What makes a company successful? To find out, I spent four years interviewing company founders who had successfully launched, grown and later sold companies for $100 million or more, or gone public for $300 million or more.
Robert Jordan
In the course of my interviews, I heard some surprising things about boards—good, bad and indifferent. The biggest success story was one entrepreneur’s account of the creation of what became Internet Explorer (IE), Microsoft’s web browser that can be found on hundreds of millions of computers worldwide.
The story starts with Tim Krauskopf, co-founder of Spyglass, who set out to create graphics applications. Spyglass had been successful in attracting a smart team and venture capital from Greylock Partners. Unbeknownst to Spyglass, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois had just developed something called a web browser, and called their application Mosaic. All this caught the eye of Bill Kaiser, partner at Greylock and Spyglass board member. Bill thought Tim should take a look at Mosaic, but Tim wasn’t having any of it. As he said at the time, “We’re working on scientific imaging applications and networking software is too hard. I don’t think we can do it.”
Lucky for Tim, Bill convinced the Spyglass team that they could do it. So they licensed Mosaic from NCSA and became their commercial partner bringing Mosaic to market. Tim picks up the story in How They Did It: “We licensed Mosaic to nearly 100 companies, but the only one anybody remembers is Microsoft. The Spyglass version of Mosaic became Internet Explorer.”
From that point on it was relatively smooth sailing, despite the internet bubble. Spyglass was the first Internet software company to go public, in 1995, a month before Netscape. OpenTV bought Spyglass in 2000 for $2.5 billion.
I could make the argument that the starting point for all the value created at Spyglass stems from one board member’s vision, determination and gentle prodding to convince a team that they could exceed their own limitations. For board members serving as directors of early stage companies, here’s my advice: go ahead, push. The entrepreneur you are backing can handle it.
Robert Jordan has been launching and growing companies and helping other entrepreneurs do the same for the past 20 years. He is the author of How They Did It: Billion Dollar Insights from the Heart of America (RedFlash Press).