Days before hackers were shutting down Yahoo (YHOO), ETrade, Amazon.com (AMZN) and others, a Silicon Valley startup by the name of LoudCloud announced its intention to provide Internet businesses with comprehensive, outsourced infrastructures - that is, everything from server hardware and software to top-notch engineers and, notably, security experts.
No big deal. Another day, another dot-com. Right?
Well, not exactly. This particular company is cofounded and chaired by Marc Andreessen, the 28-year-old who created Mosaic while an undergrad at the University of Illinois (dossier) and went on to start Netscape with Jim "New, New Thing" Clark in 1994.
In the experience-impoverished Internet industry, the driving notion is that success breeds success - even if, as in the case of Andreessen, that fertility has yet to be proven. Being considered a pioneer is akin to being handed a blank check for an account with unlimited funds. Venture capitalists drop Andreessen's name like fish food into a tank. "Did you know our partner, Bob, went to school with Andreessen?" Or, "I worked at Netscape back in '94. Ho ho. Those were the days." Like being funded by Kleiner Perkins, having Andreessen as an investor, friend, or cofounder is pretty much guaranteed to garner press, strategic partnerships, top-notch employees and more investment dollars ($64 million, in the case of LoudCloud).
Because where Andreessen goes, buzz follows, it can be difficult to separate the person from the media adulation that follows him and has been encouraged by him.
"He's able to leverage the fact that he's very much an icon. It's not arrogance, but when he can be used as a tool for that, he's smart at it. He's very agile at dealing with PR and Wall Street," says friend and former Netscape colleague Quincy Smith. "Marc by nature," he adds, "few people realize or appreciate, is a very shy guy, very supportive."
Some of these softer qualities come through as Andreessen speaks from his car on a cell phone ("If you hear screeching and lots of breaking glass, that's me"). He tells clumsy jokes ("Interactive TV, as far as I'm concerned, is when your football team loses, you pitch your beer can at the TV set"), and sprinkles his conversation with pop cultural references from his 80's adolescence. ("Corey Haim, he's very bitter. And also Corey Feldman," he says of the former "Lost Boys.")
With his latest venture, Andreessen has put himself under even more scrutiny than usual. In the minds of industry watchers and venture capitalists, LoudCloud is not just Andreessen's next project, it's a litmus test - one that will be used, unfairly or not, to settle whether Andreessen is indeed a visionary genius or just a smart guy who happened to be at the right place at the right time.
That's a lot of pressure for a guy who's just come out of career limbo. Andreessen spent six months last year as the CTO of AOL (dossier), a consolation prize after the former rival bought Netscape for $4.2 billion. "I made it through March until September," he states dryly.
A month after leaving AOL, Andreessen announced that he was starting LoudCloud, with former Netscape crony Ben Horowitz as CEO. At the time, neither would say what the company would do, but Horowitz recalls, "We knew pretty clearly the problem we wanted to solve. There were a bunch of things that we hadn't worked out ... in how we were going to solve it."
LoudCloud will, in Andreessen's words, "take this horizontal swap through the industry," giving new and established companies the opportunity to focus on their business plans instead of technical difficulties. "There are really good ideas that are out there, really good people that want to work on them, plenty of capital available to do them, so they ought to be able to move as fast as possible."
It's a business model that reflects Andreessen's own role in the two companies he's helped launch. He's the
