and also his overblown reputation as an entrepreneur.
ISBN 0-312-26361-9
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