Success Quote by Jim Barksdale

Growth, here, isn’t framed as a lucky break or a visionary master plan; it’s treated as an operational consequence of living inside your own tools. Barksdale’s line lands because it quietly demotes the usual Silicon Valley hero narrative and replaces it with something more pragmatic: discipline. “We use our products” is a simple clause with a big corporate dare embedded in it. If you can’t run your own company on what you sell, you don’t have a product yet - you have a demo.

The context matters. Netscape wasn’t just scaling; it was doing it under the hot lights of the early commercial internet, when software shipped fast, broke fast, and got judged in public. In that environment, “spread around the world” isn’t a victory lap so much as a problem statement: coordination, communication, and speed become existential. By tying Netscape’s growth to internal usage, Barksdale positions product quality as inseparable from organizational muscle. Dogfooding becomes a management philosophy: shorten feedback loops, force accountability, make engineering feel the friction firsthand.

The subtext is also competitive. He’s hinting that rivals can buy marketing, hire talent, and promise roadmaps, but they can’t fake the daily reality of a product that’s robust enough to carry a global organization. It’s a statement about trust - not as a brand value, but as an internal habit that leaks outward. When your own company depends on the thing, the customer can sense it.