Unemployment is through the roof, but Marc Andreessen just landed a new job: Venture capitalist. The Netscape co-founder officially has $300 million to play with, and that's all the more impressive for the black marks on his investing record.

Andreessen is a board member at Facebook and a longtime adviser to CEO Mark Zuckerberg. But, as he confessed to PEHub, Andreessen passed on a chance to make an angel investment in the social network years ago:

Did you have an opportunity invest in Facebook as an angel?

 Damn, she asked the question. [Laughs.] Let's put it this way, I've known them from the beginning. I probably could have if I had tried hard, but I didn't.

Because?

 Because I didn't. [Smiles.] ...things just really happen fast, and Facebook was happening at a super high rate of speed and things just didn't click.

So there's that. Then there's the fact that, save for one year at Netscape, Andreessen's companies have consistently lost money; one, Opsware, lost money for six years straight before it was acquired by HP.

In an interview with Yahoo's Sarah Lacy, Andreessen claims his new fund's edge will be its ability to pick the winners (see excerpt above). Happily for the software maven and his investors, history is no guarantee of future performance.