Marc Andreesen

MARC ANDREESEN

Place of birth : New Lisbon, Wisconsin, United States of America

Places lived : Wisconsin

Marc Andreessen, 38, is an American entrepreneur, investor, startup coach, blogger, and a multi-millionaire software engineer best known as co-author of Mosaic, the first widely-used web browser, and founder of Netscape Communications Corporation. Mosaic Communications changed its name to Netscape Communications, and its flagship web browser was the Netscape Navigator. He was the chair of Opsware, a software company he founded originally as Loudcloud, when it was acquired by Hewlett-Packard. He is also a co-founder of Ning, a company which provides a platform for social-networking websites.

In the year between the formation of the company and its IPO, Andreessen engaged in extensive public outreach on behalf of his vision of the web browser’s potential, something he had in fact done continuously since making the decision to distribute Mosaic for free via the Internet. He is currently working on a new web browser, RockMelt. On September 1st, 2009, an investor group including Andreessen Horowitz acquired a majority stake in Skype.

Previously, Andreessen developed Mosaic and co-founded Netscape. Mosaic was developed at National Center for Supercomputing Applications, on which Andreessen was the team-leader. Andreessen also served as chairman of Opsware and Chief Technology Officer of AOL after AOL acquired Netscape. Marc Andreessen’s realization of Mosaic, based on the work of Berners-Lee and the hypertext theorists before him, is generally recognized as the beginning of the web as it is now known. Mosaic, the first web browser to win over the Net masses, was released in 1993 and made freely accessible to the public

Netscape’s success attracted the attention of Microsoft, which recognized the web’s potential and wanted to put itself at the forefront of the rising Internet revolution. Microsoft licensed the Mosaic source code from Spyglass, Inc., an offshoot of the University of Illinois, and turned it into Internet Explorer. The resulting battle between the two companies became known as the Browser Wars. Netscape was acquired in 1999 for $4.2 billion by AOL, which made Andreessen its Chief Technology Officer. Like other browsers it was designed to display HTML documents, but new formatting tags like “center” were included.