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If You Can Make It in Silicon Valley, You Can Make It . . . in Silicon Valley Again

One evening this spring, Marc Andreessen, the first outsize icon of the Internet era, caught a glimpse of his former life while mingling at the San Francisco launch party for Current, Al Gore’s new 24-hour cable station. In 1994, when Andreessen was only 22, he and a high-tech veteran named Jim Clark created the Internet-browser company Netscape Communications.

Two years later, there he was on the cover of Time, sitting barefoot on a golden throne, dressed in jeans and a rumpled black polo. The magazine cast him as the king of the ”golden geeks,” a group that popularized the formerly novel notion of surfing the Web and, not incidentally, helped create a vision of Silicon Valley as a glittering gold field where the young, bright and vigorous could stake a claim and make themselves unimaginably wealthy before they even had the time to put up posters in their barely furnished apartments.

The baby fat has melted from the face of Andreessen; now 33, he is tall and almost slim, with short hair, and he dresses more like a grown-up (crisp white dress shirt, brass-buttoned black blazer). America Online bought Netscape for $4 billion in stock in 1998, and Andreessen left to start a company called Loudcloud, which went public in 2001; he serves as its chairman (the company was renamed Opsware in 2002). Several years back, Fortune pegged Andreessen’s net worth at roughly $500 million, but with a wink and a playful dance of his eyebrows he implies that he’s worth much more than that. Still, he continues to fill up notebooks with ideas and sketched-out business plans for new companies. Among the gossipy cognoscenti, it’s a poorly kept secret that in recent months Andreessen has been occupied starting a new Internet company.

By GARY RIVLIN

Full Story: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/05/magazine/05RATPACK.html?pagewanted=1&adxnnl=0&adxnnlx=1118246499-4FFa6rsMd2jAVuEuLmz2CA&oref=login

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