A look inside the insanely successful life of Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen
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Jul 26, 2021, 12:47 IST
Marc Andreessen grew up in the rural town of New Lisbon, Wisconsin. His dad, Lowell, worked for a seed company. His mom, Pat, worked for retailer Lands' End in customer service.
Andreessen doesn't like to talk about family: “We’ve never had a conversation about his parents or his brother — all he said was, ‘They didn’t like me, and I didn’t like them all that much, either,'" a friend of Andreessen told The New Yorker's Tad Friend.
When he was 9 years old, Andreessen taught himself BASIC programming from a library book. Once he hit high school, he'd already grown bored of his TRS-80, an early personal computer.
Andreessen went to the University of Illinois at Champaign, where he studied computer science when he wasn't falling asleep in lecture or skipping class.
In college, Andreessen spent two months working 80-hour weeks in a computer lab, building a web browser he called Mosaic. He and his team gave away Mosaic to 2 million users for free.
In August 1995, Netscape went public, and, at 24, Andreessen was suddenly worth $56 million. Four years later, AOL bought Netscape, and Andreessen briefly took a job as CTO, moving to a 7,000-square-foot home in Washington, DC.
When he left AOL, Andreessen formed a web-hosting company called Loudcloud with Ben Horowitz and others. The company changed its name to Opsware and sold to HP in 2007 for $1.6 billion.
Andreessen and Ben Horowitz formed their Silicon Valley venture-capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, in 2009. They started with $300 million, and in three years the firm grew to have $2.7 billion under management. The firm has made investments that have paid off, in companies like Facebook, Airbnb, GitHub, and Twitter.
In 2006, Andreessen married Laura Arrillaga, the daughter of Silicon Valley real-estate tycoon John Arrillaga and the founder of the Silicon Valley Social Venture Fund.
In 2012, Andreessen Horowitz's general partners, including Marc Andreessen, pledged to donate half of their lifetime income from venture-capital activities to charity.
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