After Netscape, Sonoma County man shifts to fish farming, restaurants, food waste
How did Bill Foss of Windsor - a successful Internet entrepreneur who co-founded Netscape Communications - end up as a North Bay restaurateur, fish farmer and advocate for sustainable food systems?
It all goes back to his childhood, and a fond memory he harbors of standing on an ocean pier with a fishing rod in his hands.
“Dad and I always loved fishing,” said Foss, still youthful looking at 52. “I have great memories of going to the Santa Cruz pier to fish with my dad and getting chowder in a Styrofoam cup with oyster crackers. What kid doesn’t like oyster crackers?”
He’s now chin deep in enterprises that include the Kenwood Restaurant, Fish restaurant in Sausalito, a fish farm, a fish feed company and a novel new way to process food waste.
Foss was born and raised in Los Gatos to a Norwegian dad and a Scottish mom, but did not really fall in love with food until his friend, Netscape co-founder Jim Clark, took him to Italy on business trips. There he was introduced to the romantic world of leisurely, mid-day meals and dinners that last all night.
“I was raised in a food vacuum ... in the ’70s and ’80s, it took forever for food to reach the South Bay,” he said. “Jim has a love for French wines, Cuban cigars and food. So I was 28 and having the most amazing, ethereal experiences of my life. It was like finding a passion you never knew you had.”
Meanwhile, Netscape produced a stock frenzy on Wall Street, creating a gold rush among public investors unprecedented in Northern California since the dusty days of 1849.
“In 1996, it IPO’d well,” Foss said. “We had sales and profit to match it.”
Best known for its then-dominant web browser Netscape Navigator, the company was sold to AOL in 1999 for $4.2 billion. By then, Foss had become disillusioned by his experience at the Internet company, which had changed from a struggling start-up into something less palatable to his personal values.
“It started off as a bundle of energy, and it turned into a Greek tragedy,” he said. “It was an animal that needed to be fed. Sometimes profit isn’t the only measure of success.”
Although he went on to create other Internet companies - most notably Global Crossing, a hosting company that helped companies such as Yahoo get their start - Foss decided to leave Silicon Valley after the bubble burst in 2001.
“I was 36, and I decided the valley had changed,” he said. “There were a lot of empty buildings, and it looked like the end of civilization.”
So Foss started looking for a new endeavor in which he would not have to compromise his principles. Although his sense of humor tends to be cynical and sardonic, he harbors a softer side that feeds upon optimism and a sense of justice.
“I think everything does have a solution,” he said. “I like the idea that as human beings, we can choose to do the right thing without there being a reason.”
At first, Foss followed his dream and lived in Italy, but eventually he settled in Sausalito. He heard it was a nice little village with steps going up and down the hillsides, just like many of the Italian towns he loved.
Fishing boat
He purchased a sport fishing boat, which steered him to Caruso’s in the Clipper Yacht Harbor, an old-time bait and fishing gear store with a deli counter. He got talking to the owner, who wanted to sell it, and ended up buying it with a business partner, commercial fisherman Kenny Belov.
After extensive renovations, the partners reopened the old Caruso’s in 2004 as Fish, a restaurant that serves only pristine, fresh seafood, all caught according to sustainable guidelines. In other words, forget eating farmed salmon. If they don’t have wild salmon, you won’t find it on the menu.
“Fish was the first restaurant to work with the Monterey Bay Aquarium on sustainable fish,” Foss said. “It’s a family-friendly spot, and there are dogs and kids and people sharing tables.”
After putting sustainable fish at the heart of the business, the partners opened their own nonprofit next door - Fish or Cut Bait (focb.org) - offering ocean education that attempts to separate fact from fiction in the sustainability world.
In 2009, Belov and Foss also founded TwoXSea, a sustainable seafood purveyor in San Francisco. Since then, the pair have become some of the planet’s most strident advocates for sustainable seafood.
For Foss, the key is understanding how many of the ocean’s problems are tied together through climate change.
“It’s not hard to solve, but it requires some common sense,” he said. “We need to rethink what we take for granted.”
As an example, he pointed to this year’s dismal Dungeness crab season, which was postponed due to a toxin (domoic acid) found in the crabs, as well as to the disappointing yields of this year’s salmon season, the cumulative effect of four years of drought. Both problems can be traced to climate.
