Examines the life and career of Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark, the founders of Netscape.

Tells the unlikely story of Silicon Valley through the life of one of its great achievers--Jim Clark, who founded Silicon Graphics and Netscape and may be on the verge of another trillion-dollar company.

Traces the stories of entrepreneurs who rose from the ashes of the dot-com bust to create groundbreaking new Web companies, in an account that documents the success stories of such examples as Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube.

“An incisive history of the venture-capital industry.” —New Yorker “An excellent and original economic history of venture capital.” —Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution “A detailed, fact-filled account of America’s most celebrated moneymen.” —New Republic “Extremely interesting, readable, and informative...Tom Nicholas tells you most everything you ever wanted to know about the history of venture capital, from the financing of the whaling industry to the present multibillion-dollar venture funds.” —Arthur Rock “In principle, venture capital is where the ordinarily conservative, cynical domain of big money touches dreamy, long-shot enterprise. In practice, it has become the distinguishing big-business engine of our time...[A] first-rate history.” —New Yorker VC tells the riveting story of how the venture capital industry arose from America’s longstanding identification with entrepreneurship and risk-taking. Whether the venture is a whaling voyage setting sail from New Bedford or the latest Silicon Valley startup, VC is a state of mind as much as a way of doing business, exemplified by an appetite for seeking extreme financial rewards, a tolerance for failure and experimentation, and a faith in the promise of innovation to generate new wealth. Tom Nicholas’s authoritative history takes us on a roller coaster of entrepreneurial successes and setbacks. It describes how iconic firms like Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia invested in Genentech and Apple even as it tells the larger story of VC’s birth and evolution, revealing along the way why venture capital is such a quintessentially American institution—one that has proven difficult to recreate elsewhere.

"A terrific book that captures the explosion of creativity and business evolution at the center of the Internet phenomenon. A tantalizing mix of diverse players with utopian visions, animated by equal parts aggression and delight. A true saga of our time."-James F. Moore author, The Death of Competition; Chairman, Geo Partners Research Inc. Architects of the Web presents the dynamic history of the Web's creation and evolution-as well as its emergence as a dynamic business tool-through revealing profiles of its architects, the brilliant minds who have helped thrust the Web onto desktops and corporate agendas around the world. A diverse, ambitious group, the architects of the Web are: * Marc Andreessen, Netscape * Ariel Poler, I/PRO * Rob Glaser, Progressive Networks Andrew Anker, HotWired * Kim Polese, Marimba * Halsey Minor, C/NET * Mark Pesce, VRML * Jerry Yang, Yahoo!

Details how entrepreneur Jim Clark made Netscape worth billions

A Library Journal Best Book of the Year Tech-guru Brian McCullough delivers a rollicking history of the internet, why it exploded, and how it changed everything. The internet was never intended for you, opines Brian McCullough in this lively narrative of an era that utterly transformed everything we thought we knew about technology. In How the Internet Happened, he chronicles the whole fascinating story for the first time, beginning in a dusty Illinois basement in 1993, when a group of college kids set off a once-in-an-epoch revolution with what would become the first “dotcom.” Depicting the lives of now-famous innovators like Netscape’s Marc Andreessen and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, McCullough also reveals surprising quirks and unknown tales as he tracks both the technology and the culture around the internet’s rise. Cinematic in detail and unprecedented in scope, the result both enlightens and informs as it draws back the curtain on the new rhythm of disruption and innovation the internet fostered, and helps to redefine an era that changed every part of our lives.