Marc Andreessen

Cofounder of Netscape

• Born: July 9, 1971
• Place of Birth: Cedar Falls, Iowa

Introduction

Mark Andreessen led the team that created Mosaic, the first graphical web browser, in the early 1990s. Soon afterward, he cofounded Netscape Communications to commercialize this revolutionary innovation, opening the use of the Internet to millions of people around the world. He went on to found companies that pioneered cloud computing, social media, e-commerce, and many other Internet-related applications taken for granted today. He also cofounded Andreessen Horowitz, a Silicon Valley venture-capitial firm that invests in emerging products with the potential to transform society through information technology. His opinions and forecasts are widely sought after, and he serves on the boards of a number of major technology companies.

Early Life

Marc Lowell Andreessen was born on July 9, 1979, in Cedar Falls, Iowa, and was raised in the rural town of New Lisbon, Wisconsin, from the age of two. His mother, Patricia, worked for the Land's End clothing company as a customer service representative, and his father, Lowell, was sales manager of a seed and farm-supply company. He and his brother, Jeff, grew up in a middle-class household, neither rich nor poor.

Andreessen did not like living in such a rural setting and was not interested in being a farmer or factory worker, which was the norm in his community. He did not have much in common with others his age. He was interested in mathematics and science and proved to be a bright and accomplished student, although some regarded him as arrogant.

When Andreessen was eleven, after learning about computer programming from books in his school library, he asked his parents to buy him an early microcomputer from RadioShack. He was fascinated by the computer's possibilities and displayed a clear gift for programming. He finished high school with a National Merit scholarship and graduated at the top of his class, enabling him to leave rural Wisconsin and pursue his interest in computer science.

Life's Work

In 1989, Andreessen entered the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 1992, he got a part-time job working in the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), a government-funded research lab at the university. This job provided him the opportunity to work with powerful computers and computer networks, since the university was part of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), a computer network between major research universities, funded by the US Department of Defense's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and a precursor to the Internet.

Working at NCSA allowed Andreessen to witness the birth of the World Wide Web after Tim Berners-Lee introduced it in 1991 as a means of connecting computers around the world. The World Wide Web is not the Internet itself but rather a system of documents linked via hypertext that are accessed through the Internet. Using the Internet at that time required advanced computer skills. Andreessen saw the need for a simpler method for people to navigate it.

In the autumn of 1992, less than a year after the web had been introduced, Andreessen led a team of fellow students in developing the first truly graphical user interface (GUI), which allowed web navigation by point-and-click commands. Working day and night, he and his team produced the first version of their new web browser, which they called Mosaic, and made it available in January 1993. On March 13, 1993, Andreessen posted a free version of the Mosaic browser on the Internet for anyone to download. With two million downloads in its first year, Mosaic was successful because it integrated numerous innovations that simplified browsing, including as bookmarks, hyperlinks, the creation of a browsing history, and the combination of images with text via “tags” to create the links.

After graduating, Andreessen was working for a technology company in California when Jim Clark, a well-known Silicon Valley entrepreneur, contacted him about starting a web venture. In March 1994, the two decided to enhance the Mosaic browser as a commercial product. Clark provided $4 million in start-up funding to form Mosaic Communications Company (MCC), and they proceeded to recruit most of the programmers who had worked on development of Mosaic at NCSA. By October 1994, Andreessen and his team had their new browser ready and offered it as a free download on the Internet. This led to conflict with NCSA, which was licensing the original Mosaic browser to other software companies to modify and market. While MCC claimed that its browser was based on completely new programming, a settlement was reached in December 1994, whereby MCC paid an undisclosed fee to NCSA and agreed to change its name. Thus, MCC became Netscape Communications Corporation (NCC), and its browser was renamed Netscape Navigator.

Netscape Navigator was an immediate success, sometimes described as the web's “big bang” moment. Netscape's business model involved charging businesses for copies of the browser software but making it easily available to noncommercial users. This model allowed Netscape to generate revenue and quickly expand use of Navigator in the marketplace, ultimately reaching 75 percent penetration of the market by 1996. By late 1995, Navigator had two million users, making Netscape the fastest-growing software company in the industry and the prototype for the dot-com boom of the late 1990s. An initial public offering in August 1995 was overwhelmingly successful; by the end of 1995, NCC revenues exceeded $100 million, and the company's stock value had soared to an estimated $2.9 billion. Andreessen's shares were worth an estimated $55–$60 million.

