We tell the truth even if it hurts. When talking to an entrepreneur, an LP [limited partner], a partner, or each other, we strive to tell the truth. … - Ben Horowitz

I let Marc open the conversation, because despite consistently being the smartest person in the room and possibly the world, Marc is so humble that he never believes that other people think he is smart, which makes him sensitive to being ignored.

The overwhelming favorites to dominate the race to become the so-called Information Superhighway were competing proprietary technologies from industry powerhouses such as Oracle and Microsoft. Their stories captured the imagination of the business press. This was not so illogical, since most companies didn’t even run TCP/IP (the software foundation for the Internet) — they ran proprietary networking protocols such as AppleTalk, NetBIOS, and SNA. As late as November 1995, Bill Gates wrote a book titled The Road Ahead, in which he predicted that the Information Superhighway — a network connecting all businesses and consumers in a world of frictionless commerce — would be the logical successor to the Internet and would rule the future. Gates later went back and changed references from the Information Superhighway to the Internet, but that was not his original vision. The implications of this proprietary vision were not good for business or for consumers. In the minds of visionaries like Bill Gates and Larry Ellison, the corporations that owned the Information Superhighway would tax every transaction by charging a “vigorish,” as Microsoft’s then–chief technology officer, Nathan Myhrvold, referred to it. It’s difficult to overstate the momentum that the proprietary Information Superhighway carried. After Mosaic, even Marc and his cofounder, Jim Clark, originally planned a business for video distribution to run on top of the proprietary Information Superhighway, not the Internet. It wasn’t until deep into the planning process that they decided that by improving the browser to make it secure, more functional, and easier to use, they could make the Internet the network of the future. And that became the mission of Netscape — a mission that they would gloriously accomplish.

A lot of companies think their employees are so smart that they require no training. That’s silly. When I first became a manager, I had mixed feelings about training. Logically, training for high-tech companies made sense, but my personal experience with training programs at the companies where I had worked was underwhelming. The courses were taught by outside firms who didn’t really understand our business and were teaching things that weren’t relevant. Then I read chapter 16 of Andy Grove’s management classic, High Output Management, titled “Why Training Is the Boss’s Job,” and it changed my career. Grove wrote, “Most managers seem to feel that training employees is a job that should be left to others. I, on the other hand, strongly believe that the manager should do it himself.