Alumnus Andreessen Joins eBay Board

5/4/2009

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eBay today announced that CS alumnus Marc Andreessen has joined the company's board of directors.

"Marc is a true visionary whose experience will be invaluable to eBay," said John Donahoe, president and chief executive officer of eBay Inc.

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.

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.


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This story was published May 4, 2009.