Marc L. Andreessen | |
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Andreessen at the Tech Crunch40 conference, in 2007. |
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Born | July 9, 1971 Cedar Falls, Iowa |
Nationality | United States |
Alma mater | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign |
Known for | Mosaic, founder of Netscape Board Member of Facebook |
Net worth | US$253 million (2004)[1] |
Marc Andreessen ( /忙n藞dri藧s扫n/ an-dree-s蓹n; born July 9, 1971) is an American entrepreneur, investor, software engineer, and multi-millionaire best known as co-author of Mosaic, the first widely-used web browser, and co-founder of Netscape Communications Corporation.[2] He founded and later sold the software company Opsware to Hewlett-Packard. He is also a co-founder of Ning, a company which provides a platform for social-networking websites. He sits on the board of directors of Facebook,[3] eBay,[4] and HP,[5] among others. Andreessen is a frequent keynote speaker and guest at Silicon Valley conferences. He is one of only six inductees in the World Wide Web Hall of Fame announced at the first international conference on the World Wide Web in 1994.[6][7]
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Andreessen was born in Cedar Falls, Iowa, and raised in New Lisbon, Wisconsin.[8] 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. [9]
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 [10] 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[11][12] and other publications,[13] 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. The same year, he was named to the MIT Technology Review TR100 as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35.[14]
Andreessen left Netscape 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.
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Andreessen co-founded Ning[15] 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.[16]
He serves on the board of Facebook,[2] eBay, Kno, Hewlett-Packard, Bump, TinyCo, and Mixed Media Labs.[17] Before it went defunct, he was on the board of 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.[18] On September 1, 2009, an investor group including Andreessen Horowitz acquired a majority stake in Skype Limited.[19] In 2010, an investor group including Andreessen Horowitz invested $46 million into Kno, Inc., a digital education platform company.
Andreessen married Laura Arrillaga in 2006.[20] 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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