Netscape Browser – Whatever Happened To Its Founder?

Many of you may not be familiar with the name Marc Andreessen. Well then, how about Netscape? Netscape was the browser that made the Internet explode and Marc Andreessen was one of its co-founders and the face of Netscape. Before Netscape, the Internet was pretty much text based but with Netscape's graphical interface it blew the doors off. Netscape was the way tens of millions of people were introduced to cyberspace. I still remember seeing my first demo of Netscape. Wow!

Netscape Navigator blew the doors off the Internet when it was introduced

At the University of Illinois in Champaign in the early 1990’s, Andreessen and some college friends worked 2 months of 80 hour weeks to develop a graphical browser called Mosaic which used pictures and mouse clicks to navigate through information. The team gave the Mosaic browser away free, and before long, some two million people were using it, This caught the attention of Silicon Graphics Inc. founder James Clark out near San Jose, CA.

Moving to Silicon Valley in 1994, Andreessen and Clark founded a company called Mosaic but quickly changed it to Netscape when the University of Illinois objected and threatened to sue.

No problem. Andreessen recruited his buddies from college, where some were still working for $6.85 an hour, and they created a new version of the browser from scratch called Netscape. They went public with an IPO in 1995 and became instant celebrities with their enormous wealth.

It looked like clear sailing for Netscape on the world wide web until Bill Gates of Microsoft became a  convert to the Internet. Starting from behind, Gates and Microsoft simply licensed the Mosaic source code from the University of Illinois and called it Internet Explorer. Simple! Microsoft embedded Internet Explorer in its Windows OS and steamrolled Netscape to become the world’s most popular browser. In 1999, at age 35, Andreessen sold Netscape to AOL for $4.2 billion.

I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for Netscape and still have an original box of its browser on my bookshelf in my computer room. Also, I never heard much about Marc Andreessen after that and always felt kind of bad for him as he pretty much had no chance against the Microsoft behemoth. Boy, was I ever wrong (again)! It turns out that Andreessen went on to found a Silicon Valley venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

Andreessen Horowitz invests in entrepreneurs, products, and companies in the information technology industry and boy do they know how to pick them. The two became known as super-angel investors. Among the startups they invested in were Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Jawbone and Pinterest which has raked in billions for them. Marc Andreessen also serves on the board of directors of Facebook and eBay so he’s doing quite nicely.

I’m not sure why I still have this 20 yr. old Netscape Communicator box

In another quirky twist of fate, in 2009, an investor group that included Andreessen Horowitz acquired a majority stake in Skype for $2.75 billion which at the time was considered a risky investment.  Not for the super-angel investors. Just two years later in May, 2011 they sold Skype to Microsoft for $8.5 billion. That must have been some sweet signing ceremony for Andreessen and I’ll bet the champagne corks were popping that night. I’ll never feel sorry for Marc Andreessen again!

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