Smart Valley talk - Marc Andreessen

There was a talk given on January 17, 1995 at the Palo Alto Holiday Inn from 7:30 AM to 9:00 AM by Marc Andreessen, who wrote a lot of Mosaic and is co-founder of Netscape Communications.

It was sponsored by Smart Valley, Inc. and titled

Netscape Communications:
Building a Cool Company and Creating a Killer Internet Application

This article was originally written by me and posted to the users mailing list at webcom.com right after the talk was over. I cleaned it up a little, but left the original rushed style...

I just got out of the Smart Valley talk by Marc Andreessen and I thought I'd stop home on the way back to work and write up a few quick notes about it.

The talk started at about 8:00. The room was packed with a variety of people, about 50-60% were older men dressed in suits that looked like execs, the remainder were about half younger types in slacks and half miscellaneous...

Marc was introduced and talked for about 20 minutes about Netscape and then entertained questions until about 9:00. Ladies - he is available!

Marc is a stocky, dark-blonde-haired scandinavian looking guy - a fast talker with a quick wit. He said his name is pronounced "an dree' sen" - long e. He gave his email address as marca@netscape.com.

He formed Netscape along with Jim Clark (ex-SGI prez) and a few fellows from U. of Ill. were Marc got his BS.

At first there were 2 or 3 and now about 100 employees at Netscape. He showed an amusing Dilbert comic with reference to venture capitalists.

He mentioned that at first it was made up of two 'mafias' - from U of I and SGI, but now there are dozens of them. It was easy to lure the U of I people to Silicon Valley.

He mentioned a little about MCI's plans to host commercenet, the negotiations of Netscape with B of A, Visa, etc.

Here are a few of the Q&A topics:

• He feels that the internet will soon have zones of sponsors where people would congregate and be somewhat insulated from the rest of the Internet.
• Netscape is heavily participating in WWW standards groups and other such groups.
• The original name 'Mosaic Communications' and IP 'mcom.com' were changed to Netscape Communications, Inc, and 'netscape.com'. This was because of a dispute with U of Ill.
• The virus that got out on the first Netscape distribution diskettes was 'an embarrassment'. It was on the PC used to verify the diskette and has been fixed. 'Backup, backup, backup your source' he said.
• The products are Netscape Navigator - the browser, and Netscape Netsite, the server (it comes in two flavors for big and small sites).
• There were several questions about security. He mentioned they were all being vigorously investigated. He said that at the moment, none of these allow individual users to have security certificates. Some security software are things like SSL - secure sockets layer.
• He said he didn't think there were any real competitors to Netscape yet, perhaps Microsoft in the future.

When it was over I hung around a bit and asked him the truth about Mosaic development. He said it was written by two people in three months. 'It's not Rocket Science' he said.

Overall, enjoyable, I'd write more but I have to get to work...

Created on 17 Jan 1995 by Jim Hurley -- hurleyj@arachnaut.org

Last update on 09 Jan 1996

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