Top 200 Collectors

Among the first titans of the tech industry, Marc Andreessen made his name in the early 1990s, just a few years after Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web in 1989. He co-authored Mosaic, considered the first popular web browser, which had its initial release in 1993, and then co-founded Netscape, another browser popular throughout the ’90s. He now runs Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, and serves on the board of Facebook. 

Scion of a real estate billionaire, Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen quite literally wrote the book on philanthropy, Giving 2.0: Transform Your Giving and Our World, published in 2011. The book spawned an online course of the same name. Those efforts are the more public-facing ventures of the Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen Foundation, the nonprofit philanthropy “incubator” she founded that works with young billionaires—Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg among them—to persuade them to “give away their wealth now, rather than later,” according to the Washington Post. 

On the art front, Arrillaga-Andreessen has been instrumental in introducing Silicon Valley elites to the gallery system. (The Valley’s newly minted tech millionaires have been notably slow to build serious art collections with their quickly made fortunes.) With her encouragement, mega-gallery Pace, with eight locations around the world, opened an Art and Technology space in 2016 in Menlo Park, California, offering 20,000 square of (what else?) cutting-age digital art. (That venture has since closed, though Pace continued to maintain a gallery in Palo Alto for some years afterward.) 

In 2020, she was elected to a 10-year term as a trustee of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Arrillaga-Andreessen has two degrees in art history and collects heavily in postwar American art, including the likes of Jasper Johns and Agnes Martin. “At the epicenter of social, so much is public, and for true art collectors it is deeply personal,” Arrillaga-Andreessen told the Guardian in a 2016 interview. “Having art come through the wires will meet this community in a unique way that works on paper or sculpture may or may not.”