Marc Andreessen

Marc Andreessen was born in Cedar Falls, Iowa, and grew up in New Lisbon, Wisconsin, a small town where his mother worked customer service for the mail-order company Lands' End and his father sold seed corn. The town library held one of the few computers he could get his hands on, and he taught himself to program on it around age twelve, mostly from manuals. He studied computer science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and, as an undergraduate, took an hourly job at NCSA, the university's federally funded supercomputing center, earning about 6.85 dollars an hour. That job put him next to programmer Eric Bina, and the two spent early 1993 building software that could show images alongside text on the same web page.

Mosaic shipped in 1993 and became the first browser ordinary people could actually use -- web traffic exploded within a year. Andreessen graduated, moved to California, and with Silicon Graphics founder Jim Clark started the company that became Netscape in 1994. Its August 1995 IPO, priced at 28 dollars a share and closing its first day near 58, is usually cited as the moment Wall Street decided the internet was a business. AOL bought Netscape for 4.3 billion dollars in 1999, after Microsoft had already used Windows to route around it. Andreessen built two more companies, Loudcloud (later Opsware, sold to HP for 1.6 billion dollars) and Ning, before co-founding Andreessen Horowitz in 2009 with Ben Horowitz, which backed Facebook, Airbnb, Coinbase, and dozens of firms that came to define the next two decades of American technology.

The company that made Andreessen famous did not survive its own success. Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer free with Windows, cut into Netscape's distribution deals, and by the time regulators used the fight as the centerpiece of United States v. Microsoft, Netscape's market share had already collapsed -- AOL shut the browser's development down in 2008, nine years after buying it. Andreessen spent most of his career as a donor to Democratic candidates, including Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, before reversing in 2024, when he and his co-founder each put 2.5 million dollars into a pro-Trump super PAC, citing Biden-era cryptocurrency and AI regulation. The reversal coincided with his firm's own enormous stakes in both industries, and critics have called it self-interest dressed as ideology -- Andreessen has said the policy shift, not the money, changed his mind.

None of this has settled into a verdict, because Andreessen is still in the middle of it. He has sat on Meta's board, runs one of the largest venture firms in the world, and has become one of the most consequential unelected voices in Republican technology policy, all while his first company survives mainly as a case study in antitrust law classes. Whether he ends up remembered chiefly as the engineer who built the on-ramp to the modern internet, or as the financier who spent his fortune buying access to the government that regulates it, is a question his own career has not finished answering.

Marc Andreessen's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• Mosaic invention
  Co-written with Eric Bina at NCSA -- the first widely used web browser 1993
• Netscape Communications company
  Co-founded with Jim Clark 1994
• Loudcloud / Opsware company
  Sold to Hewlett-Packard for 1.6 billion dollars in 2007 1999
• Andreessen Horowitz company
  Venture capital firm co-founded with Ben Horowitz 2009
• "Why Software Is Eating the World" article
  Wall Street Journal essay 2011
• The Techno-Optimist Manifesto other
  Widely circulated essay arguing technology is a moral good 2023

• July 9, 1971 aged 0 Born in Cedar Falls, Iowa
• 1993 aged ~22 Co-writes Mosaic at NCSA while an undergraduate
• 1994 aged ~23 Co-founds Netscape with Jim Clark
• August 9, 1995 aged 24 Netscape goes public Priced at 28 dollars a share -- the moment often cited as the start of the dot-com boom.
• 1999 aged ~28 AOL acquires Netscape for 4.3 billion dollars
• 2009 aged ~38 Co-founds Andreessen Horowitz with Ben Horowitz
• 2011 aged ~40 Publishes "Why Software Is Eating the World"
• October 2023 aged 52 Publishes The Techno-Optimist Manifesto
• 2024 aged ~53 Donates 2.5 million dollars to a pro-Trump super PAC A reversal after decades of donating mainly to Democrats.

• Tim Berners-Lee b. 1955
  British-American computer scientist who invented the World Wide Web, revolutionizing global information sharing. built the browser for his invention
• Bill Gates b. 1955
  Co-founder of Microsoft who, through the Gates Foundation, has donated billions to global health and education. rival in the browser wars
• Mark Zuckerberg b. 1984
  Co-founder of Facebook who built the world's largest social media platform and reshaped global communication. served on the board of
• Peter Thiel b. 1967
  PayPal co-founder and first outside investor in Facebook whose contrarian views shaped Silicon Valley culture. aligned with politically