BOOK
Jim Clark now admits that he started Netscape without a specific plan - just gut instinct and a $3 million nest egg. "How could anyone make money on the Internet?" he asks in his new seat-of-the-pants memoir. "I didn't have a specific answer to that yet, but I figured that with the Web- and Mosaic-enabled Internet already growing exponentially, how could you not make money? It was just the law of large numbers at work - even a small amount of money per user would yield a big business." The prescient entrepreneur was betting that home shopping, banking, and other services would be delivered over the Web. The only issue was how to make it pay. Netscape Time explores his insights and frustrations as the company raced to answer this billion-dollar question.
Netscape's consumer strategy was the first to go, as Clark was forced to turn to venture capital "velociraptors" to fuel a fiercer-than-anticipated burn rate. Instead of concentrating on the mass market, after closing its first $7.2 million deal with MCI to develop server products, the company reset its sights on enterprise software. At the time, it was battling a rearguard legal action with Marc Andreessen's alma mater over intellectual-property rights that threatened to put its protean plans on hold.
It was a white-knuckle ride for harried investors. "We were spending over half of our R&D dollars on this one piece of software, so if we didn't charge for it, we had to find some other way to pay for our costs," says Clark. The company would resurrect its consumer-portal strategy 24 months later after coming under siege from Redmond's "evil Lord Sauron."
One corollary of living in Netscape time is that being first to establish a brand is not enough: You have to keep moving at the speed of the media, if only to make it more difficult for competitors to lock on. After starting SGI and Netscape, the 55-year-old entrepreneur is now applying the lesson to his third billion-dollar startup, Healtheon, which went public in February and in May announced a multibillion-dollar merger with WebMD that makes Microsoft a significant shareholder. And his fourth venture, MyCFO, is just out of the gate. "An axiom of motorcycle racing applies precisely to the technology business," he muses. "Stability is a function of momentum."
Netscape Time: The Making of the Billion-Dollar Start-Up That Took on Microsoft by Jim Clark: $24.95. St. Martin's Press: (888) 330 8477, www.stmartins.com.
STREET CRED
Basement Area Network
Hacking the Vacuum Tube
Free of Attachments
Polaroid's Sticky Portal
Burnt Rubber, Chicago Style
Booting Up Beelzebub
Out of the Celluloid Closet
ReadMe
Music
Saar-Sighted
The Transreal Thing
I, Nicklaus
American History f/x
Just Outta Beta
Little Big Screen
"It Was Just the Law of Large Numbers at Work"
Contributors
