Why Every Modern Tech Company Can Trace Their Roots Back to Netscape

The origin story of the first true Silicon Valley startup

Jamie Logie
Entrepreneurship Handbook
7 min readMay 31, 2021

--

Pic via Wikipedia

See if this trajectory sounds familiar:

  1. Form a start-up
  2. Get venture capital backing
  3. Release product
  4. Grow like wildfire, becoming darlings of the tech world, and gain millions of users
  5. Go public
  6. Become billionaire

That’s the blueprint now for how every successful start-up seems to go. But it wasn’t always like this. This now-familiar ascension had to start somewhere and that somewhere is with Marc Andreessen and Netscape.

In the book “How the Internet Happened” by Brian McCullough, we get a look into how a few entrepreneurs inadvertently put in motion the model that would drive the future of silicon valley and all modern tech startups.

The Early Days of the Web & the NCSA

Marc Andreessen grew up obsessed with computers. This passion took him to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications or NCSA.

The year was 1992 and it was the very early days of the internet. The NCSA had the fastest internet connections and was the best place to work on the new platform. Andreessen was one of the student computer programmers there.

The internet was the ability to connect computers, but there hadn’t been an effective platform to connect everything you found online together.

While doing mindless coding work, Andreessen had been consumed with the emerging “World Wide Web.” This was the platform that could actually connect everyone — and everything — on the internet together.

Andreessen believed he could evolve the web quickly and into something more useful. This would mean creating a better web browser.

Building a Better Web Browser

The internet is nothing if there isn't software to both navigate and view it. There were early browsers but they were clunky. Dozens of people were trying to create browsers such as the text-based Lynx browser.

--

--