Marc Andreessen’s name is not quite the household word in Silicon Valley it was in the mid-1990s, when he was a wunderkind at Netscape Communications fighting the browser wars against mighty Microsoft (MSFT). Still, the idea he might get involved in the same market more than a decade later is an intriguing thought.

A person familiar with Andreessen’s plans said he is an investor in a Silicon Valley startup called RockMelt that is working on some form of Web browser. Andreessen did not respond to requests for comment.

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In February 2007, a friend called Marc Andreessen, a founder of Netscape and a board member of Facebook, and asked if he wanted to meet with a man with an idea that sounded preposterous on its face. Always game for something new, Mr. Andreessen headed to the San Francisco airport late one night to hear the guy out. A junior member of a large and powerful organization with a thin, but impressive, résumé, he was about to take on far more powerful forces in a battle for leadership.

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Ning founder Marc Andreessen is already on the record about Microsoft’s proposed takeover of Yahoo: He thinks it will likely go through, and turn out to be a good deal. It’s a remarkably sanguine take for someone who saw Netscape bought and destroyed by AOL. In a thorough analysis for which he dragooned two corporate lawyers, Andreessen elaborates: Yahoo has few defenses, aside from a poison pill, and Microsoft will likely succeed. For all its thoroughness, the analysis is less interesting for what it says about Microsoft-Yahoo than for what it says about Andreessen.

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We have seen extensive press coverage of Microsoft’s pursuit of Yahoo over the last few months. However, I have not seen a detailed analysis of how a full hostile takeover might play out–the kind of analysis that you would be receiving if you were a Microsoft or Yahoo board member. So I asked a pair of expert corporate attorneys–Michael Sullivan and Ed Deibert at Howard Rice Nemerovski Canady Falk and Rabkin in San Francisco–to work up such an analysis.

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