How the World Got Wired · Mosaic, the Pivot

The Other Side of the Table

But before we go to August 9, I want to skip ahead, briefly, to tell you what eventually happened to Marc Andreessen.

Netscape, in the end, did not survive. The reason it did not survive was that the largest software company in the world at the time — Microsoft — saw the web coming, decided it could not afford to let Netscape control how people got there, and built its own browser, called Internet Explorer. Microsoft gave Internet Explorer away for free, forever, and bundled it with the Windows operating system that almost every computer in the world ran. Netscape, which was charging companies for its browser, could not compete with free-and-already-installed.

This was a real war, fought through the late 1990s. Netscape’s market share fell from about eighty percent to under twenty percent in a few years. The company was eventually sold to a much larger internet company called AOL, in 1999, for about $10 billion in stock. The team scattered. Andreessen, in his late twenties, was suddenly rich, and suddenly unemployed.

He started another company. He sold it for $1.6 billion. He started a third company, with a friend named Ben Horowitz.

The third company was different. The third company was not a software company. It was a venture capital firm. It was a company that, like Don Valentine’s Sequoia in the last chapter, gave money to small fast-growing technology companies in exchange for a share of their ownership.

The firm was called Andreessen Horowitz. People shortened the name to a16z — the “16” stood for the sixteen letters between the A of Andreessen and the z of Horowitz. They opened in 2009. Within a decade, they were one of the two or three most influential investment firms in technology. They managed tens of billions of dollars of other people’s money. They invested in some of the most famous companies of the last fifteen years: Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb, Coinbase, GitHub, Slack, and many more. In recent years, they have become some of the biggest backers of artificial intelligence companies — the kind of companies you will read about at the end of this book.

Marc Andreessen, the twenty-one-year-old who once wrote free software in a public computer lab on six-and-a-half dollars an hour, is now, in his fifties, one of the most powerful private individuals in technology. He decides which other people’s free software becomes the next private company worth billions. He sits on the other side of the table from the next generation of Marc Andreessens.

I want you to hold this in your mind as you keep reading. The pattern of this book is not just about specific companies — it is about specific people. The young people who get paid by public institutions to build the foundations sometimes grow up to become the older people who help private companies build the towers on top. Sometimes the same person does both, in different decades of their own life. The kid who got the gift is sometimes the adult who decides who gets the next one.

This is not a moral judgment. It is a description. Whether you find it inspiring, or troubling, or both, is up to you.

And now, with all that in mind, we can go back to the morning of August 9, 1995.

The bankers had doubled the price of Netscape’s shares overnight, to $28. The stock was about to start trading. Marc Andreessen, age twenty-four, was about to learn what his last two years of work were worth, in front of the entire watching world.

That’s Chapter 10.

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