Background
James Clark was born on March 23, 1944, in Plainview, Texas.
201 Presidents Circle Salt Lake City, UT 84112, United States
Clark received a Ph.D in computer science from the University of Utah in 1974.
2000 Lakeshore Drive New Orleans, LA 70148, United States
Clark studied at the University of New Orleans, where he earned his bachelor's and a master's degrees in physics.
2000 Lakeshore Drive New Orleans, LA 70148, United States
Clark studied at the University of New Orleans, where he earned his bachelor's and a master's degrees in physics.
201 Presidents Circle Salt Lake City, UT 84112, United States
Clark received a Ph.D in computer science from the University of Utah in 1974.
https://www.amazon.com/NETSCAPE-COMMUNICATIONS-CORPORATION-Annual-Report/dp/B00U49UD6S/?tag=2022091-20
James Clark was born on March 23, 1944, in Plainview, Texas.
Clark studied at the University of New Orleans. There, Clark earned his bachelor's and a master's degrees in physics, followed by a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Utah in 1974.
After completing his Ph.D., Clark worked at NYIT's Computer Graphics Lab, serving as an assistant professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz from 1974 to 1978, and then as an associate professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University from 1979 to 1982. Clark's research work concerned geometry pipelines, specialized software or hardware that accelerates the display of three-dimensional images. The zenith of his group's advancements was the Geometry Engine, an early hardware accelerator for rendering computer images based on geometric models which he developed in 1979 with his students at Stanford.
In 1982, Jim Clark along with several Stanford graduate students founded Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI). The earliest Silicon Graphics graphical workstations were mainly terminals, but they were soon followed by stand-alone graphical Unix workstations with very fast graphics rendering hardware. In the mid-1980s, Silicon Graphics began to use the MIPS CPU as the foundation of their newest workstations, replacing the Motorola 68000.
In 1993, Clark met Marc Andreessen who had led the development of Mosaic, the first widely distributed and easy-to-use software for browsing the World Wide Web, while employed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). The next year, Clark and Andreessen founded Netscape.
While he was chairman at SGI, Clark was badly injured in a motorcycle accident that required physical therapy and frequent trips to the hospital. During these visits, he was struck by the bureaucratic and inefficient nature of the health-care system, especially the redundant forms and paperwork that doctors, hospitals, and insurers all filled out by hand and exchanged by mail or fax machine. Given the sheer size of the health-care industry - as large as $1.5 trillion, according to some analysts - Clark immediately recognized a business opportunity to streamline and automate all of the paperwork, making the system work more efficiently.
The enormous wealth he amassed from Netscape offered Clark the chance to put his next idea to the test. In 1996, only months after Netscape became a public company, Clark founded Healthscape, which was later renamed Healtheon. More than SGI and even Netscape, Healtheon symbolized Clark's fascination for big ideas and his willingness to follow his instincts into uncharted territory. Neither Clark nor his newly hired engineers understood the U.S. health-care system and its complicated network of doctors, patients, hospitals, and insurers. But the idea of a company at the center of this vast network, using technology and the Internet to streamline and facilitate transactions, made sense. It was a powerful idea, and best of all it was Jim Clark's idea, which meant to many that it had to be a success. As such, the venture capital firms shut out of Netscape came clamoring for a piece of the action. Like SGI and Netscape, Healtheon attracted plenty of investors during the Internet boom years, and it achieved a market capitalization of more than one billion dollars. Thus, Jim Clark became the first entrepreneur to create three different multibillion-dollar technology companies.
SGI, Netscape, and Healtheon all fell on hard times. With the growth of the personal-computing industry, as Clark foresaw, SGI no longer dominated high-end computing. Netscape fell victim to Microsoft's dominance - again, as Clark anticipated - and was purchased by AOL in 1999. Healtheon failed to attract the numbers of doctors, hospitals, and insurers that Clark and others had expected; it merged with WebMD in 1999 and became more of a health-information portal than the central clearinghouse for all health-care transactions that Clark had envisioned. Clark abruptly resigned as chairman of the company in 2000. MyCFO, another company Clark founded in 1999, was sold to Harris Private Bank in 2002.
Clark was chairman and financial backer of network-security startup Neoteris, founded in 2000, which was acquired by NetScreen in 2003 and subsequently by Juniper Networks.
Clark was a founding director and investor in the biotechnology company DNA Sciences, founded in 1998 to unravel the genetics of common disease using volunteers recruited from the Internet launched August 1, 2000 (see The New York Times). In 2003, the company was acquired by Genaissance Pharmaceuticals Inc. The same year, he turned to real-estate development, forming Hyperion Development Group in Miami, Florida, with his longtime friend Tom Jermoluk, the former CEO of Excite@Home.
Nowadays Clark sits on the board and is one of the primary investors in the consumer facing mobile technology company Ibotta. Clark also sits on the board of IEX: The Investors Exchange IEX.
Jim Clark is best known as the highly successful entrepreneurial innovator and founder of such notable Silicon Valley technology companies as Silicon Graphics, Inc., Netscape Communications Corporation, myCFO, and Healtheon.
Clark is widely known by his peers as an individual with an uncanny knack to predict business trends. An early example of this is his first business start-up, Silicon Graphics Incorporated. Here Clark strove to develop the unheard-of concept of powerful standalone computer workstations while slow-moving, behemoth businesses, such as IBM were still focusing their attention on mainframe supercomputers.
Clark was the main subject of the 1999 bestseller The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story by United States author Michael Lewis.
Clark co-produced the 2009 movie The Cove. His funding made possible the purchase and covert installation of some high-tech camera and sound-recording equipment required to capture the film's climactic dolphin slaughter. The film addresses the problem of whale and dolphin killing in Taiji, Wakayama, Japan.
Quotations: "Set out to build a longlasting company. Focus on the market, not the technology…. Use the IPO to raise money, not make money. If you want to build a longlasting, successful company, you'll have to do that. If you want to get quick riches, you won't have a successful company."
When not guiding the future of Netscape or Healtheon, Clark can often be found sailing, flying various personal aircraft, or consulting with designers on his latest personal project, a $30 million computerized yacht named Hyperion.
Clark has been married four times. His third wife was Nancy Rutter, a Forbes journalist. They divorced and soon afterward he began dating Australian model Kristy Hinze, 36 years his junior. Hinze became his fourth wife when they married in the British Virgin Islands on March 22, 2009. She gave birth to a daughter, Dylan Vivienne in September 2011, and later, Harper Hazelle, in August 2013.
