Ron Conway explains how Netscape Unlocked the Internet

So Ron, maybe this is now the right time to talk about Netscape. Yes, because we're about 50 companies in, investing just in internet companies, but there's this overarching dilemma that you cannot put your finger on, but you know we're not going anywhere without it. In hindsight, it's 2020, it's easy to see, but back then it wasn't easy to see. We were grappling around, we weren't saying it, but founders were saying it: hey, this internet thing is not going to be usable until people and users have a way to access all of this information. The amount of information in the world is unfathomable, and this thing called the internet was supposed to give you access to that information, but there was no friendly, practical way to access all this huge corpus of valuable information that was going to make people productive. Along came a person named Jim Clark. Jim Clark had founded several companies in Silicon Valley, including Sun Microsystems; he was a co-founder there. After Jim Clark retired, he put his finger on this issue: how are people going to find a friendly way to access and interact with this information corpus? He rooted around and found out that there was a group of engineers at the University of Illinois that were doing research on this and had this thing called a browser. This thing called a browser was a user-friendly interface to access all the information on the internet. Jim Clark flew to the University of Illinois and went to talk to the lead engineer, Marc Andreessen, and found out there were other engineers, probably four or five of them, working on this project. He said to them, please come to Silicon Valley and start a company to commercialize the browser. John Doerr, Kleiner Perkins, and I—by then Kleiner Perkins was arguably neck and neck with Sequoia—but Jim Clark was affiliated with Kleiner Perkins. He said, why don't you come out? We're going to start a company with Kleiner Perkins and me funding you. The engineers said yes, they jumped on an airplane in their bare feet and came to California. So I'm merrily doing these one-off investments with Ben Rosen, and my good friend Mike Homer, who had a career at Apple Computer and then retired from Apple and started dabbling on his own. Mike Homer—we need to digress because he was an engineer who went to UC Berkeley, but probably the most affable engineer on Earth. He could communicate ideas crystal clear, had tons of charisma, one of the wittiest persons on Earth, and also one of the smartest people on Earth, especially from a practical point of view. So Mike Homer found out about Netscape and took a consulting job there.