Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…You can imagine Marc Andreessen’s fit with an environment like this. Of course, as this is happening, this is when Mosaic is rocketing up this adoption curve. It's this weird thing where he's this kid out of school, working a no-name job, but he's kind of a celebrity. He's gotten kind of shoved out and there are two sides to this story. I think the folks in NCSA would say that Mosaic was an official project, Marc says they sort of self-organized. It became very clear to him that the bureaucratic leadership at the NCSA was going to take the lead on this and start doing the press interviews. They did own the license to the source code, so he was an employee and it became NCSA's thing, not Marc Andreessen's thing. Yup, oh boy is that going to come back. Enter Jim Clark. Of course, Jim Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics, SGI, Utah Mafia Alumni. He had just left SGI, he had been feuding with the board and he's out. He's looking for his next thing, but he has a non-solicit from SGI so he can't take any of his people with him, but he knows he wants to start a new thing. He's got a chip on his shoulder. He's like, I got another act. I'm going to prove all these people wrong. He needs to go find new blood. He hears about Mosaic, he tries it out, and he's like, this is amazing, this is the future. I got to look up this Marc Andreessen guy who's there on the about page. It’s like Mosaic by Marc Andreessen. He cold calls him and they get together, they have breakfast. I think Marc would famously say this is the one and only time he got up at 7:00 AM in his 20s. Here's how it goes down. They have breakfast and Jim was like, Marc, you should commercialize this thing that you're doing with Mosaic. You got to get out of this job and I think we should do it together. Marc was like, I don't know. I'm really enjoying this consulting lifestyle, doing software implementation, PeopleSoft. [...] hell no, let me get out of here. Let's go do this damn thing. No, that's not how it went down at all. You probably know this Ben from the research, but you would think that would be now, in retrospect, an obvious thing. No, Jim does take a shine to Marc and he's like, okay, great. I want you on my team in the new team I was assembling. I want some young blood, but the idea I have is this N64 Nintendo Console that we've been working with Nintendo over at Silicon Graphics. This is going to be the perfect information superhighway node into living rooms. This is how we're going to win the internet. We're going to build an online service for the N64 console.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.