Marc Andreessen to spin his web magic on HP's board

Posted Sep 18th 2009 10:30AM by Tom Taulli
Filed under: Management, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ)

It's hard to believe that Marc Andreessen is only 38 years old, especially in light of his awesome resume, which includes the creation of the Mosaic browser and the legendary company Netscape. While he could have easily retired years ago, he has continued to work hard. Hey, if not, it would be a waste of an amazing mind.

In fact, it seems that Andreessen has been accelerating his activities lately. For example, he setup a venture fund called Andreessen Horowitz.

And for this week, Andreessen has joined the board of Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ). For any tech veteran, this is a highly prestigious position.

But it will also be a boost to HP. While the company has made great strides in cost efficiency, it is time to find new strategies to be more creative, take bigger risks.

This means venturing into areas like social networking, cloud computing, the real-time web and so on. Of course, this suits Andreessen's core abilities: he is the co-founder of Ning.com; on the board of Facebook and eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY); and an investor in Twitter as well as LinkedIn. He's also part of a group that wants to purchase Skype.

You have to wonder though: where does he find the time? I'm not sure. But getting just a little time with Andreessen is probably a very good thing.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including The Complete M&A Handbook.

Tags: featured, hewlett-packard, hp, hpq, Marc Andreessen, MarcAndreessen