Marc Lowell Andreessen was born on July 9th, 1971 in Iowa to Patricia and Lowell Andreessen.
During his high school days, Andreessen was recognized as a creative intellect. While pursuing his undergraduate degree at the University of Illinois at Urbana – Champaign, Andreessen worked at the National Centre for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University from where he designed the web browser Mosaic, along with his colleague Eric Bana. It was the first widely used web browser. Owing to objection from the University, Mosaic was later renamed as Netscape Navigator and the company was called Netscape Communications.
Andreessen was only 24 years old when Netscape went public. It is believed that by then, his company was worth 56 million US dollars.
Since then, Andreessen has launched many internet-related initiatives including Loud-cloud Inc., and Ning, and has also held various posts in firms across the world.
During 2005-09, Andreessen invested millions in various start ups, including Twitter. He and his partner Ben Horowitz thus earned the name ‘super angel investors’.
For his contributions, Andreessen entered the Time Magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2012. A year later, he was one of the five Internet and Web pioneers who were awarded the first Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, recognizing “outstanding advances in engineering that have changed the world.”
