Marc Andreessen – Biography of Marc Andreessen

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The inventor, entrepreneur and creator of Netscape, Marc Andreessen, was born on July 9, 1971 in Cedar Falls, Iowa, USA.

Andreessen he got bored with computers before he finished high school. Although the tall, blond boy, who grew up in New Lisbon, Wisconsin, taught himself Basic programming from a library book at age nine, in high school he had run out of things to do with his TRS-80, a of the primitive personal computers available in the mid-eighties. At the University of Illinois at Champaign, Andreessen only majored in computer science because he did not do well in electrical engineering. Even with his new major, he frequently skipped class or fell asleep, he later claimed.

In the early 1990s, while working in a physics lab at the university, Andreessen He felt his old interest in computers rekindled when he noticed that scientists were sharing their work with other universities via the Internet. Tim Berners-Lee, a researcher at CERN’s particle physics laboratory in Geneva, had recently developed the World Wide Web. Andreessen recruited a team of programmers to create a better way to explore the web. After two months, with 80-hour weeks in the computer lab, living off chocolate chip cookies and milk, Andreessen and his team created a graphical browser called Mosaic, which used images and mouse clicks to navigate through the information. The team gave away the Mosaic browser for free, and before long, some two million people were using it, enough to catch the attention of James Clark, the recently retired founder of Silicon Graphics Inc., who was looking for new challenges.
Clark sent an email to Andreessen, inviting the young man to discuss business possibilities. Although Clark was interested in pursuing opportunities in the field of interactive television, Andreessen He convinced him with a bottle of wine that the Internet was the key to the future.

Together, the two launched a company dedicated to the World Wide Web called Mosaic, but they changed the name to Netscape when the University of Illinois strongly objected. To avoid copyright infringement issues, Andreessen He recruited his old friends from college, where some were still working for $ 6.85 an hour, and they built a new version of the browser from scratch. The browser, given away for free with an order for users to pay for it, was up and running in an instant; More importantly, corporations began purchasing web server software and other tools to publish their own websites.

When Netscape went public in August 1995, the 24-year-old programmer found himself with a fortune of $ 56 million. But it wasn’t easy to navigate: Microsoft had announced its commitment to the Internet and started giving away its own browser for free, severely eroding Netscape’s market share in a short period of time. The two companies launched the “browser wars“in the mid-90s, constantly introducing new versions to attract consumers.

When America Online (AOL) bought Netscape in 1999, Andreessen, who often criticized AOL for being technically backward, accepted a position as chief technology officer. He moved across the country to the Washington, DC area, where he purchased a 7,000-square-foot home to share with his three bulldogs. However, after a few months, he resigned from his position and became a part-time strategic advisor to the company, spending the remainder of his time working with other start-ups.

In October 1999, Andreessen announced the formation of Loudcloud Inc., a company that provides high-performance computing and software services to Internet and e-commerce businesses. In addition to his position as President of Loudcloud, Andreessen He recently joined the board of directors of the recently created Internet startups, CollabNet, MobShop, CacheFlow, and Octopus.com.