Early life and education
Andreessen (pronounced ann-DREES-sen) was born in Cedar Falls, Iowa,
and raised in New Lisbon, Wisconsin.
He received his Bachelor's degree in computer science from the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. As an undergraduate, he
interned one summer at IBM in Austin, Texas, United States. He also
worked at the university's National Center for Supercomputing
Applications (NCSA), where he became familiar with Tim Berners-Lee's
open standards for the World Wide Web. Andreessen and a full-time
salaried co-worker Eric Bina worked on creating a user-friendly browser
with integrated graphics that would work on a wide range of computers.
The resulting code was the Mosaic web browser.
"In the Web's first generation, Tim Berners-Lee launched the
Uniform Resource Locator (URL), Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP),
and HTML standards with prototype Unix-based servers and browsers. A
few people noticed that the Web might be better than Gopher. In the
second generation, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina developed NCSA
Mosaic at the University of Illinois. Several million then suddenly
noticed that the Web might be better than sex. In the third
generation, Andreessen and Bina left NCSA to found Netscape..."
Bob Metcalfe, InfoWorld, August 21, 1995, Vol. 17, Issue 34.
Netscape
After his graduation from the university in 1993, Andreessen moved to
California to work at Enterprise Integration Technologies. Andreessen
then met with Jim Clark, the recently departed founder of Silicon
Graphics. Clark believed that the Mosaic browser had great commercial
possibilities and suggested starting an Internet software company. Soon
Mosaic Communications Corporation was in business in Mountain View,
California, with Andreessen as cofounder and vice president of
technology. The University of Illinois was unhappy with the company's
use of the Mosaic name, so Mosaic Communications changed its name to
Netscape Communications, and its flagship web browser was the Netscape
Navigator.
In the year between the formation of the company and its IPO,
Andreessen engaged in extensive public outreach on behalf of his vision
of the web browser's potential, something he had in fact done
continuously since making the decision to distribute Mosaic for free via
the Internet.
One of these events, hosted by Internet commercialization pioneer Ken
McCarthy, was captured on video and provides a unique look at the state
of the web between the time Andreessen and his colleagues launched
Mosaic and the time when web browsers and servers became mainstream
commercial products. At the time of the recording, Andreessen was 23
years old.
Netscape's IPO in 1995 propelled Andreessen into the public's
imagination. Featured on the cover of Time
and other publications, Andreessen became the poster-boy
wunderkind of the Internet bubble generation: young, twenty-something,
high-tech, ambitious, and worth millions (or billions) of dollars
practically overnight.
Netscape's success attracted the attention of Microsoft, which
recognized the web's potential and wanted to put itself at the forefront
of the rising Internet revolution. Microsoft licensed the Mosaic source
code from Spyglass, Inc., an offshoot of the University of Illinois, and
turned it into Internet Explorer. The resulting battle between the two
companies became known as the Browser Wars.
Netscape was acquired in 1999 for $4.2 billion by AOL, which made
Andreessen its Chief Technology Officer.
Loudcloud
However, he would soon leave to form Loudcloud, a services-based Web
hosting company that made an IPO in 2001. Loudcloud sold its hosting
business to EDS and changed its name to Opsware in 2003, where
Andreessen served as chairman. Opsware was purchased by Hewlett-Packard
in September 2007 for approximately $1.6 billion.
Current ventures
Andreessen co-founded Ning and is an investor in social news website
Digg and several other early-stage technology startups, like Plazes,
Netvibes, CastTV and Twitter. His latest project is the RockMelt browser
launched in 2010.
He serves on the board of Facebook, eBay, Kno, Hewlett-Packard, and
Open Media Network, a combined Kontiki (VeriSign) client and media
player, launched in 2005.
On July 5, 2009, Andreessen announced along with his longtime
business partner Ben Horowitz, the formation of their venture capital
firm, Andreessen Horowitz, aimed purely at investing in the best new
entrepreneurs, products, and companies in the information technology
industry. He is currently working on a new web browser, RockMelt. On
September 1, 2009, an investor group including Andreessen Horowitz
acquired a majority stake in Skype Limited. In 2010, an investor group
including Andreessen Horowitz invested $46 million into Kno, Inc., a
digital education platform company.
Personal
life
Andreessen married Laura Arrillaga in 2006. She is the founder of the
Silicon Valley Social Venture Fund,and the daughter of Silicon Valley
real estate billionaire John Arrillaga.
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