Marc Andreessen gets a real job

At 26, Marc Andreessen is one of the network industry's brightest stars. His story is well known, from helping to create the Mosaic Web browser as a college student in Illinois to cofounding Netscape Communications Corp., which exploded onto the scene in 1993 with its historic initial public offering.

But his story also keeps changing, and the biggest change of late is a new job title. Netscape's chief technology officer and chief evangelist for the past few years is now its executive vice president of products. That means Andreessen will have a much more hands-on role in pushing Netscape to respond to customer demand and the moves of rivals such as Microsoft Corp.

Andreessen spoke recently with Network World News Director Bob Brown about personal and industry issues. Part one of our interview focuses on Andreessen; part two will be on his industry outlook.

Q. What does your new job entail?

A. They gave me a real job. A month and a half ago I had a staff of three. Now I have a staff of about 800. Luckily I'm not managing them all directly. We don't have that flat of an organization.

Q. Why the change?

A. We're sort of a fairly typical software company in terms of how our organization has evolved. It's just happened a lot faster. Netscape has about a $550 million run rate and about 2,200 people. It took Microsoft about 11 years to reach this size. It took us about three years, and in those years we started with a very functional organization. We started with an engineering, marketing and sales group and had VPs of each group reporting to the CEO. But then our development activities got more complicated so we created multiple product divisions, each with a general manager. The number of people grew a lot, so we had all the heads of the product divisions, the heads of sales, marketing, finance, IS and HR all reporting to the CEO. And in this industry, the CEO has a lot of duties other than internal management.

[CEO Jim Barksdale] is still ultimately responsible for the company's direction, but now all the product development activities report to me. If there are major changes that I think we need to make, I can sit down with the general managers and make those changes virtually immediately.

Q. So this is when people really find out if you have business skills?

A. That's exactly it. But here's the good news. It's not like I've got 800 people working for me. I've got three highly experienced general managers under me, each of whom have their own [profit and loss responsibilities]. They're senior vice presidents. They've done this before. They've run product divisions before, and in some cases companies. And they are just sort of steaming ahead with their plans.

I work directly with them on what their future plans are, but they're responsible for their own budgets. They're responsible for their own development plans and activities

Q. Since your college degree is in computer science, do you have any interest in going back to school to get a formal business education?

A. No, no, no.

Q. How has the new job affected your daily routine? I've read that you like to get up around 9 or 10 in the morning and go to bed at 3 a.m.

A. I do that whenever I can. Recently I've been getting up earlier and earlier because with this job I actually have to be in the office and have meetings on a lot of days. But my ideal working day is actually getting up around noon and going to bed at 6 in the morning because I get the most done late at night. But what I do on most days now is I'll be up by 7 or 8, be working probably by 8 or 9, and I'll probably work through 7 or 8, and then I'll get dinner and probably work at home until midnight.

Q. I imagine the new routine will fit your lifestyle better now that you're getting married.

A. Yeah. I'm engaged and my fiancee's a morning person. It's been an issue.

Q. I saw somewhere a while back that you had never met Microsoft CEO Bill Gates. I can't imagine that's still true.

A. That would still be true.

Q. How about Oracle Corp. Chairman Larry Ellison? What's your relationship with him?

A. I have met Larry. It's pretty much a business relationship. He's funnier than people give him credit for. He's also very, very smart. Many people miss that about him.

Q. What's it been like to have your life change so dramatically?

A. I'm probably the exact wrong person to ask because it's hard to be that introspective. From my standpoint, I sort of have the personality that wants to work all the time anyway.

Q. To what extent have you become a celebrity?

A. When there's a cover story in something like Time, there's a rush of attention for a couple of weeks, and then it falls off. From time to time people ask for my autograph, at trade shows sometimes. But I spend a lot of my time right in Palo Alto and Mountain View (Calif.), and people are pretty blase about a lot of this at this point.

Q. So it's not quite like being a sports celebrity, like say, Cowboys quarterback Troy Aikman?

A. Right, nor Madonna.

Q. How has the media treated you?

A. There's sort of two stories: the story of ``Oh, the wonder of it" and then there's the ``Oh, the shame of it" story, and they sort of go back and forth. You get waves of praise and adulation, and then you get waves of just bitter criticism, and then you get more waves of praise and adulation. But by and large, the thing about executive celebrity is it's incredibly useful from a business standpoint because all the coverage has resulted in tons of PR that would have cost us hundreds of millions of dollars from an advertising or marketing standpoint. So I don't care what you call me as long as you spell my name right.

Q. It gets misspelled a lot?

A. Oh yeah.

Q. I understand that down the line you'd have an interest working for a big venture capital firm like Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Why?

A. They have a lot of benefits being able to work with startups without the liability. They get the rush and the involvement with three, four or five companies at a time. But there are people who are actually responsible for running the company so you get to be involved in the creation of all these different businesses, and then sort of their evolution without having to actually have a full time job at any of them. And you get to participate in a pretty broad cross section of the market.

Q. What's driving you these days, three years into Netscape?

A. This keeps getting more fun because we keep getting bigger. Doing a start-up is fun but it's fun in sort of a perverse way. It's sort of masochistic because you're so small and inadequate from an operational standpoint that you can't do very much. You spend a lot of time just trying do the basics _ make sure the garbage gets taken out and make sure you have enough cash in the bank. You swing between euphoria and depression because one day things look like you're on top of the world, and the next day it looks like everything is caving in. You have no leverage. You can't engage a large number of customers or partners, even if there's 300 of them calling you. So now that we're bigger, we have a tremendous amount of leverage. We can take all these ideas that we have and implement them on the product development side and get them out in the market extremely quickly and on a broad scale.

Q. Is there a Marc Andreessen book in the works?

A. Only your local bookstore knows for sure.