(2 of 6)
IT IS IN THEIR STYLE THAT TODAY'S millionaires differ most strikingly from the new rich of the past. Rather than build huge houses of questionable taste in Newport or Palm Beach or Aspen, the brand-new millionaires may live in two-bedroom apartments and wear T shirts and jeans. Rather than jet to Tahoe for the weekend in their Gulfstream, they are liable to be with the kids at the neighborhood soccer league. Running-shoe chic is often a pose in Hollywood and Silicon Valley, but this modesty appears genuine. Today's newly superrich are models of free enterprise, except for one thing: they don't seem all that interested in money.
Marc Andreessen greets a visitor at his office in Mountain View, California, by saying, "Got my Armani suit on today." He's actually wearing a sport shirt, jeans and clunky boots. When he's off duty, he may lose the boots. Andreessen is 6-ft. 4-in. tall and has a baby face and lopsided smile. Talking about the day he made his first $50 million, he says, "I was at home in bed. I had been up until, like, 3 in the morning, working, so I woke up at 11, logged in from home, looked at Quote.Com. My eyes went..." He makes a face of astonishment. The stock was expected to sell at $28; instead it opened at $71 (it has since had a 2-for-1 split). "Then," he says, "I went back to sleep."
Andreessen grew up in Wisconsin, where his father is a retired salesman and his mother works for Lands' End. While an undergraduate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he helped develop a program called Mosaic that makes it easier to navigate around the Internet. Paid $6.85 an hour, he was actually supposed to be writing software for three-dimensional scientific visualization. The university was enthusiastic about Mosaic, however. It gave the program away, earning the team that wrote it the undying devotion of the Internet underground. Jim Clark, who had founded Silicon Graphics, a computer firm known for its workstations, sent Andreessen an E-mail message in early 1994 suggesting that they talk. Using Clark's capital, they founded Netscape, with the idea of becoming a kind of Microsoft of the Internet. Their breakthrough product has been the Internet browser called Navigator.
Like other IPO millionaires, Andreessen is careful to point out how difficult it would be for him to sell his stock. "You can't just sum up the total value of the stock and say that that's actually what somebody has in his pocket," he says. "There are a lot of both legal and practical restrictions on what actually happens to the money." Under the provisions of most IPOs, officers and executives who have stock or stock options cannot begin selling shares for several months. In addition, the sec places strict limits on the number of shares that officers and key executives can sell each quarter. Finally, insiders are inhibited from selling their stock because other investors might take it as a bad sign and start selling too. "It's all still funny money," Andreessen says. Asked if he feels rich, he fidgets. "Not really," he says. "When I want to go out to dinner, I go out to dinner, but other than that..."