Marc Andreessen

Marc Lowell Andreessen was born on July 9, 1971, in Cedar Falls, Iowa. As an undergraduate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, he worked at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), where he co-authored Mosaic—the first widely used web browser capable of displaying inline images—with Eric Bina and others. Released in 1993, Mosaic was made freely available online, leading to over 2 million downloads within a year and fundamentally popularizing the World Wide Web. After graduating in 1993, Andreessen briefly worked at Enterprise Integration Technologies in California before partnering with Jim Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics, to commercialize Mosaic. In April 1994, they founded Mosaic Communications Corporation (renamed Netscape Communications after a naming dispute with the University of Illinois), with Andreessen as vice president of technology. Netscape Navigator, launched commercially, quickly dominated with over 75% market share by mid-1996, offering improved speed, interfaces, and tools for e-commerce. The company's 1995 IPO valued it at nearly $3 billion on its first day, catapulting Andreessen to fame—he appeared on Time magazine's cover and was named to MIT Technology Review's TR100 list in 1999. Netscape was acquired by AOL for $4.3 billion in 1999; Andreessen served briefly as AOL's chief technology officer before departing after seven months. In 1999, he co-founded LoudCloud (later Opsware) with Jim Clark, pioneering cloud computing services, though it faced early market challenges; it was acquired by Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion in 2007. In 2004, Andreessen co-founded Ning with Gina Bianchini, a platform for user-created social networks, where he served as chairman. In 2009, Andreessen co-founded Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that has invested billions in tech companies like Facebook, Airbnb, and crypto/web3 enterprises, solidifying his influence in venture capital.