Success Quote by Steve Crocker

Startups love to mythologize origin stories, but Steve Crocker gives you the unvarnished infrastructure version: a handful of people, a homemade name, and growth measured not in valuations but in headcount and coordination. The phrase "we called ourselves" carries the tell. The Network Working Group wasn’t an institution anointed from above; it was a self-assembly, a temporary flag planted by practitioners who needed a way to talk, decide, and keep moving. Naming is power here, but it’s also modesty: not a committee, not a board, just a working group. The title implies motion over authority.

The numbers do quiet rhetorical work. "6 to 10" is fuzzy, almost casual, suggesting how informal and porous the boundary was at the start. Then comes the rapid escalation to 30 and 50, delivered with the plain cadence of engineering progress. Crocker frames growth as inevitability, not conquest. That’s the subtext of early internet culture: scale arrives because the problem is real, the need is shared, and participation is open.

Context matters. Crocker is a key ARPANET figure and the driving force behind the RFC process, a system built on iterative, public-ish drafts rather than polished decrees. This quote echoes that ethic: legitimacy comes from doing the work and inviting others into it. It’s a reminder that the internet’s foundational politics were procedural. Before there were platforms policing speech, there were small groups inventing rules for interoperability, discovering that governance is what happens when a network starts attracting people faster than anyone can manage alone.