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He was off and running down a dark tunnel that ran directly into a brick wall. But at least he was running.
“a thousand people don’t build anything; if you need to build something really complicated really fast, you hire fifty of the smartest people you can find.”
If I go and do this next thing and don’t make $100 million, it’ll be a failure. I’ll be a failure.’
Success was his chosen form of revenge. Clark was intent on inventing a new role for himself that would not allow the Muellers and McCrackens to take advantage of him.
the guy who finds the new new thing and makes it happen wins. The engineers who help him to do it finish second. The financiers and the corporate statesmen, the sucker fish of economic growth, finish a distant third.
He wanted to create the company that invented the future. Once he’d done that, he wanted to do it again and again and again and again.
About the first thing Andreessen said was that he didn’t want to make a business of Mosaic. Clark didn’t care. His ambition was more inchoate than that.
If you page through his talk on the telecomputer, you can see just how chance favors the prepared mind.
Clark said that this time any venture capitalist who wished to back him would do so on new, unprecedentedly harsh terms.
Instead, Doerr invited Clark to his office and gave him exactly what he asked for.
“Jim was pressing for us to go public way before anyone else,” recalls Marc Andreessen. It turned out there was a reason for this. He’d seen a boat called Juliet. He wanted one just like it, only bigger. To get it he needed more money.
“Netscape obviously didn’t create the Internet. But if Netscape had not forced the issue on the Internet, it would have just burbled in the background. It would have remained this counterintuitive kind of thing. The criticism of it was that it was anarchy. What the IPO did was give anarchy credibility.”
No longer did you need to show profits; you needed to show rapid growth.
But the young engineers whom Clark had pulled together to create the company also became rich.
An engineer who joined Netscape in July 1995 was, by November, worth ten million dollars.
Before Clark arrived on the scene, there was no building in the Huisman Shipyard that could house a 197-foot mast. Clark had waved that objection to one side, and said he would pay for a new building.
His play took on the intensity of work, and his work acquired the flavor of play.
One day he created a fuel gauge in the normal fashion, using the new computer language C++. That night he lay awake torturing himself over the sloppiness of the work.
so there, at three in the morning, in his dingy little office over the Jenny Craig weight loss center, Clark solved his problem with mathematics, then translated the solution back into computer code.
A few hours later I plucked his work out of the garbage can, as a memento of how the late twentieth-century American technology billionaire spent the hours between midnight and six in the morning:
The truth was that no casual observer could say when Clark was working and when he was playing.
That was the starting point for Clark after Netscape: how to make not millions but billions of dollars. Quickly.
The venture capitalists advertised themselves as the great financial risk takers of the Valley, but you could learn everything you needed to know about their attitudes toward risk, simply by driving up Sand Hill Road. Sand Hill Road was where the venture capitalists clustered together for safety, like ducks in a park waiting for the bread crumbs to fall. Each time Clark made this trip, the ducks came out of it worse than the time before. The price of the crumbs rose;
Sand Hill Road was where the venture capitalists clustered together for safety, like ducks in a park waiting for the bread crumbs to fall. Each time Clark made this trip, the ducks came out of it worse than the time before. The price of the crumbs rose; and they had to quack louder for them.
Clark had charged Doerr three times the going rate for start-up capital. Doerr had cleared $500 million or so in eighteen months, or thirty times his original investment, and become the most talked-about venture capitalist on Sand Hill Road.
Phil and Bill were also pretty much everything Clark hated about venture capitalists. Both were self-consciously “professional” men who knew how to dress down for meetings with engineers and how to dress up for meetings with Wall Street financiers and never said anything in any of these meetings that surprised anyone.
Clark was at best ambivalent about young men in suits who had gone to business school and never run a real risk in their lives.
The venture capitalists, the investment bankers, the CEOs—they were all fungible.
The lesson Pavan extracted from the bitter experience was to watch what Jim Clark did, not what he said.
“the difference between a great software guy and an okay software guy is huge. A great software guy is worth ten times an okay software guy.”
“The trick to Netscape was markets,”
He wanted to help Kittu get over his old habit of thinking “thousands” and into the new one of thinking “millions.”
He worked one hundred and twenty hours a week—so many hours that the notion of “work” and “home” was absurd.
“It was three am,” he recalls. “I’m sitting there drinking espresso, listening to music, and writing up some notes about the software and…I could never explain this to anyone…not even my wife…I was so happy. I just laughed to myself.”
“They can say that Silicon Graphics and Netscape was just luck, but when I do it again, and Healtheon will do it, they can’t say it was just luck,” he said. “I don’t have to do it again.”
“I could always make fifty million dollars,” he explained to me once. “But who needs that?”
All of these budding entrepreneurs wanted to be around Clark in the same way normal people wanted to be around at sunrise, just to see where the light came from.
All you needed was an idea, some excellent engineering talent, and a pair of big brass balls to execute that idea.
He was, for that brief, curious moment, the orchestra’s conductor. He set the tempo. In the past, the venture capitalists had always done that.
Other than that, so far as Clark was concerned, the finance department of the American economy was expendable.
It was a difference of temperament as much as anything else. Clark had walked up to a roulette wheel surrounded by more or less reasonable men, and laid all his chips on 00. And it scared the hell out of the others at the table. The VCs could tolerate companies’ going bust—they had so many of them—but they could not tolerate missing out on the new new thing.
“I won’t waste your time with our promotional materials,” he said, wasting Clark’s time with the promotional material,
He had no interest in preservation of any sort. His life was dedicated to the fine art of tearing down and building anew.
Wall Street had gone from being the celebrities of the money culture to being its lackeys.
an investment banker in Silicon Valley wasn’t exactly a player. He was more of a waterboy.
To his way of thinking there were health care professionals who clearly served a purpose. They were called doctors. And there were people who clearly needed health care. They were called patients. Everyone else in between—the hundreds of billions in paperwork and bullshit—could go.
If they could write software, they wouldn’t be schlepping companies for a living.
Their money was cheap: there was so much money pouring into the Valley that Mike Long had about twelve different ways he could get his hands on what he needed.
One of the great things about AOL was that they hammered into the heads of investors the idea that all that mattered was the number of subscribers.”
Clark let the Wall Street people sell his companies to the public and make him billions of dollars, but only because he hadn’t yet figured out a way to get rid of them.
