Marc Andreessen

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Marc Andreessen (2013)

Marc Andreessen (born July 9, 1971 in Cedar Falls , Iowa ) is an American software developer , entrepreneur and investor .

Andreessen is co-founder of the company Netscape Communications and developer of Mosaic , one of the first internationally widespread web browsers . He is co-founder of the online platform Ning and was the managing director of the software company Opsware, which was acquired by HP in 2007 . He is co-founder and partner of Andreessen Horowitz venture capital company based in Menlo Park , California . He sits on the board of directors of Room to Read , Facebook , Oculus VR, and others.

Live and act

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 for marketing. In 1994, in Mountain View , California, they founded Mosaic Communications Corporation 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 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 technical 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 developed with former partners Eric Vishria and Tim Howes Web browser RockMelt . RockMelt end of 2013 was the Internet company Yahoo ! The development of Rockmelt and other web apps was then stopped on December 31, 2013.

With the venture capital company Andreesen Horowitz, which he and Ben Horowitz founded in 2009, Andreessen invested in several Internet startups , including the microblogging service Twitter , the provider of social bookmarks Digg and the community platform Ning , which he co-founded in 2005.

Awards

literature

Web links

Commons : Marc Andreessen  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ afterdawn.com: New browser development called RockMelt (English)
  2. ↑ Rockmelt.com: Yahoo! has acquired Rockmelt! ( Memento from August 31, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
personal data
SURNAME Andreessen, Marc
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American computer scientist, founder of Netscape Communications Corporation and developer of the Mosaic browser
DATE OF BIRTH July 9, 1971
PLACE OF BIRTH Cedar Falls , Iowa