In August 1995, Mosaic (now named Netscape) went public. At the close of the first trading day, Kleiner’s original $5 million stake was worth $293 million.74 As Netscape’s stock climbed further, Kleiner soon found itself sitting on a profit of $500 million: it had achieved a multiple of 100x, or roughly twice as much as Accel’s multiple on UUNET. In the face of this sort of bonanza, it really didn’t matter how many Kleiner bets went to zero. In the internet age, it was worth paying whatever it might take for stakes in turbo-power-law companies.
