Marc Andreesson and Ben Horowitz Launch New VC Firm

The dumpy economy might make it seem like a bad time to launch an investment firm...but Netscape co-founder and Mosaic developer Marc Andreessen things the timing is perfect.

The current recession and general economic turmoil might make it seem like the wrong time to empty out one’s pockets on a bunch of speculative ventures, but Marc Andreessen—co-founder of Netscape and one of the developers of the Web browser that started it all, NCSA Mosaic—has partnered with Ben Horowitz to launch a new venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, with a $300 million starting fund. Andreessen and Horowitz have extensive experience in the tech industry, having founded three companies and acted as angel investors in dozens of outfits, including companies like Digg, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Aliph.

“We’ve had some time to test our investment approach and support great entrepreneurs,” said Andreessen. “After years of angel investing, we decided to go pro and raise a fund.”

Andreessen currently serves as chairman of the social networking hub site Ning and has seats on the boards of Facebook and eBay. Andreesson was one of the developers of NCSA Mosaic, the first Web browser to gain significant traction in the Internet community; he went on to co-found Netscape (whose browser also had a major impact on the World Wide Web and eventually, indirectly gave birth to Firefox), serve as AOL’s CTO after AOL’s acquisition of Netscape, and founded LoudCloud.

Andreessen says his VC firm will favor investments in startups founded by folks with strong technical backgrounds who have leadership potentials. But he also sees the firm getting into venture-stage and late-stage investment rounds in companies that are already gaining momentum and experiencing high growth. Horowitz and Andreessen will take on board positions at some of the firms they back.

“We are hugely in favor of the technical founder,” Andreessen wrote in his blog. “We are hugely in favor of the founder who intends to be CEO. Not all founders can become great CEOs, but most of the great companies in our industry were run by a founder for a long period of time, often decades, and we believe that pattern will continue.”