If You Can Make It in Silicon Valley, You Can Make It . . . in Silicon Valley Again
By GARY RIVLIN
New York Times Magazine
One evening this spring, Marc Andreessen, the first outsize icon of the Internet era, caught a glimpse of his former life while mingling at the San Francisco launch party for Current, Al Gore’s new 24-hour cable station. In 1994, when Andreessen was only 22, he and a high-tech veteran named Jim Clark created the Internet-browser company Netscape Communications. Two years later, there he was on the cover of Time, sitting barefoot on a golden throne, dressed in jeans and a rumpled black polo. The magazine cast him as the king of the ‘’golden geeks,'’ a group that popularized the formerly novel notion of surfing the Web and, not incidentally, helped create a vision of Silicon Valley as a glittering gold field where the young, bright and vigorous could stake a claim and make themselves unimaginably wealthy before they even had the time to put up posters in their barely furnished apartments.
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