Marc Andreessen from "no-stoplight town" to Forbes' Midas List

Marc Andreessen is best known for cofounding the internet browser Netscape and launching Andreessen Horowitz, one of Silicon Valley's most famous venture-capital firms.

Andreessen was an early investor in tech companies like Facebook and Twitter and has overseen its investments in hot billion-dollar startups like Airbnb.

Andreessen's net worth was an estimated $600 million in 2012 and has likely increased since — not bad for someone who grew up in a sleepy "no-stoplight town" in rural Wisconsin.
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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.

This caught the attention of James Clark, the founder of Silicon Graphics. He and Andreessen cofounded Netscape in 1994.

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.

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.

Andreessen has been named to Vanity Fair's 2011 New Establishment List, Forbes' Midas List of tech's top investors, and the Time 100.

Today, Andreessen Horowitz has $4.2 billion under management. The firm invests in hot startups like Slack, Lyft, Airbnb, and Pinterest.

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