Jim Clark

Whatever we may think today of the dot-com boom of the late ’90s, one thing true then that seems even more true now is this: It was Jim Clark’s world. The rest of us were just visiting.

The Internet was still a data network used primarily by academics and the military in 1994 when this tall, bespectacled scientist-turned-entrepreneur plopped down $5 million of his own money to back the creation of a new thing called a Web browser. Barely a year later, when Netscape went public and set Clark on the path to make his first billion, we had all entered the era of “eyeballs” and “click-throughs” and “stickiness.”

“That’s what I was trying to do,” Clark says, looking back on those days of start-ups and road shows. “I was trying to get a frenzy going.”

He now reflects on those times from his sprawling oceanfront home in Palm Beach, Fla., which boasts an art collection that includes Picassos, Matisses, Van Goghs and Modiglianis. Yes, the poor kid from the dusty little Texas town of Plainview has done very well indeed.

When asked what fuels the drive that got him all these goodies, Clark has a ready answer for most people—he simply had to get out of that little Texas town. Yet on a recent fall morning, Clark sat down in his cozy entertainment room, stretched his long legs out on a sofa in front of the fireplace, sipped his coffee and conceded that his usual answer tells only a fraction of the story.

Clark was 16 in 1960 when he dropped out of high school, an angry kid from a broken home. The next year, he got his mother to sign a waiver so he could join the U.S. Navy. After a miserable nine-month tour of duty at sea, he entered a 13-week school stateside. The first week, he surprised everybody, including himself, by coming out at the top of his class. The second week, he was first again. Then, the third week he was beat out by another sailor.

“After that, I got very focused,” Clark says. It got his competitive juices flowing and taught him that there was nothing quite like success to inspire you to work harder. “To realize I could be the best was eye-opening. I wanted to just keep going further and see how far I could go.”

That turned out to be pretty far. At the urging of his Navy instructors, he took night classes at Tulane University in New Orleans. Then he studied electrical enginneering at Texas Tech. Back in Louisiana, he worked at Boeing, where he was introduced to computers, and he earned a masters in physics at New Orleans University. He got his Ph.D. at the University of Utah in 1974. And after some more bouncing around, including some time at the New York Institute of Technology and University of California–Santa Cruz, Clark landed at Stanford University as an associate professor.

Throughout this dramatic transition from high-school dropout to Stanford professor, Clark equated success with motion. “Each time I changed subjects, went somewhere new, did something new or different, my life seemed to improve. One thing after another opened up,” he muses.

The jump to entrepreneur engendered another great success. He used his work in 3-D imaging software at Stanford to create the Geometry Engine, the core technology with which he founded his first company. Silicon Graphics started in 1982 with $25,000 of borrowed money, became one of the great, iconic Silicon Valley companies. Its 3-D graphics workstations and servers made possible the special effects in movies such as “Jurassic Park” and became favored by engineers and scientists around the world.

At Silicon Graphics, success also came with dollar signs. Clark made his first millions there. Ultimately, though, it proved to be a disappointment. As the ’80s rolled into the ’90s, he clashed repeatedly with the management team he’d brought in to run the company, growing increasingly frustrated and angry that they didn’t agree with the business strategy he felt was needed to address a changing computer market. So, he walked away.

Focus. Drive. Love of motion. An appetite for risk. These elements would now combine in Clark’s personality, all in service of a hunch he had about the coming Internet revolution and a sense that he was the person to get out in front of it. Equally important was his ability to transfer his enthusiasm to others.

At a meeting held in a pizza joint near the University of Illinois campus, Clark wielded an almost hypnotic power when he and Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen met the band of software engineers they would recruit for their new company, recalls Lou Montulli, one of the young engineers at that meeting. “He’s very intense,” Montulli says. “He had this power to convince us all that our life’s purpose was to go to California and make this happen.”

In those early days of the Internet frenzy, Clark had found an environment perfectly suited to his driven personality. Alvy Ray Smith III, co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios and a computer graphics pioneer who knew Clark even before his Stanford days, calls him “a wheeler-dealer of the first order.” And wheel and deal he did.

Even though he wasn’t sure how exactly they were going to make money at it, Clark says he didn’t see building a company around a Web browser as such a long shot or a risky bet. “If I were to take all my entire fortune and bet it on the lottery, that would be a stupid risk,” he says. “But I took one-third of my liquid net worth—one-fifth of my total net worth—and bet it on Netscape. I was worth a total of about $25 million and I had about $15 million in liquidity, and I bet $5 million on Netscape. I’d say that was a good bet.”

And the betting didn’t stop there. Before the decade was over, Clark would take his Internet medical company, Healtheon, public—making him the only person ever to have started three companies that each reached more than $1 billion in market capitalization.

Now, Clark, 60, dabbles in real estate. He also serves on the boards of MyCFO.com and Shutterfly.com, two other Web companies he founded after Netscape and Healtheon. And he reveals he’s getting another start-up related to Shutterfly off the ground.

In his Silicon Valley book, “The New New Thing,” author Michael Lewis suggests that Clark’s drive comes from the fact that he seems to create the conditions of his own dissatisfaction. Clark says he would prefer to call it a drive for perfection. Because he’s a perfectionist, he can always see how something can be improved, he says. “This,” he holds up his arms in a motion meant to encompass the 32,000-square-foot mansion around him, “and my boats and everything I do, I like it to be done with a sense of aesthetics and quality. Quality, to me, is very important. I’m always looking for the highest quality of anything. That means that I’m kind of a perfectionist. And when I do things, I like for them to be the best. I was always wanting to be the best in my class. That’s the nature of someone who’s driven that way, and so you’re always finding the things wrong with stuff.”

While Clark’s friends say his intense drive can make him a difficult person to be around, they also say it’s an absolutely essential part of the man. Clark, an avid sailor, and his friend Louie Psihoyos were kayaking offshore of Clark’s Palm Beach estate recently, just having a nice day watching the birds and the fish. Then, Psihoyos says, he glanced over and saw that Clark had stopped paddling and was looking around and frowning at his kayak. “Jim says, ‘These would be pretty nice if they just had a sail on them,’ ” Psihoyos laughs. “That’s how it all starts.”

 Published for the Week Of December 13, 2004