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Until this month Andreessen lived in a rented two-bedroom house in Palo Alto with his girlfriend Elizabeth Horn, who sells commercial real estate. He gets to the office around 10 a.m. and rushes home at 5 p.m. to walk their bulldog. Until about 3 each morning, Andreessen answers E-mail, reviews the status of products and, as corporate vice president of technology, helps plan Netscape's next moves (he doesn't write code anymore). "Marc hasn't changed," says Horn. "He still buys 20 or more CDs of classical music at a time when we go to Tower Records. We live in a modest house with books and records and computers and bulldog toys, not art and sculpture and glittery things." Andreessen and Horn have just moved to another rented house, this one with three bedrooms. "I have a girlfriend," he says. "That's one of the reasons we're getting the house. And we have a dog. That's another reason."
Fifteen years ago, Steve Jobs knew how Marc Andreessen feels today. Apple Computer, which he founded with Steve Wozniak, went public in 1980 when Jobs was 25. But in 1985 he was pushed out of the company (today he doesn't even use Apple products, although a broken Macintosh he calls a "sculpture" sits in a closet), and his fortunes seemed to dim. Later that year, he started NeXT, but its computers never caught on the way the Macs did.
ALL OF A SUDDEN, JOBS IS BACK on top. In 1986 he paid filmmaker George Lucas a reported $10 million for a small firm specializing in computer animation. Over the next six years Jobs poured another $40 million of his own money into the company, now called Pixar, as it set out to make the first-ever computer-animated feature film. The result was Toy Story, which since its release in November has grossed more than $177 million at the box office. The Pixar IPO, timed to take place just after Toy Story opened, was a huge hit too. The share price more than doubled in the first hour of trading, and Jobs, who owns 80% of the company, was a billion dollars richer. Since then, the price has dropped so that Jobs' holdings are worth a mere $728 million.
Sitting in NeXT's offices in Redwood City, California, Jobs is slightly more subdued than the hyperenergetic--and, some would say, megalomaniacal--pitchman of old. "You have to work differently once you have a family," he says. (He lives with his wife and three children in a large house in Palo Alto.) "When I was in my 20s, I literally would work 18-hour days, seven days a week. You do that with a family, and you won't have a family for very long."
Jobs makes the point that Pixar, like other IPO overnight successes, was really anything but an overnight success. "The things that I've done in my life have required a lot of years of work before they took off," he says. He and Wozniak started work on Apple in 1975. "So it was really six years of work before we went public. And Pixar has been 10 years."
Jobs insists that he isn't in it for the money. "The thing that drives me and my colleagues at both Apple and Pixar," he says, "is that you see something very compelling to you, and you don't quite know how to get it, but you know, sometimes intuitively, it's within your grasp. And it's worth putting in years of your life to make it come into existence."