Marc Andreesen
 Marc Andreesen    (computer scientist, businessman) | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Marc Lowell Andreessen July 9, 1971 Cedar Falls, Iowa, United States |
| Alma mater | University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign |
| Children | John |
| Spouse | Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen |
| Member of | WEF/Global Leaders for Tomorrow/1996 |
Marc Lowell Andreessen is an American entrepreneur, investor, and software engineer. He is the co-author of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser; co-founder of Netscape;[1] and co-founder and general partner of Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He co-founded and later sold the software company Opsware to Hewlett-Packard. Andreessen is also a co-founder of Ning, a company that provides a platform for social networking websites. He sits on the board of directors of Facebook.
Career
Marc Andreessen was born in Cedar Falls, Iowa and grew up in New Lisbon, Wisconsin. He received his bachelor's degree after studying computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He then spent a summer at IBM in Austin, Texas, and at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), where he got to know Tim Berners-Lee's ideas for the World Wide Web. Andreessen and Eric Bina, a full-time employee at the institute, worked together on a user-friendly browser with graphic options that should work on as many systems as possible. The result of the work was the Mosaic browser. Andreessen was very demanding, answering every user request and suggestion, which made the browser known and popular.
After graduating from university in 1993, Andreessen moved to California and worked at Enterprise Integration Technologies. Here he met James H. Clark, the founder of Silicon Graphics, who saw great economic potential in Mosaic and encouraged the establishment of a company to market it. In 1994, both founded Mosaic Communications Corporation in Mountain View, California, and Andreessen became vice president. Since the University of Illinois did not agree to the use of the name Mosaic, the company was renamed Netscape Communications Corporation and the browser Netscape Navigator was developed. Andreessen then committed himself to the broadest possible public dissemination of the program, which was made freely available on the Internet.
In 1995 Netscape went public and the 25-year-old Andreessen was stylized as the child prodigy of the Internet generation. Due to the success of Netscape, the software company Microsoft also got into the newly recognized Internet business and licensed the source code of the Mosaic browser from Spyglass, a company founded by the University of Illinois, and developed Internet Explorer from it. The subsequent competition between the two browser manufacturers led to the so-called browser war, which ultimately came to an end when the Netscape browser was ousted from its position as market leader.
In 1999, AOL bought Netscape for $ 4.2 billion and Andreessen became the company's chief technology officer. In the same year he left AOL again and founded Loudcloud, which went public in 2001 and was renamed Opsware after the sale of its service segment to Electronic Data Systems.
Since 2009 Andreessen has been developing the RockMelt web browser with former partners Eric Vishria and Tim Howes.[2] Rockmelt was founded in late 2013 by the internet company Yahoo! taken over, the development of Rockmelt and other web apps was then stopped on December 31, 2013.[3]
With the venture capital company Andreesen Horowitz, which he and Ben Horowitz founded in 2009, Andreessen invested in several internet startups, including Twitter, the provider of social bookmarks Digg and the community platform Ning, which he co-founded in 2005.
Related Document
| Title | Type | Publication date | Author(s) | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Document:Silicon Valley’s Trump supporters are dicing with the death of democracy | Article | 4 August 2024 | John Naughton | Speaking to a Christian convention in Florida the other day, Donald Trump said: “Get out and vote. Just this time. You won’t have to do it any more. Four more years, you know what: it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote any more, my beautiful Christians.” |
