… is a genius. First he has the idea for Mosaic, the first real graphical browser and the main reason the Web reached a tipping point in 1993 — and co-authors the code with Eric Bina. Then in 1994 he co-founds Netscape with Jim Clark, and sparks off the first Internet boom when they took the company public in August 1995. He then founded Loudcloud and morphed it eventually into Opsware, an outfit with 550 employees and $100m in annual revenues. Now, he’s sold Opsware to HP for more than $1.6 billion in cash.

Today we have announced that Opsware is being acquired by Hewlett-Packard for more than $1.6 billion in cash, or $14.25 per share.

For Opsware, this means that our vision will now get delivered at much higher scale — being part of HP’s software business will ensure that our software will be used by a much larger number of organizations and have an even more dramatic impact on the industry than we would possibly have been able to reach by ourselves over the next several years.

And he maintains a terrific, witty, thoughtful, civilised blog. Oh — and he founded Ning, the DIY social networking service.

Pure genius.