Marc Lowell Andreessen (/ænˈdriːsən/ an-dree-sən; born July 9, 1971) 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; and co-founder and general partner of Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He 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, eBay, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, among others. A frequent keynote speaker and guest at Silicon Valley conferences, Andreessen was one of only six inductees in the World Wide Web Hall of Fame announced at the First International Conference on the World-Wide Web in 1994.
Early life and education
Andreessen was born in Cedar Falls, Iowa and raised in New Lisbon, Wisconsin. He is the son of Patricia and Lowell Andreessen, who worked for a seed company. In December 1993, he received his bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. As an undergraduate, he interned one summer at IBM in Austin, Texas. He also worked at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois, where he became familiar with Tim Berners-Lee’s open standards for the World Wide Web. Andreessen and full-time salaried co-worker Eric Bina worked on creating a user-friendly browser with integrated graphics that would work on a wide range of computers. The resulting code was the Mosaic Web browser.
“In the Web’s first generation, Tim Berners-Lee launched the Uniform Resource Locator (URL), Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and HTML standards with prototype Unix-based servers and browsers. A few people noticed that the Web might be better than Gopher.
In the second generation, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina developed NCSA Mosaic at the University of Illinois. Several million then suddenly noticed that the Web might be better than sex.
In the third generation, Andreessen and Bina left NCSA to found Netscape…”
— Bob Metcalfe, InfoWorld, August 21, 1995, Vol. 17, Issue 34.
Summary
Marc Andreessen Born Marc Lowell Andreessen
July 9, 1971
Cedar Falls, Iowa, United StatesAlma mater University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign Known for Developer of Mosaic
Founder of Netscape
Founder of Opsware
Founder of Andreessen HorowitzNet worth US$ 600 Million (est. 2015)
Spouse(s) Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen (m. 2006) Children John (born in March 2015)
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