NewsGator has a new CEO – JB Holston. Greg Reinacker and I are extremely excited to welcome JB to the team.

When Greg and I first started talking about Mobius investing in NewsGator, the topic of CEO came up early. I’d had a few meetings with Greg, thought he was awesome, but also felt that – given his (our) ambition for the company – it would be a misuse of his talents for him to be CEO. In the words of one of my partners, Greg is “a CTO from central casting” – fantastic vision, extremely articulate about the technology he’s into and its business impact, passionate about what he does, and an unbelievably capable software developer (one of those 100x everyone else guys).

Once I’d decided that I was serious about an investment, I broached the topic of CEO with Greg. I was direct – telling him that I wanted to invest – but wanted us to hire a CEO that could be his business partner. After describing the respective roles I felt Greg and the CEO should play, I encouraged Greg to talk to a number of other entrepreneurs – including some that are founding CTO’s and some that are founding CEO’s – to better understand the respective positions and responsibilities. In addition, I was clear that while the requirement of hiring a CEO was a condition of my investment (I was willing to make the investment in advance of identifying the person, but I wanted a commitment that we would hire a CEO), the choice of CEO was ultimately Greg’s (we’d both work on finding someone, but I gave him veto power.) After a few more conversations, Greg was willing to sign up for this and we moved forward with the investment.

One of the first “potential CEO’s” I introduced Greg to was JB Holston. I first met JB when I moved to Colorado in the mid-90’s – he was connected to the Softbank consellation through his roles as President of Ziff Davis International (owned by Softbank at the time) and his involvement in starting up Yahoo! Europe. We took an instant liking to each other and kept up over the years. JB took a role as CEO of a company called NetSage and over the next few years he pitched me a few times on investing (I turned it down each time, much to his chagrin). Eventually, I introduced him to one of my companies – Finali – as I thought there might be an interesting strategic fit between NetSage and Finali. There was and Finali ended up acquiring NetSage and incorporating the NetSage technology into its vision of a next generation call center. JB worked on the Finali executive team for a year and then left to write a book and enjoy some time with his family. A year and a half ago, he called me with an idea for a Colorado-based progressive advocacy organization. Within six months, he’d rallied funding from me, Jared Polis, and a number of other folks and created the Rocky Mountain Progressive Network. An integral part of RMPN was its blog – which was my first real exposure to the blogosphere. I also got to see JB in startup mode and was blown away.

Greg took an instant liking to JB. I reinforced that I wanted Greg to make sure he was completely comfortable with whoever we chose as CEO – and was equally clear with JB that it was ultimately Greg’s choice. The two of them came up with a two month “trial period” – where JB acted as a consultant to NewsGator. This gave them a chance to get to know each other in a work context, understand their respective styles and goals, and make sure they were in alignment. Obviously, this trial period was a success.

I’ve heard (and seen) numerous ridiculous VC / founder / CEO stories over the last decade. I learned an extremely hard lesson in my first venture funded deal (where I was the entrepreneur, not the VC). I was the founding angel investor of NetGenesis and chairman of the company. My close friend Raj Bhargava was CEO and co-founder (with three others – it started with five others, but that’s another story). Raj was 21 at the time and NetGenesis was his first company. We had great early success and were a hot young Internet company in the 1995-1996 time frame. When we went out to raise our first round of venture capital (after raising about $2m from angels, McAfee, and Tivoli), we got four term sheets – all very attractive for an early stage company. One of the firms (and VCs) did an incredible job of romancing Raj and convinced him that he’d mentor Raj and help him become a successful CEO post investment. We chose that firm to lead the financing. Two weeks after the financing closed, the VC in question asked me out to breakfast (I was still chairman post financing – and – at that moment – a pretty optimistic and happy chairman.) At breakfast – after a little chitchat (I didn’t know the VC very well – I assumed we were starting to build a relationship) – he came out and told me he wanted to replace Raj with “an experienced CEO”. He was clear that he wanted Raj to stay in the company (“there must be some logical role for him,”) but that this was too important an investment to have a young, inexperienced guy like Raj at the helm. This evolved in a predictable way – after the initial negative emotional response from me and Raj, we both accepted (Raj much faster and more gracefully than me) that the VC was calling the shots and we lined up behind helping the VC recruit an experienced CEO. Three months later an “experienced CEO” (who ultimately was fired by the board and replaced by another experienced CEO – who ended up making the company very successful) was hired and three months later Raj left the company (he had nothing to do) and I left the board (I couldn’t bear to interact with the VCs involved at that point and decided I had better things to do so I “took my marbles and went home.”)

The lesson – which as I write this still riles me up – is that it’s much more effective to be upfront about any issues prior to an investment. In my experience, about half of the VCs believe this (and it’s not firm specific). Now – I’ve fired plenty of CEO’s (and founders) after an investment – that’s a different issue. However, as a VC is deciding whether or not to make an investment, and an entrepreneur is deciding whether or not to take a VCs investment, it’s my strong belief that both sides should be direct, honest, and clear about their views and motivations as they will have to live with each other post deal. Unfortunately, in the desire to “sell the other side,” people often cut corners, aren’t upfront and direct about what they are thinking, or feel that they can finesse the situation after a deal is done. In the words of my 15 year old niece “gross, icky dude.”

I’m very happy with how Greg and I approached this issue. Interestingly, it strongly reinforced my desire to work with Greg as it increased my confidence that we could be clear and honest with each other about even the most sensitive issues. I got to see his thought process in action as he thought through my request. Hopefully, I built the same level of trust with him as a result of being completely open about what I thought we should do an why. JB and Greg now have their own relationship (independent of me) and it’s cool to watch them work together to build this company.

