Serial entrepreneur While Marc Andreessen has done it again.
The founder of Opsware will receive about $160 million as his share of the company’s $1.6 billion sale to Hewlett-Packard. On his blog Monday, Andreessen described the eight-year run of his company, which began with the name Loudcloud, as an “unbelievable journey.”
“Loudcloud took off like a rocketship,” Andreessen wrote, “raised $350 million in equity and debt financing, went public in March 2001, and was rapidly nearing $100 million in annual recurring managed services revenue when the entire market blew up and virtually all of our competitors and peers went bankrupt.”
He said the company did a complete restart, with a new name, in September of 2002. The company now has more than $100 million in annual revenue, 550 employees and is one of the fastest growing software firms in the world, he wrote.
What’s next for Andreessen, who also helped start Netscape? He told The New York Times that he plans to jump directly into Ning, a Silicon Valley start-up that allows computer novices to develop their own social networking sites.
On the web:
HP buys my company Opsware for more than $1.6 billion in cash – Marc Andreessen blog
H.P. Making 2 Purchases to Push Data – New York Times