Success Quote by Jim Barksdale

Careerism dressed as civic virtue: Barksdale frames ambition as public service, a neat rhetorical move from a businessman whose legend was forged in the turbocharged 1990s. The line is built on two flattering promises. "Fast-growing" signals that he’s been close to the action, where market share and urgency confer status. "Improve the way business gets done" wraps that status in a purpose narrative, implying that growth isn’t just profitable, it’s progressive.

The subtext is a familiar Silicon Valley-adjacent creed before the label fully stuck: disruption as moral alibi. He’s not saying he likes risk, power, or outsized returns; he’s saying he likes efficiency, better systems, the removal of friction. That reframing matters because it makes success look inevitable and almost accidental, as if the companies simply grew because they deserved to. It’s also a quiet self-credentialing: if the firms “improve” business, then his judgment must be unusually clear, his leadership unusually modern.

Context sharpens the stakes. Barksdale ran Netscape, a company synonymous with the internet’s early promise that software could reorganize commerce and, by extension, society. In that era, “improving how business gets done” meant digitizing transactions, accelerating communication, and collapsing distance - changes that created whole new winners while rendering old jobs, norms, and competitors obsolete.

The quote’s efficiency is the point: it reads like a résumé line, but it’s really a worldview. Growth is treated as evidence, improvement as destiny, and business as the arena where history now happens.