This success provoked intense competition. Netscape's fiercest competitor was Microsoft, where executives realized that its Windows operating system and its Microsoft Office Suite of applications needed to be compatible with the web. In a major shift in strategy, Microsoft acquired an enhanced a web browser, based on the original NCSA Mosaic, and named it Internet Explorer (IE). Microsoft bundled IE into its market-dominant Windows 95 operating system, essentially giving it away to all of its customers who purchased the program, either prepackaged on a personal computer or as a stand-alone program.

As IE's market share increased in 1996, Navigator's plunged. Netscape alleged that Microsoft was rigging its Windows operating system to place competing browsers at a disadvantage, effectively forcing customers to use IE. These charges led the US Department of Justice to launch an antitrust investigation and ultimately bring suit against Microsoft. The Supreme Court found in 2001 that some of Microsoft's practices were illegal, and a settlement was reached.

This early episode in the so-called browser wars ultimately led to the demise of Netscape. As Microsoft continued to improve new releases of IE and push its use through its bundling strategy, Navigator development stalled, and NCC began to lose money. Andreessen faced downsizing NCC to cut costs as revenues plunged. By 1998, the dot-com bubble was expanding, and the stock values of competitors such as Yahoo! and America Online (AOL) were exploding while NCC stock was dropping. This led to the sale of NCC to AOL in March 1999 for $4.2 billion. Navigator was later abandoned.

Andreessen worked for AOL for a few months before leaving with several colleagues to form Loudcloud, a web-hosting service that used cloud computing and automated website development to help companies establish websites faster and at a lower cost. From its launch in October 1999, Loudcloud grew rapidly, providing web hosting for a ballooning list of well-known companies through 2000. It had a successful initial public offering in March 2001, when the dot-com bubble was bursting for many Internet start-ups. Loudcloud was soon caught up in the bust, however, as demand for dot-com hosting declined and server network hardware and software economics changed. In August 2002, the Internet services portion of the company was sold to Electronic Data Services, and the remaining portion of the company was renamed Opsware and refocused on developing and selling software to manage large server networks. Hewlett-Packard purchased Opsware in September 2007 for $1.6 billion.

Andreessen went on to pioneer many other web ventures. In 2004, he cofounded Ning, Inc., an online platform for social networking sites that he sold to Glam Media in 2011 for $150 million. He also invested in a number of other technology companies, including Digg, Twitter, Groupon, and Instagram. On July 5, 2009, Andreessen joined with his longtime friend and fellow investor Ben Horowitz to form the venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, dedicated to funding entrepreneurs who were commercializing transformative advances in information technology. In September 2009, Andreessen Horowitz invested in the web-based video-communications company Skype; in 2010, they invested in Kno, a digital education platform, and Airbrnb, a website devoted to peer-to-peer real-estate rentals. Andreessen Horowitz is actively engaged in providing advice and early funding to a host of new web-based enterprises.

Andreessen served on the Hewlett Packard Enterprise board of directors until 2018. He also serves on the board of such businesses as Facebook, eBay, Bump Technologies, Oculus VR, and TinyCo, as well as the many companies in which his venture-capital firm invests. In addition, he works as an advisor for Asana and Neom. In 2023, Andreessen published the Techno-Optimist Manifesto, in which he advocated for the unfettered advancement of technology for the benefit of humanity as a whole. The following year, Andreessen announced that he would be donating to the presidential campaign of former president Donald Trump.

Personal Life

Andreessen married Laura Arrillaga, the daughter of Silicon Valley real-estate billionaire John Arrillaga, in the summer of 2006. Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen is the founder of the Silicon Valley Social Venture Fund, a “venture philanthropy” organization modeled on venture-capital funds that provides expertise and investments to nonprofit organizations. In 2010, the couple founded the Marc and Laura Andreessen Foundation, of which Arrillaga-Andreessen is president.

Forbes magazine estimated Andreessen's net worth as approximately $600 million in 2012. Andreessen has said that he believes that “software is eating the world,” meaning that as broadband Internet becomes more ubiquitous, cloud computing more powerful, and smartphones more globally adopted, software will continue to be a transformative force for human progress.

Bibliography

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"Andreessen, Marc. "The Techno-Optimist Manifesto." Andreessen Horowitz, 16 Oct. 2023, a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/. Accessed 27 Sept. 2024.

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