CHAIRMAN, HEALTHEON CORPORATION / CHAIRMAN, NETSCAPE COMMUNICATIONS CORPORATION
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING, '79-'85

The Jim Clark story has reached another dramatic moment. Our professor-turned-entrepreneur protagonist has already stepped up to the plate and lofted two home runs-Silicon Graphics and Netscape-out of the computer industry ballpark. Now he's in the batter's box again. Can he go 3 for 3?

All the press box chatter-and there is plenty these days-rolls off Clark. Sipping a mineral water in the bright new offices of his third start-up, Healtheon Corporation in Palo Alto, the ghost of Mighty Casey is absent. Clark seems focused, low-key, relentlessly pragmatic.

"If I hadn't been successful with Netscape, everyone would have said I was lucky with Silicon Graphics," says Clark. "But because it was successful, they think I'm brilliant. In fact, I'm a pretty smart guy who was very lucky."

Clark says his success is really founded on a deep understanding of technology. In the case of Silicon Graphics, he says he understood how faster and cheaper integrated circuits would eventually allow powerful 3-D graphics computation on the desktop. This insight spurred him to design the first geometry engine for imaging workstations, leading to a revolution in computer graphics-from Hollywood special effects to aircraft design.

And with Netscape, Clark says he simply perceived sooner than most how digital data, audio, and video would eventually converge on the Internet rather than private networks. The result this time: commercialization of the standard interface for the World Wide Web-Netscape's Navigator browser-and an opening of the floodgates to on-line communication and commerce.

"The Internet was considered frivolous, academic, noncommercial, impractical for business before Marc Andreessen and I started Netscape," says Clark. "Everyone else was headed towards proprietary networks-AT&T, IBM, Microsoft. It was silly. It was like having five or six phone systems that didn't connect. We made the Internet a commercial reality. Some people call that vision," he muses. "I don't think it's vision. I think it's common sense. It's just logic applied to what I understood about the technology."

Vision or logic, timing or good mechanics. Whatever the cause, the silkiness of his swing and the loftiness of his two home runs are now Clark lore. But Clark says his business successes must also be attributed to the team-building skills he honed while teaching at Stanford from 1979 through 1985. It was during these years as Associate Professor of EE-while sharing a secretary with two other young professors named John Hennessy and Forest Baskett-that Clark developed the habit of surrounding himself with strong business-minded research teams. He cites the Stanford DARPA contract of the late 1970s as the project nucleus from which not only Silicon Graphics but also MIPS Computer Systems and Sun Microsystems were spun off.

"At Stanford, business is not a dirty word," says Clark, "it's always been part of the culture. I think the rest of the academic world is waking up to this."

In fact, both of Clark's major successes started with teams coming out of universities: Silicon Graphics from Stanford in 1981 and Netscape from the University of Illinois in 1995. "There's no magic to this," says Clark. "You just need to get students focused and make sure they work well together towards a good market."

Having cut ties with Silicon Graphics about three years ago, Clark now splits his time between chairmanship duties for Netscape and his newest venture, Healtheon Corporation. Founded in June 1996 along with David Schnell, MD (Stanford BS and MA '82), and Pavan Nigam, Healtheon is attempting to do for health care information what Netscape did for the Internet and Web-standardize interfaces, simplify access, and reduce costs.

"Healtheon is an attempt to overhaul the communications infrastructure of the health care system," Clark says. "Ninety-five percent of your personal contact with the health care system has nothing at all to do with getting health care. It's spent in getting appointments, finding information, checking up on lab results. Our objective is to replace these inefficient interactions with electronic transactions."

With a growing suite of software tools, Clark says that Healtheon can help streamline all the paperwork that currently frustrates providers, insurers, employers, and patients alike. According to Clark, administrative costs now account for a fifth of the trillion dollars spent on health care annually. "We're trying to save a couple percent of that 200 billion dollars," he says.

But even as the media spotlight shines on Healtheon, Clark is looking ahead. With Silicon Graphics now employing well over 10,000, Netscape over 1,000, and Healtheon rapidly approaching 100, it seems natural to ask Clark about the new team of nine, plus himself, he must be fielding somewhere in the Silicon Valley.

He pauses, amused momentarily by the slim logic behind the question. Well, yes, as a matter of fact, he does have a small group working on the germ of an idea... "It's something related to home multimedia, consumer entertainment, and some personal interests of mine like sailing," he says. "It's really only three people right now, but we're hiring a few more...".