The Producer of Tomorrow (Part 7)

^{← Part 6}



At the wedding of Andreessen in 2006, Ben Horowitz made a toast that this man has long been known to everyone as “grumbling Mark,” because “no one understood him all his life, he passed it alone.” No one understood him in his farm town, no one understood him in Silicon Valley - “Damn, I don’t understand him myself!” But now he finally became “happy Mark” because he found “someone who completely takes it "- a bride named Laura Arrillaga-Andrissen ^★ . She lectures on philanthropy at Stanford Business School.



In December, Andreessen invited me to their home in Atherton ^★ , five minutes from the a16z office, to watch TV. She and Laura live in a modern, art-filled, nine-thousand-foot ( about 836 m² ) villa, built in a style that the hostess calls “Northern California Pastish ^★ ”. The height of the ceilings corresponds to the giant proportions of Andreessen. Everything around at the same time majestic, minimalist and fresh. The toilet in the restroom is so visionary, and the soft lighting around the room is so beautiful that I had to spend some time searching for a way to flush the water.



Arrillaga-Andreessen brought treats to the living room and arranged them on the tables purchased by the host at Costco ^★ . The chef prepared omelets and Thai salads in advance. Now they are all warmed up: there are three microwaves in the house so that all the food is ready at the same time. Andrissen stroked her hand and beamed: "Hello, beauty!"

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“Hello, my dear!” She replied. I was honored with a brief hug, as if we had not seen each other since yesterday. Arrillaga-Andreissen is a tall, seemingly unearthly, but expressive woman. When they met in 2005 on the eve of the New Year, at a party organized by the leading investor of the eHarmony ^★ dating service, they talked for six and a half hours in a row. As Laura says, Andreessen answered most of the criteria on her checklist: he was a genius, he was a coder, he was funny, he was bald. She explained the last point as follows: “To directly see what the brain is hidden under is incredibly sexy!” For his part, Andriessen felt that “she was impressive! My biggest fear was that her ideal was living in flight from place to place. ” In one of the seventeen emails that he sent her the next day, he was interested in: “What is your perfect evening?” To which she replied: “Stay at home, make out mail, make an omelette, watch TV, take a bath, go to bed” . Before the second date, he presented to her, according to her, “a twenty-five-minute monologue about why our relationship should become permanent, with a complete, thoughtful decision tree ^★ , which also prudently included all of my own decision tree”. They got married nine months later. In her and her father, John ^★ , Andrissen, a millionaire developer from Silicon Valley, seems to have found a family that he lacked. Laura showed me a photograph of two men, standing side by side, both bald, successful, powerful: "Just like two drops of water."



After spending some time at the TV, the couple indulges in reading in bed, so she says: "I can fall asleep hugging my lover." (She invariably prefers to call her husband “my beloved,” without using the name “Mark.”) “I ask him about things that interested me during the day, so every night I fall asleep with a person-Wikipedia able to go deeper and deeper in topic, link by link. Last week, we talked about mobile phone hardware, how the binary code works, what to expect in the regulation of drone flights, and whether Putin is using Ukraine as a maneuver that distracts from the financial crisis in Russia. ” As soon as she falls asleep, Andreissen returns to work at her home office. Like a charging phone, it accumulates energy throughout the night.



He pressed a button to maximize the screen, then woke up Apple TV ^★ . We were going to watch two episodes completing the first season of the AMC drama “Stop and Burn” ^★ . The series is dedicated to the fictional company called Cardiff, which enters the personal computer war in the early eighties. The show obviously impressed Andreessen. In 1983, he said, "I was twelve, and I did not know anything about start-ups and venture capital, but I was familiar with all the products." He used RadioShack TRS-80 ^★ from the school library to build a calculator for homework. In 1992, while undergraduate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign ^★ , he quit his job - coding under Unix for $ 6.85 per hour - to team up with another programmer and create Mosaic ^★ , the first graphical browser for the World Wide Web. After graduation, he moved to Silicon Valley, where, together with the restless persistent entrepreneur Jim Clark ^★ (Jim Clark), he launched Netscape to make the Internet accessible to everyone, not just scientists. John Doerr (John Doerr ^★ ), who financed their round A, says that the genius of their browser was like “adding photos to the Howard Johnson ^★ menu. No knowledge of the language required; you can simply indicate what you need. ” Arrillaga-Andreissen told the secret background behind this story: "Netscape was based on my beloved's inability to access knowledge in a small town, at a time when he was still a child."



