Comment by brandall10
4 hours ago
It's such an interesting arc. I starting university in Sept '94, super excited to try out Mosaic on a T1 class connection after suffering through my 14.4k home modem. And shortly after I arrived, Netscape dropped.
He was an absolute hero of that era, possibly the most admired 'geek' back then. Young, with hair, with no hints of his future Dr. Evil emergence.
I don't recall that fame at the time (from Mcom/Netscape, JWZ was more visible, in my circles), but I knew his name.
When he was first coding NCSA Mosaic, we were both pretty young, and doing workstation development, which took more of what HN would consider hacker spirit than the bulk of contemporary software development does. And we were also presumably Internet people, so I assumed he was like me.
In my mind, there was a default Internet person culture, which was very different than the tech industry culture of today. Curious, optimistic and wanting to bring Internet tech and culture to people, and a sense of responsibility for it. (Not affected platitudes, but innate and genuine; but also not tested by the potential of wealth, so you didn't really know how firmly held it was.)
Culturally, today, I seem to be closer than him to my early impression of early Internet people. (Though I changed my mind about trying to first become a professor and then do research commercial spinouts, rather than to grab the initial dotcom boom money right away. So I'd like a do-over.)
I don't know why he culturally seemed to go into the direction of libertarian manifestos and questionable crypto pumping.
Maybe he has in mind a version of OG Internet values, or some other vision, and he's trying to amass more wealth and power to make it happen?
There have been a few OG hackers in the VC space who you might have assumed would go one way if they had money, but then went a different way. Were they actually always like that? Did they learn something that changed how they think about the world? Were they changed by money/power circles, sycophants, or drugs? Did their business take on a life of its own, naturally maximizing profit, and they were just along for the ride?