Marc Andreessen

Overview

On September 30, 2008, eBay Inc. announced that Mark Andreessen had been appointed as a new member of the Company's Board of Directors. An entrepreneur, investor, and blogger, Andreessen's current focus is Ning, a new consumer Internet company founded in late 2004 that is building a next-generation platform for social networking. Ning allows anyone to build your own social network for anything. More than 480,000 social networks have already been created by users on Ning, and those networks are being used by a large and rapidly growing number of people worldwide. Prior to Ning, Andreessen co-founded Opsware (formerly known as Loudcloud) and Netscape. Opsware, which created the datacenter automation software market, was acquired by Hewlett-Packard in 2007. Netscape, which was founded in 1994, pioneered today's commercial Internet and invented or co-invented such technologies as Javascript, SSL and RSS, and helped Internet standards such as HTML, HTTP, Java,SMTP, IMPA and LDAP become commercially mainstream. Netscape was acquired in 1998 by America Online. Andreessen subsequently served as AOL's Chief Technology Officer until September 1999. As an undergraduate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Andreessen and Eric Bina co-created the Mosaic Internet browser. Mosaic was the first widely-used browser that helped transform the Internet from a niche environment for academics and researchers into the state-of-the-art global multimedia network. In addition to founding and leading successful public companies, Andreessen also has served as an angel investor and advisor to startups. Some of his current and prior investments include Digg, Del.icio.us, Twitter, Qik, Aliph/Jawbone, LinkedIn, Meebo, Netvibes, Outside.in, Revision 3, Fon, Funny or Die, Scribd, and Wikia. Andreessen received a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In addition to eBay, he currently serves on the boards of Facebook, Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto, California and Room to Read in San Francisco, California.