As everyone now knows, Marc Andreessen apparently made it a New Year’s resolution to begin tweeting, just as some of the platform’s most prolific users are deciding to dial it down. That’s good news for the roughly 42,000 of us who are following him, given that he usually has plenty of interesting observations to make.
Sunday afternoon, for example, Andreessen entered into a Twitter conversation with 21-year-old Marcos Villacampa, a self-described “startup addict” in Spain, who tweeted, “It is really, really difficult to find the *real* story of events in the past which involved winners and losers.” Villacampa then tweeted of Andreessen specifically that Mosaic “wasn’t exactly a one-man job…”
Here’s the history lesson that Andreessen offered Villacampa in turn. (We feel vaguely trollish publishing it, but because it’s useful background, and conversations are so quickly lost on Twitter, we thought we should seize the opportunity to capture the exchange.)
@MarkVillacampa At the start it was Eric Bina (@ebina1) and me. Later expanded to half a dozen killer guys. All but one came to Netscape.
— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) January 12, 2014
@MarkVillacampa NSF grants funded the program for which we all worked. But gov’t didn’t know about it until it had already happened. — Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) January 12, 2014
@MarkVillacampa And yes, Mosaic is original code base for IE, and Netscape is original code base for Firefox. — Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) January 12, 2014
@MarkVillacampa Side note–we later applied for more NSF funding and were denied. If we had received it, may not have left to start company.
— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) January 12, 2014
@MarkVillacampa Attached see cover page of denied NSF grant proposal from mid 1993 :-). pic.twitter.com/GXn24c89sk
— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) January 12, 2014
@MarkVillacampa Netscape never got rights to Mosaic. We rewrote code base from scratch. Univ Illinois then licensed Mosaic to Spyglass. — Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) January 12, 2014
@MarkVillacampa Univ of Illinois got small-$ cash payoff. Refused stock. That plus lost future philanthropy cost Univ ~$1 billion over 20yrs
— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) January 12, 2014
@MarkVillacampa Cautionary tale :-). Many universities still struggling with right policies around this stuff today.
— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) January 12, 2014
@MarkVillacampa History of Stanford suggests best approach extreme laissez faire-optimize for long-term philanthropy vs short-term gain.
— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) January 12, 2014
@MarkVillacampa Many billions of dollars of gifts from grateful alumni far outweigh commercial licensing or patent arrangements in long run.
— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) January 12, 2014
@cdixon @MarkVillacampa Didn’t count as Research anymore. Was well into Development and NSF didn’t fund D. p.s. I think they were right.
— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) January 12, 2014
@cdixon @MarkVillacampa I am very happy they turned us down :-).
— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) January 12, 2014