Welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Michael Copeland.

Getting denied another round of NSF funding in the early days of Mosaic turned out to be a huge catalyst to start a company around the fledgling web browser, says Mark Andreessen.

That company was Netscape.

At the time, Andresen was still at the University of Illinois, and he wanted the NSF money to help build what amounted to a customer support team.

That wasn't the NSF's business.

Since Andresen's Mosaic Days, calibrating the interplay between academia, government, and the private sector has gotten, if not easier, less exotic, with schools like UC Berkeley

and Stanford setting the standard for providing students and faculty with a clear path forward.

In this segment of the A16Z podcast, Mark Andreessen and Chris Dixon discussed the role academia

plays in the startup world, from picking the right classes to picking the right institution

from which to turn research into a company.

The conversation you were about to hear

was recorded at our 2015 academic roundtable.

Chris Dixon starts things off.

So, Mark, let's talk about,

so you way back were a recipient of government grants, right?

Netscape came out of that.

How, can you talk about

sort of how, I guess,

how you see the role of academia

as it relates to startups

venture capital and how that's changed over the last,

over your, you know, over your career?

...