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The 23-year-old who made the Internet usable
ALSO: on turning your team into shareholders and what we give people credit for at work
Tobias Günther
March 06, 2025 • Reading Time: 7 minutes
In 1992, the internet consisted of just 26 websites. By 1995, that number had exploded to over 23,000.
What had happened to fuel this massive growth in just three years?
Today, of course, we're used to the idea of the internet growing and growing. But back in 1992, you wouldn’t have bet your money on this idea — because the internet, quite frankly, was not a sexy product. There was hardly anything to read, watch, or do… and the few existing websites were aimed at researchers and techies.
A Young Programmer with a Bold Vision
Nonetheless, a young programmer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) realized its potential. Marc Andreessen understood that it could become a mass-market phenomenon. And he also understood what was necessary to take it there.
Andreessen and his co-developer Eric Bina set out to create “Mosaic,” a user-friendly graphical interface for the web. At the time, accessing the internet required entering text-based commands into a black window — much too complex for all but the most technical users!
Andreessen’s vision was to integrate graphics, simplify navigation, and make the browser accessible to non-technical users — all of which were revolutionary concepts back then.
The Challenges of Building Mosaic
The technical challenges to make this real were daunting. But Andreessen faced another kind of obstacle: the rapid innovation he was pushing for didn’t always sit well with the academic environment he was in. For example, when he decided to implement embedded images in Mosaic before it became an official web standard.
But he and Bina pushed through. Finally, on January 23, 1993, Mosaic saw its first public release.
Why Mosaic Changed Everything
Mosaic was able to display images inline, embedded directly into a web page. It had forward and back buttons. It allowed you to create bookmarks. And it was the first browser that could submit forms to a server.
Today, of course, features like these don’t make anyone’s heart beat faster. But imagine not having them. Imagine having to navigate the web through a clunky, text-based terminal. These features were crucial in making the web accessible to a wider audience.
From Academic Experiment to Global Phenomenon
But innovation doesn’t guarantee success. Andreessen knew this:
“Mosaic was a renegade academic research project. We had extremely low expectations.”
But then it took off. Mosaic took the world by storm, with over two million downloads within its first year.
———
Andreessen went on to commercialize the technology by creating “Netscape Navigator,” one of the browsers that fueled the next growth phase of the internet. Today, after co-founding VC firm “a16z” in 2009, he’s one of the most successful tech investors in the world.
What’s so fascinating about Andreessen’s story is that he didn’t come up with “the big invention.” Tim Berners-Lee already did that for him. But Andreessen’s contribution was big in a different way: he was the one who finally made it usable — bringing it to millions and then billions of people.
Insights From the Community
 Bastian Allgeier, CEO at Kirby CMS | What was a pivotal moment where your business made a big leap forward? 💬 When the Kirby team turned into shareholders in our new company. The feeling of owning the company together as a team had a big, positive impact on me. |
Visual Thinking
Stats & Studies
📊 49% — A study by Michael Freeman found that 49% of entrepreneurs have a personal history with mental health. They reported experiencing more depression (30%), ADHD (29%), substance use (12%), and bipolar disorder (11%) than comparison participants.
Food for Thought
Odell Mitchell III discusses the importance of psychological safety. Research shows that safety cultivates engaged teams who are more profitable. 💬 Engaged teams are 21% more profitable for their companies, and an overwhelming 96% of employees want empathetic bosses and managers creating safe and inclusive places to work.
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Professor and author Gloria Mark talks about how our modern workplaces — and the overwhelm they often create — might be a driver of burnout: 💬 Before email, communications were a lot slower. There were phone calls, there were written communications. But now people have an additional workload on top of their other workload, which is answering Slack messages, texting, email. In fact, we find people check email on average 77 times a day — which is quite a lot.
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Radical Candor | In “Radical Candor”, Kim Scott reminds us that how we treat our colleagues creates a ripple effect in the whole organization: 💬 If you lead a big organization, you can’t have a relationship with everybody. But the relationships you have with your direct reports will impact the relationships they have with their direct reports. The ripple effect will go a long way toward creating—or destroying—a positive culture. Relationships may not scale, but culture does.
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