Marc Andreessen, the Netscape co-founder and one-time poster boy of the Net entrepreneurial crowd, is stepping down from his short-lived stint as chief technology officer at America Online.
AOL made the surprising announcement on Friday that it was replacing Andreessen with William Raduchel, the chief strategy officer at Sun Microsystems. Andreessen will remain with the company as a part-time consultant.
See also: AOL Names Andreessen CTO- - - - - -
The big question: Was the executive shuffle a mutual decision?
Not unlikely.
"Marc's a very entrepreneurial fellow. It doesn't surprise me at all that he wants to do more of that. Once you get the bug, it's very hard to get over," said Eric Hahn, a friend of Andreessen's and former Netscape CTO who now runs the venture fund Inventure Group.
"It's not his best use to have him managing thousands of people," Hahn said.
AOL, for its part, cast Andreessen's departure as an amicable one.
"It was definitely mutual and coordinated," an AOL spokesman said.
Analysts didn't see the executive shakeup as anything that should worry investors. In fact, AOL shares barely budged in the wake of the announcement, closing up about 6 cents at $96.31.
What's more, Andreessen's move didn't surprise investors.
"My take has been that Marc Andreessen was a very successful entrepreneur at Netscape, and as Netscape got larger and was eventually folded into AOL, Marc had to make a decision about his career," said Dawn Simon, an analyst at Brown Brothers Harriman.
In other words, Andreessen, 28, could either stay in management or go back to what he knows best: starting up Internet companies.
Simon said she had a clue Andreessen was leaning toward the latter when he recently started selling shares in AOL.
Others saw the career move as one whose time had come.
"Marc has no role in AOL," said Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future, which tracks trends in technology. "Marc is the pioneer. He starts small companies. I was hoping Marc would leave sooner."
Abhishek Gami, an analyst at William Blair & Co., said the Andreessen-AOL matching was never the greatest fit. "AOL's core forte has not been understanding where technology's going so much as understanding where people are going."
And Andreessen certainly isn't hurting at this stage. "He certainly has the capital and the smarts to do anything he feels like doing at this point. There's no end to the number of phone calls he'll be getting," Gami said.
Even since helping to take Netscape public in a spectacular initial offering in 1995, Andreessen has been a role model for Internet entrepreneurs seeking fast riches.
Andreessen was a member of the University of Illinois team that developed Mosaic, the first easy-to-use software for viewing information on the Web, and a predecessor to the phenomenally popular Netscape browser.
Netscape Communications was founded in 1994 when Jim Clark, a successful Silicon Valley executive, discovered the talent of the then-22-year-old student programmer who had created one of the world's first programs for easily navigating the Internet.
The most famous product of that collaboration, the Netscape browser, quickly became the tool of choice among the early Web users.
Soon enough, however, Netscape had to contend with near-crushing competition from Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
Last November, America Online agreed to acquire Netscape in a stock deal valued at more than $4 billion. The move gave Netscape backing from the biggest Internet service provider in the world, and as part of the deal Andreessen agreed to stay on as AOL's technology chief.
Analysts said America Online needed to keep Andreessen on for awhile after the Netscape purchase, for both the company's public image and internal morale. However, Andreessen's reputation was still that of an entrepreneur rather than of an executive at a huge corporation.
At least that's how AOL CEO Steve Case cast the company's decision to replace Andreessen.
"Marc wanted to spend more time working with startups," Case said. "Marc will focus on what he likes doing best -- nurturing the rapidly growing number of new companies in Silicon Valley and elsewhere."
Andreessen, for his part, said that even during his executive stint at AOL, his biggest interest was in working with new ventures. He had helped arrange AOL's acquisition of Spinner Networks, a Webcaster, and Nullsoft Inc., makers of MP3 player software, earlier this summer.
"What I really discovered was that a lot of my job at AOL was dealing with outside startups," Andreessen said.
Andreessen hasn't provided any inkling, however, about what new companies he'll be working with next. Hahn says he has an idea, but wouldn't spill any details.
Although he is among Silicon Valley's most famous success stories, Andreessen isn't setting himself up to be the next Bill Gates or Michael Dell, Hahn said.
"It's not that Marc isn't living up to Bill Gates, it's just that they're very different people. Their personal aspirations are differing, their upbringing is different -- everything," he said.
Nevertheless, the Silicon Valley crowd will be watching Andreessen's next moves very closely.
"What Marc does next will prove to people he wasn't a one-shot wonder," Saffo said.
