Marc Andreessen Net Worth

Marc Andreessen is the co-founder and general partner of Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), one of the most influential venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, and the creator of Mosaic, the first widely used graphical web browser that made the internet accessible to ordinary people. Born in Cedar Falls, Iowa, Andreessen grew up in New Lisbon, Wisconsin and studied computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where, as an undergraduate, he co-created the Mosaic browser at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in 1993.

At just 22 years old, Andreessen co-founded Netscape Communications with Jim Clark, turning the web browser into a commercial product. Netscape's 1995 IPO — in which the stock soared from $28 to $75 on its first day of trading — is widely credited with launching the dot-com era and establishing the template for technology IPOs. The browser wars that followed, as Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer with Windows to crush Netscape, led to one of the most significant antitrust cases in technology history. AOL acquired Netscape in 1998 for $4.2 billion.

Andreessen then co-founded Loudcloud (later Opsware), an early cloud computing company that he sold to Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion in 2007. But his most lasting impact has been through a16z, which he founded with Ben Horowitz in 2009. The firm has invested in many of the defining companies of the modern era, including Facebook, Twitter, GitHub, Airbnb, Coinbase, Stripe, Lyft, Instacart, and Roblox. Andreessen's 2011 essay "Why Software Is Eating the World" in The Wall Street Journal became the defining thesis of the technology era, predicting that software companies would disrupt every industry — a forecast that has proven remarkably prescient. He is also known for his prolific writing on technology optimism, most notably his 2023 "Techno-Optimist Manifesto."