James H. Clark

James Henry Clark (born March 23, 1944) is an American entrepreneur and computer scientist who founded several major Silicon Valley companies: Silicon Graphics, Netscape, myCFO, and Healtheon. His computer graphics research led to systems that quickly render three-dimensional images. In 1998, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for his graphics work and technical leadership in computing.

Clark was born in Plainview, Texas. He left high school at 16 and served four years in the U.S. Navy, where he learned about electronics. He took night classes at Tulane University’s University College, earning enough credits to enter the University of New Orleans despite lacking a diploma. There he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in physics, then a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Utah in 1974.

After his doctorate, Clark worked at the New York Institute of Technology’s Computer Graphics Lab but was fired for insubordination. He was an assistant professor at UC Santa Cruz from 1974 to 1978, then an associate professor of electrical engineering at Stanford from 1979 to 1982. His research focused on geometry pipelines—specialized hardware or software that speeds up 3-D image display. In 1979, with Stanford students, he developed the Geometry Engine, an early hardware accelerator for rendering images from geometric models.

In 1982, Clark and several Stanford graduate students founded Silicon Graphics (SGI). Its earliest workstations were primarily terminals, then standalone Unix machines with fast graphics hardware. By the mid-1980s, SGI switched from Motorola 68000 chips to MIPS CPUs. By 1991, SGI led the world in Hollywood visual effects and 3-D imaging, targeting the high-end market with premium hardware and software. Clark disagreed with management on the company’s future and left in January 1994.

In February 1994, Clark sought out Marc Andreessen, who had led development of the Mosaic web browser at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. They founded Netscape and created the Netscape Navigator browser. Netscape’s founding and its August 1995 IPO sparked the mid-to-late-1990s Internet boom on Wall Street. Clark invested $4 million in 1994 and exited with $1.2 billion when AOL bought Netscape in 1999.

In 1995, Clark became interested in streamlining healthcare paperwork. He founded Healtheon in early 1996 with backing from Kleiner Perkins and New Enterprise Associates. Though his original goal of eliminating medical bureaucracy was ambitious, the company succeeded in administrative streamlining of medical records. An Atlanta startup called WebMD, focused on medical content, had Microsoft’s financial backing. Clark merged Healtheon with WebMD to form WebMD Corporation (NASDAQ: WBMD), now a leader in online health information.

In 1999, Clark launched myCFO, a company managing fortunes for wealthy Silicon Valley individuals. In late 2002, while he was on the board, most of myCFO’s operations were sold to Harris Bank and now operate as Harris myCFO. Clark was chairman and backer of network-security startup Neoteris, founded in 2000, later acquired by NetScreen and then Juniper Networks. He was a founding director and investor in DNA Sciences, founded in 1998 to study genetics of common diseases using Internet-recruited volunteers; it was acquired by Genaissance Pharmaceuticals in 2003. Clark was the subject of Michael Lewis’s 1999 bestseller *The New New Thing*. He invested in Kibu.com, a teen-focused website that raised about $22 million but shut down in 2000, returning remaining capital to investors. Clark co-produced the 2009 film *The Cove*, funding covert high-tech camera and sound equipment used to capture footage of dolphin slaughter in Taiji, Japan. He sits on the board and is a primary investor in Ibotta, a mobile technology company that went public in April 2024. In 2017, he launched CommandScape, a cybersecurity-focused building management platform. In 2020, he announced a $30 million Series A round for Beyond Identity, a phone-based authentication solution that eliminates passwords.

Clark received the ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award.