Meet the magic man behind the Web's brightest ideas

From...

May 4, 2000
Web posted at: 8:59 a.m. EDT (1259 GMT)

by Dan Goodin

(IDG) -- Jim Clark knows the recipe for online success: bold ideas, top-flight talent -- and a sprinkle of Internet pixie dust.

As a Stanford engineering professor in 1982, he founded Silicon Graphics to prove wrong all the people who had ever doubted him -- including the principal who kicked him out of high school and the Navy officers who threw plates of food on the floor just to watch him clean up the mess. In 1994 he launched Netscape Communications -- which he later sold to AOL for some $10 billion -- in part to settle a score with the venture capitalists and executives he thought had cheated him out of his due at Silicon Graphics. Clark later founded Healtheon, now worth $2.5 billion, and myCFO.com, which has amassed $30 billion in client wealth, out of personal frustration with shortcomings in the health care system and the financial-services market.

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Clark, 56, is a serial entrepreneur with the Midas touch. The first three companies he started all have market caps over $1 billion. He succeeds by having bold ideas, attracting top-flight talent -- and knowing when to get out of the way. Recently Clark has been investing in companies whose management teams he admires and whose business plans focus on markets big enough to capture his attention. Among the firms in which Clark has taken a major stake: Shutterfly, a Web site that prints pictures taken with digital cameras; SmartPipes, a company that provides advanced networking for Web businesses; and Kibu, a site for teenage girls.

Clark is so emblematic of the new economy that when Michael Lewis set out to write a book about Silicon Valley, he ended up profiling Clark, whom Lewis calls not so much a businessman as a "conceptual artist." In fact, Clark's success has created a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy: new businesses to which he's connected take off precisely because he's connected to them. Around the Valley, VCs, entrepreneurs and prospective employees see Clark's involvement with a firm -- as founder or funder -- as a stamp of success.

"His name carries such Internet pixie dust," says Quincy Smith, a partner at the Barksdale Group, which invested in myCFO and also has equity in Shutterfly rival Ofoto. "He identifies what businesses are going to be quickly turned upside down by the Net."

Clark is accustomed to such adulation but insists he's not comfortable being called a visionary. "I don't feel like Chauncey Gardiner," he says, referring to the simpleton-genius of the 1979 movie Being There, "but there is an element of, 'Why me?'"

After launching the information age (Netscape) and picking a fight with the $1.5 trillion health care system (Healtheon), Clark is thinking a bit smaller. "It's pretty hard to build a broad Internet company now," he says. "I don't have any burning ideas."

But the famously cantankerous ex-professor may yet deliver another billion-dollar scheme. "The probability is," he says, "that I'll get frustrated about something and start a company."

Friends and family help Healtheon's stock
(The Industry Standard)
Let's make a Net health care deal
(The Industry Standard)
Healtheon/WebMD and CVS unite
(Computerworld)
Sun-Netscape introduce portal platform
(InfoWorld)
Netscape browser nears beta
(PC World)
Netscape 6 hopes less is more
(PC World)
First look: Netscape 6's new interface
(MacWorld)
MyCFO attracts top talent
(The Industry Standard)

Silicon Graphics
Netscape
Healtheon
myCFO.COM

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