David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. No one recognizes his genius yet, and the innovation of creating Mosaic of actually mobilizing people to work on this thing was like, hey, we have a lot of fallow resources here. We have some smart people. I have no authority, but I'm going to wrangle the troops to try and do this with me. I think if there's one thing that young Marc Andreessen and now older Marc Andreessen is very good at, it is putting himself in the right environment to meet the right people and to succeed. We're referring to the University of Illinois where he would end up going to college. He was very intentional about deciding that. He decided that he wanted to go to school, a) to study computer science as we wanted to go to school with a great CS program that his family could afford; and b) he also wanted a place where he would have the opportunity not just to study CS, but to actually work while he's in school, on cool stuff that's going on. And of course, Urbana-Champaign had not just great a CS school, but what we were referred to a few times now: The National Center for Supercomputing Applications was attached to it, the NCSA. Marc—when he gets to Illinois—he immediately starts doing work-study at the NCSA and while he's there as you mentioned, he's not yet Marc Andreessen. How does he end up coming up with Mosaic? While he's at NCSA, they're interfacing with all of the other supercomputing centers around the world including academic research like particle accelerators. Particularly, with CERN over in Switzerland, the particle accelerator, which is where Tim Berners-Lee is and that's where Tim Berners-Lee comes up with the set of Standards like HTTP and all that stuff that he dubs "the world wide web". All the way across the world, halfway across the world in Illinois, this kid working there, Marc Andreessen hears about it and he's like, oh well, that sounds very interesting. Totally, it's cool thinking about how this came to be because you got Tim Berners-Lee there on one of the few next workstations, like the next cube, that actually shipped and was actually used by people. Because this crazy expensive thing that only went to people working in academia. Of course, this is sort of Steve Jobs' company before returning to Apple. It says so much about Tim and the environment in which the internet and the World Wide Web was started that it was on the NeXT machine. It came out of this rigorous Academia corner of the world, which is frankly so different from a lot of the startup innovation that is happening today. I mean, a lot of the frontier tech stuff comes out of academic labs. But I think we often forget, especially with how it's sort of countercultural, a lot of new things on the internet have become, that it started in a very...…

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