All Things Digital

Silicon Valley luminary Marc Andreessen (pictured here) has been asked to join the board of Facebook, according to several sources with knowledge of the situation.

While the arrangement is not completed yet, sources said the longtime entrepreneur has verbally agreed to accept the post to become the fourth member of the board of the Palo Alto, Calif.-based social-networking site.

Other board members include Accel Partners Jim Breyer, Founders Fund’s Peter Thiel and Facebook CEO and Founder Mark Zuckerberg. Greylock Partners David Sze also has observer status on the board.

Since he co-founded browser pioneer Netscape in the 1990s and helped usher in the Internet age, Andreessen has been an active investor and has created several successful start-ups.

His most current effort has been Ning, also based in Palo Alto, which is a white-label social-networking company that recently raised another $60 million in funding.

If Andreessen joins Facebook’s board, the move is yet another sign that the much-hyped start-up, which has undergone some growing pains over the last year, as well as garnering a $15 billion valuation, is growing up by bringing some major high-profile tech figures into its ranks.

Last night, for example, BoomTown broke the news that Google PR head Elliot Schrage had accepted a similiar job at Facebook.

That comes after Facebook hired another top Google (GOOG) exec, Sheryl Sandberg, as its COO, in March.

A while back, BoomTown suggested that Web 1.0 golden boy Andreessen–pictured here on the iconic Time magazine cover in 1996–would be a good mentor for current golden boy Zuckerberg, in a piece I did about potential execs for Facebook.

As I wrote in February:

But why not go for the man who was Zuckerberg before Zuckerberg was cool. Yes, the shiniest of Golden Geeks himself, Marc Andreessen.

I could go on and on about the similarities I find between the two, if you compared today’s Zuckerberg with the Netscape founder in the mid-1990s.

From their arrogant innocence to their visionary qualities to their enfant-terrible charm, it is almost as if they were separated at birth.

But now Andreessen is all grown up and much, much matured from when I covered him. He has become all calm and sage and he even does a very decent blog.

Plus, he has also started and run a number of start-ups after Netscape, giving him deeper managerial experience over the last dozen years.

And, best of all, Andreessen knows the pressure of being the best-thing-since-sliced-bread in the tech sector, and its inevitable downside too.

Overall, a real mentor and partner for Zuckerberg, making a perfect pair of Golden Geeks.”

In the late 1990s, during the height of the bubble of Web 1.0, there was a poolside charity auction at an Industry Standard conference for a variety of items donated by Web luminaries.

A tie from John Doerr, the right to push eBay CEO Meg Whitman in the pool and also the little black dress that then-CEO Katrina Garnett of CrossWorlds Software had worn and made famous in a Richard Avedon-shot ad for the company.

I am blanking on the person who bought the dress, but what was most interesting about that item was that the same person kept upping his own price, and went several rounds bidding against himself before winning the prize for a lot of money.

It was amusing at the time, a symbol of a very frothy time indeed.

Today is not that time, so I was a bit perplexed at why Microsoft (MSFT) would top its own bid and raise its $31-per-share offer for Yahoo (YHOO) to $34 a share, as suggested by Citigroup (C) analyst Mark Mahaney yesterday.

There seem to be no other rivals and not much has changed since the software giant made its unsolicited offer at the start of February, except for time passing.

Of course, the only reason to do so then is to get the deal done sooner than later and perhaps the number was a public message to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer of that fact (as I said before, I am sure there are plenty of private messages too).

And while I am in the camp that Yahoo, well run, is probably worth a whole lot more (see this post I did at the start of this slog) than even $34–although perhaps not the $40 that Yahoo claimed last week–it’s still a matter of actually getting Microsoft to pay it by bidding against itself.

As I saw back in the roaring ’90s, it could happen. The question is: What will it take to get Microsoft to do it?

My guess if it happens: Sheer boredom and the cost of wasted time during which rival Google (GOOG) keeps chugging along and a distracted Microsoft and Yahoo do not.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.