Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts,

of Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org, or you can subscribe,

comment on this podcast, and find links and other information related to today's conversation.

You'll also find our archives where you can listen to every episode we've ever done going

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Today is May 1, 2014, and my guest is Mark Andreson, legendary entrepreneur and venture capitalist.

He's the co-creator of Mosaic, the co-founder of Netscape, and more recently, the co-founder of

the venture capital firm, Andreson Horowitz. Mark, welcome to Econ Talk.

Russ, it's great to be here. Thank you. I want to start with your career.

You're at the heart of the First Browser War between Netscape and Internet Explorer.

That seems like hundreds of years ago. It's a little more recently than that, but give us a

quick thumbnail of what happened to Netscape and then how you escape from that war.

Yeah, so Netscape was founded actually 20 years ago this month. So it's a sort of a special

time. For me, Netscape is a company that grew incredibly quickly. We grew from 0 to 3500

employees in three years. It was actually really funny. Netscape was always fun of us,

this small little browser company. People used to come visit us on the campus and they were just

completely flabbergasted at all the buildings and all the people. And the reason we had all those

people was because in addition to browsers, we built a very broad range of Internet software

and Internet services at that time. And so we were one of the first companies that did

Internet e-commerce systems. We're one of the first companies that did Internet publishing.

Systems are software for a long time. Powered actually a lot of the big newspapers,

the big Wall Street Journal. We actually are the company that built the cryptography into the

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