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Marc Andreessen
Marc Lowell Andreessen is an American entrepreneur, investor and software engineer. He is co-founder and general partner of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz in Silicon Valley. He sits on the board of Facebook, eBay, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
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Early years
Marc Andreessen was born on 9 July 1971 in Cedar Falls, Iowa and raised in New Lisbon, Wisconsin. In 1993, he received a bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He interned at IBM in Austin, Texas. After graduating from UIUC in 1993, he moved to California because he was hired by Enterprise Integration Technologies.
First steps in the career
Mosaic Communications Corporation was in the business in Mountain View, California, with Andreessen as co-founder and vice president of technology. He succeeded with the help of his friend Jim Clark, who founded Silicon Graphics and Mosaic Browser. Representatives of do not want to use Mosaic name so they did change this name to Netscape Navigator. Netscape made Andreessen popular and he featured on the cover of Time.
Andreessen was known for spending many hours at Netscape, but his leadership style was very different from that of his main rival, Microsoft. Andreessen stayed close to the programmers who worked for him and maintained a collegial, team-like atmosphere. He did not insist that his employees work long hours. In fact, he encouraged them to limit office hours to 50 per week. Characteristic of this team-oriented approach was Andreessen's decision to offer Netscape's browser code over the Internet to anyone who wanted it. His argument was that the feedback he received from other software developers could lead to new ideas for Netscape.
Netscape became part of AOL in 1999. It was bought for $ 4.2 billion. The same year Marc Andreessen founded a company together with Ben Horowitz, Tim Howes and In Sik Rhee. It was named LoudCloud and offered computer, hosting and software services to Internet and e-commerce companies that turn to consumers. The name was changed to Opsware in 2003. It was bought in 2007 at HP for $ 1.6 billion. Opsware was the first company to offer cloud hosting.
Partnership with Horowitz
Andreessen and Horowitz contributed some funds to Twitter at an early stage, turning them into really great investors.
In 2009, they founded the venture fund Andreessen Horowitz and invested in IT companies.
Private life
Andreessen lives with his fiancée Elizabeth Horn and her bulldogs in Palo Alto, California. Following his job change, he commuted between Netscape's Mountain View headquarters and America Online's offices in Dulles, Virginia. Andreessen enjoys a number of interests, including science fiction, classical music, philosophy, and business strategy. Andreessen claims he is a common internet user himself - he gets all the news from the World Wide Web, buys his books from the Amazon.com online site, and even uses the Internet to check the theater times.
Awards
- In 1997 he received the Wallace McDowell Award.
- In 2011 he won the first place in the ranking of the most influential investors of CNET.
- In 2012, Andressen was on the Time 100 list.
- In March 2013, Andreessen was one of the five Internet pioneers to receive the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Technology for "Outstanding Technical Achievements That Have Changed the World".
