Marc Andreesen - GENIUS
M Trust
3/15/18
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Adrian S. Martinez
Marc Andreesen - Genius
When Netscape's IPO ( The Browser ) landed on the public consciousness via the Netscape IPO on August 1995, it effectively solidified probably the biggest " idea " since probably , Fire, The Airplane, The Radio, The Automobile, Tesla's works, and sliced bread combined.
"Small minds discuss people, average minds discuss events, GREAT minds discuss ideas." - Eleanor Roosevelt .
Ideas are the true currency
Before there was Baidu. Or Google. Before there was Theglobe.com or eBay, Webvan or Amazon. Before even Yahoo, there was Netscape.
In fact, when historians tell the tale of the dot-com boom, they will say it began on Aug. 9, 1995. That was the day shares of Netscape Communications Inc., maker of the first widely adopted Internet browsing software, more than doubled on their first day of public trading.
The stock offering's success showed that huge fortunes could be made by selling shares in a Web start-up, even though the company itself had yet to make a dollar of profit. Netscape co-founder Jim Clark's 20% stake in the company was worth more than half a billion dollars that day.
The IPO's success -- which made millions for early Netscape investors, including not a few 20-somethings -- was like a gunshot whose echoes reverberated from Silicon Valley to Wall Street.
"It was the beginning of fundamental changes on Wall Street," said Steve Massocca, co-chief executive of the San Francisco investment bank Pacific Growth Equities.
"It signaled a dramatic change in the marketplace," Massocca said.
That marketplace would enrich -- on paper, at least -- millions of Americans who bought into the idea that owning tech -- and, specifically, Internet-related -- stocks was the quick path to the good life.
Along with the Telecommunications Act of 1996 -- which unleashed a wave of investment in telecom upstarts -- the Netscape IPO spawned the biggest era of U.S. wealth creation in generations.
At least, it did for those who had the luck or foresight to sell before the bubble popped some five years later.
Before the dot-com era ended, many who had profited from the bubble would be charged with felonies, and at least one of the principle architects of the Netscape IPO itself -- star investment banker Frank Quattrone -- would be convicted on obstruction-of-justice charges.
Ironically, the seeds of Netscape's demise were planted exactly a year after its IPO, when Microsoft, in August 1996, launched an improved version of its own browser that would ultimately crush its upstart rival.
The bust that followed the boom left scars on investors' psyches that are still affecting financial decisions. "There wasn't a lot of fear in the wake of [the Netscape IPO]," said Mark Lehmann, head of equities at JMP Securities, a San Francisco investment bank. "People thought it was limitless, that things could only go up."
Seismic shift in sentiment
The fact that the Netscape IPO was executed at all proved that institutional investors had grown willing to buy into offerings from unprofitable companies -- a revolutionary idea at the time.
Even more important, the stock's performance after going public provided the first glimpse of the viral power of mom-and-pop investors to drive up the price of Internet stocks.
Marketwatch . com
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