Netscape Navigator ^★ , released in 1994, quickly gained more than 94% of the browser market, and Andresen predicted that the World Wide Web ^★ would make operating systems such as Microsoft Windows ^★ "irrelevant." When the company entered the public market in 1995, its shares soared from twenty-eight dollars to seventy-five apiece, and Andriessen soon found himself on the cover of Time ^★ : barefoot on the throne. But Mark 1.0 was in many ways just a beta version. Having tied up with coding, his first love, he took control of the coders. At the same time, he devoured the Pepperidge Farm ^★ nantuckets ^★ livers and honey-cereal bars, missed meetings, suddenly flashed with anger on occasion. “When you see how doubts overwhelm him, it makes you feel a combination of inspiration and fear,” recalls Jason Rosenthal ^★ , manager Andreassen spoke positively about. Andreassen's favorite answer to the embarrassment of his subordinates was: "There are no stupid questions, there are stupid people!" Jim Barksdale (Jim Barksdale ^★ ), the company's CEO, adds: "After the meetings, I told Mark:" There is no need to tell a stupid donkey that he stupid ass. ”” Andriessen replies to me: “I had to get Netscape to work, it had to work — I had no way back — so I was absolutely impatient with everything that bothered me.” Bearing in mind, according to his own explanation: "people." He could never relax: “I am very paranoid. And the pain in the periods of falls was much stronger than the joy in the periods of take-off. "



The fall period began when Microsoft turned on its own browser ^★ as part of the operating system, turning it into a national browser after fact, if not by choice. Netscape shifted from the consumer market to the corporate, and began selling browser and server software. He was lucky to be bought by AOL ^★ in 1999 for ten billion dollars. Peter Currie (Peter Currie ^★ ), a CFO ^★ company, said: “We were able to distinguish ourselves from others, we introduced cookies ^★ and were the first among download managers ^★ from the Internet, and Netscape left a mark in business history. Perhaps it is best to consider it as a classic technological history: the company creates, invents, succeeds - and its competitors bypass it. ”



In the episode of the series “Stop and Burn,” Cardiff entrepreneurs go to COMDEX ^★ , a large trade show, and discover that another company stole their idea and bypassed them in the market. In response, Gordon, a hardware engineer, removes an interactive OS from the Cardiff computer - a system developed by a punk girl, a software genius named Cameron - and downloads DOS ^★ from Microsoft instead, which makes the development of IBM-compatible ^★ , viable, and ... sad It was a contrived surrender, but Andriessen nodded approvingly: “It was a moment of triumph for Microsoft, and Gordon is right - they need to survive in order to accept the fight the other day. But ... ”He points to the screen where the Apple Macintosh ^★ makes its debut on the show. “Hi, I'm a Mac,” said the computer. Andrissen laughed, and continued: “They were initially doomed because Apple was in Cupertino ^★ ,” in Silicon Valley, “spent three years building it. Being here, I was determined to be on the other side of this driving force, because in success in software development it is distributed according to the law of the strong. This is not like Coke and Pepsi ^★ and the like. Here the winner gets everything. The second prize is a set of table knives ^★ , and the third is firing. ”







In the season finale, Cameron launches his own startup. Watching how she manages her programmers, Andriessen gently remarks: "The best scenes with Cameron were those where she was alone in the basement, indulging in coding." I added that in my opinion she is the most dissatisfied character: too pliable, inconsistent, without convincing motivation. He smiled and replied: "Because she is the future." ▼



To be continued…



Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 ← | Part 7 | → Part 8

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About the author: Ted Friend has been a regular contributor to The New Yorker since 1998. Author of various reports and investigations, multiple winner of awards in the field of journalism.

Photos: 1. baltimoretimes-online.com , 2. fortune.com , 3. time.com , 4. iq.intel.com



Bonus: A curious Howard Johnson's children's menu from 1968.