By Michael Liedtke
The Associated Press

SUNNYVALE, Calif. - Marc Andreessen spent most of his 20s reveling in the Internet mania he helped set off a decade ago with a Web browser called Mosaic.

ANDREESSEN FILE

Name: Marc Andreessen Age: 31 Occupation: Chairman, Opsware Inc. Hometown: Palo Alto, Calif. Recent career: Chairman and co-founder, Opsware Inc. (formerly Loudcloud), 1999-present; chief technology officer, America Online, 1999; co-founder, Netscape Communications Corp., 1994-1999; co-inventor, Mosaic, National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Family: Single Quote: "There is very little vision going on right now. There's a lot of practical nuts and bolts. Sometimes (people) want to hear futuristic stuff, sometimes they don't. Right now, they don't."

He's preparing to devote his 30s to something more mundane - sifting through the high-tech wasteland created by the ensuing investment meltdown.

"We helped create the problem by introducing the technology and we're hoping to help clean it up now," Andreessen says.

His current venture, a sputtering software firm called Opsware, is designed to automate the management of all the technology required to run Web sites.

A tedious task, it is, compared with the 31-year-old technologist's exhilarating journey after the April 1993 release of Mosaic, which he and other engineers invented at the University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

Among other innovations, Mosaic enabled the display of text and images on the same Web page for the first time. It also enabled the retrieval of online documents by clicking on a link instead of typing a series of numbers.

Mosaic's breakthrough laid the groundwork for Netscape Communications, which Andreessen co-founded in mid-1994.

Mosaic, then Netscape, became cyberspace's Big Bang, triggering an online revolution that altered corporate America's landscape. Huge fortunes were made and lost on Netscape and all the Internet companies its browser spawned.

The whirlwind experience transformed Andreessen from a geek who stayed up all night writing code to an entrepreneur with the clout and connections to start his own business.

Andreessen is still trying to prove he is more than a one-hit wonder.

"I think he is relishing the challenge," says Mike McCue, a former Netscape executive. "Netscape happened so quickly and occurred amid so much craziness that Marc wants to prove that he can build a business from scratch, the old-fashioned way."

He appears to have his work cut out for him.

Opsware had accumulated nearly $500 million in losses in three years before the company shifted gears in August by selling a big chunk of its business to EDS for $63.5 million.

Andreessen is counting on a 3-year, $52 million licensing agreement with EDS to make Opsware profitable.

Opsware has not mesmerized investors the way Netscape did. The company is now trading at about $2 per share.

Nevertheless, Opsware remains one of Andreessen's better investments. He says he paid an average of $1.56 per share for his Opsware stake - a $16.4 million investment worth about $21 million now.

To succeed, Andreessen reasons, entrepreneurs must focus on "something not taken seriously, something that people would never think of if they were thinking normally."

Opsware's early adversity probably will help Andreessen make better decisions in the years ahead, says Jon Mittelhauser, who worked with him on Mosaic and Netscape.

"The failures that Marc has had recently are going to be just as important as his success," Mittelhauser says. "If nothing else, the failures help frame the reasons that Netscape succeeded."