Netscape IPO
Netscape Communications went public on August 9, 1995. The offering price had been raised from $14 to $28 the day before. It opened at $71 and closed at $58.25. The day-one return was 108 percent. The company had no profits, was eighteen months old, and was giving its main product away for free. Morgan Stanley took it public anyway. The IPO is conventionally cited as the moment the internet became visible to mainstream finance — the moment retail investors began to look for the next browser, then the next portal, then the next search engine. Pets.com, Webvan, and the entire 1999–2000 mania trace directly to this day.
Marc Andreessen had written the original code for Mosaic, the first popular browser, as a 21-year-old at the University of Illinois. Jim Clark, who had founded Silicon Graphics, recruited him in 1994 to build a commercial browser. The Netscape IPO made Andreessen a paper billionaire at 24 and demonstrated that browser-software companies could be valued like media companies, not like utilities. The valuation framework that followed was the bubble.
04 · Internet & Early Social
Message boards, blogs, early Twitter democratized financial commentary. Anyone with an audience could move a market. The pump-and-dump went digital.
Read the full era →