marc andreessen
Marc Andreessen
a16z, Marc Andreessen, and Andreessen Horowitz are described in the same document.
Born in 1971, this American billionaire, 48 years old by Korean age, was born in a small town in Wisconsin, USA, and took his first steps into the IT world by tinkering with the Commodore 64, an early personal computer his father had bought for him.
While Bill Gates was establishing Microsoft and enjoying great success, Andreessen, who had a knack for programming, earned a bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1993, and during his undergraduate years he worked as an intern at IBM.
At the NCSA laboratory affiliated with the University of Illinois, Andreessen first encountered the World Wide Web created by Tim Berners-Lee. Wanting to change the web interface, which was then text-based and crude, he began working with Eric Bina, a researcher at the lab, to create a user-friendly web browser with graphics, and by the end of 1992 they had developed the famous 'Mosaic' web browser.
Mosaic achieved tremendous success as soon as it was released. That was inevitable: unlike existing web browsers, which were text-based, crude, and inconvenient to use, Mosaic allowed users to move to other pages with a simple mouse click via hyperlinks, just like today, and was designed to use graphics such as icons and background images. It was born as the world's first GUI-based web browser.
When NCSA publicly released the Mosaic web browser on January 23, 1993, already 25 years ago, the browser saw an explosive 2 million downloads in just its first year.
Now that the number of internet users worldwide reaches 3 billion, 2 million downloads is a modest number that would not attract attention. But at a time when there were only 20–30 million internet users in the entire world, 2 million downloads was a truly astonishing event.
The following year, in 1994, after earning a master's degree in computer science from the University of Illinois, Marc Andreessen left Illinois and moved to Silicon Valley, California. There he met James H. Clark, a venture entrepreneur who had made a fortune founding Silicon Graphics, and together they established a company.
The University of Illinois expressed its displeasure over copyright issues regarding the newly born Mosaic Communications. In response, Andreessen changed the company name to Netscape Communications and changed the browser's name to Navigator.
Then, without reusing a single line of the existing Mosaic source code they had developed, they rebuilt it from scratch and released a new web browser named Netscape Navigator at the end of 1994. Upon release, Netscape Navigator met with an explosive response and enjoyed enormous success, capturing about 90% of the web browser market.
The following year, in 1995, Netscape went public on NASDAQ in spectacular fashion despite lacking any significant revenue model, and Marc Andreessen instantly rose to become an IT industry star rivaling Bill Gates, leading the so-called dot-com bubble.
However, Netscape, which had made such a brilliant entrance, suffered a crushing defeat in a head-on confrontation with Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE), which had obtained a Mosaic license and virtually copied Netscape, and disappeared into history just 14 years after its founding.
Afterward, he founded the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and achieved great success by investing in numerous startups, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Airbnb, Groupon, Skype, Zynga, Foursquare, Oculus VR, and GitHub.
eBay Conflict with Carl Icahn
Andreessen first joined eBay's board of directors in 2008 and served as a director for six years. In October 2014, he announced his resignation following the company's decision to spin off PayPal, its online payment service. The decision to cut ties with PayPal was a point of contention between Andreessen and investor Carl Icahn. Icahn insisted on separating from PayPal, while Andreessen opposed the separation and drew public anger. Icahn criticized Andreessen for putting his own interests ahead of shareholders, and in an open letter detailed his suspicions of a conflict of interest between Skype, which eBay sold in 2009, and Andreessen Horowitz, Andreessen's own firm.
Investments
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram
Airbnb
Groupon
Skype
Zynga
Foursquare
Oculus
GitHub
Coinbase - de facto largest shareholder, holding about 6–7%
Related Links
Topics: investor,developer
Category: Wiki/Person
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