Twenty years ago this month, Jim Clark and I were planning the company that became Netscape. In the coming months, I may post the occasional memory from that time! To start, some thoughts on Jim Clark himself…
When I came to Silicon Valley in 01/94, Jim Clark was regarded like Elon Musk or Larry Page today. Top-top-top tech visionary and entrepreneur. Jim’s first company, Silicon Graphics Inc (SGI), was viewed much like Google today – the tech powerhouse all the genius engineers wanted to join. SGI invented modern 3D computer graphics-from Jurassic Park to today’s Call of Duty and Oculus Rift, including core tech “GL” (now OpenGL).
Jim had been a professor at Stanford. He and his grad students spun off into SGI and created entirely new worlds, one of best SV companies ever. Jim is a Silicon Valley renaissance man: academic, inventor, entrepreneur, business builder, visionary, marketer, leader, philanthropist.
My great stroke of luck happened when Jim left SGI in 1993, stayed on the SGI board and so couldn’t recruit cofounders for the next company out of SGI. This changed my life, since there were easily hundreds or thousands of SGI engineers way better than me! But Jim needed new blood. And so Jim’s desire to start a new company and his inability to recruit from SGI led to The Email that turned into Netscape. To be continued…
Source: Tweets – 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10
@pmarca Says 