Welcome JB – today the the blogosphere has another extremely strong leader and Greg has a new partner.

My long time friend Andy Sack has started blogging. Andy is currently CEO of Judy’s Book, a new local search startup funded by Ignition Partners.

Andy is a great entrepreneur. I first met him in Boston in 1995 when we was working with the original team at a new Internet startup called Agents (which turned into Firefly). Shortly after, he started a company called Abuzz and he asked me to join his board. Abuzz was originally considering creating an online auction site (damn) but ended up creating a complex but powerful email-based collaborative filtering product. Abuzz raised venture money from Flatiron Partners (I sat on the board with Jerry Colonna), Softbank Venture Capital, and DFJ. Shortly after releasing the product, NY Times Digital came calling and acquired the company. We had stars in our eyes about the ultimate valuation of NYT Digital (as they planned to go public in 2000) – with the dot com crash that didn’t happen, but Andy had negotiated a clever put in the event that the NYT Digital didn’t go public and we all got a nice big check for our share of the equity in the deal in 2000.

I then managed to rope Andy into helping me start up a company called Body Shop Digital, which was the dot com spinoff of The Body Shop (retail stores). We fell in love with Anita Roddick – the original founder of The Body Shop – and got caught up in the dot com / brick and mortar spinoff that was in fashion at the time. We should have known it was going to be a disaster when it took us six months to negotiate the deal with the UK-based company, including several long negotiating sessions where we struggled with things like their arcane (and very protective) branding strategy. Within three months of closing the deal, we realized it was going to be a disaster – while The Body Shop was a visionary company, they were consumed at the time with internal politics around the ownership and long term leadership of the company and we were merely a pawn in the game. Fortunately, we had negotiated a 31 year exclusive right to the online brand (31 one years because when we got push back on a perpetual licence, I decided that Body Shop Digital should hold the rights until I was 65 – which was 31 more years). At the end of the first year (when we needed to raise more money for the venture), we managed to get The Body Shop to buy our investment back and we recovered half of our capital. Clearly nothing to be proud of (although by the end of 2001 and into 2002, getting back fifty cents on the dollar was better than most of the investments going around.) However, Andy and I had some incredible experiences and learned a tremendous amount on this one (and were happy to get out of town with some of our skin.)

Andy then took a couple of years off as he enjoyed his new child, helped found and coach a few startups (including Quova and Kefta – both companies I invested in), and stewed on what to do next. A year ago, he started cooking on Judy’s Book – which is now up, funded, and in beta.

In addition to being an accomplished entrepreneur, Andy is a deep thinker with a huge emotional IQ. Look for some great entrepreneurial stories and revelations on his blog.

Today was a strange day. At 2:30pm, on our way back from Aspen to Boulder, I got a call from my assistant Wendy saying, “there’s a fire in Eldorado Springs – I’m driving over to your place to see what’s up and check on your dogs.” Apparently, Boulder County was doing a controlled burn just outside of Eldorado Springs and it hopped the fire line and got out of control.

We’re back home and safe as the fire is now under control (after burning 50 acres). This is our third brush with fire in four years – the original Eldorado Springs fire was actually on our land (and came within 200 yards of our house) and the Walker Ranch fire (which burned over 1000 acres in three days) was less than two miles (and – more importantly – one ridge) away. After the Eldorado Springs fire that was on our land several years ago, I went on a “fire reading binge” to learn everything I could. Fire is an amazing, scary, and primal thing – I don’t think I’ll ever get comfortable with it.

Amy and I talked briefly about chucking our mountain life and moving to Cherry Creek. Yes – it was a brief conversation.

The noise about RSS bandwidth jams finally made the NY Times today. However, that’s not what this post is about.

In the article, the NYT quotes blogger Steve Main who writes on his blog. “The whole purpose of an RSS aggregator is so that I don’t have to open my freaking Web browser to 100 different pages. By having the content right there in my aggregator, I can skim an entire article in the time it takes to open up a new Web browser. By not including full content in the RSS feed, you take away some of the productivity gains that RSS offers.”

Steve’s point is right on the money. But why did he say “freaking” instead of “fucking”. And when did “freaking” become an acceptable and uncensored substitute for “fucking” as an adjective? Now, I’m not an editor, nor do I want to be, but when I hear 10 years olds walking around saying “freaking this and freaking that” I’ve just got to wonder. I’m also not a prude – I can use the various forms and usages of the word fuck with the best of them. Freaking is just such a lame substitute for the real thing.

I’m an unashamed South Park fan (if Colorado wasn’t a swing state I’d consider writing in Cartman for president.) Amy and I watched South Park – The Passion of the Jew tonight and rolled around on the floor in laughter. The DVD included two bonus tracks – Christian Rock Hard and Red Hot Catholic Love.

If you aren’t a South Park fan, can’t handle “clearly over the reasonableness line” satire and sarcasm, or are easily offended, this is not for you. However, if you are a South Park fan, couldn’t ever figure out what was the big deal about The Passion of the Christ, or just love 90 minutes of non-stop, non-PC satire – this is it. As one would expect from the titles, each episode does actually have a moral at the end.

NewsGator announced another RSS content relationship yesterday – this time with uclick, the online arm of Universal Press Syndicate (UPS). You can now get Doonesbury, Cathy, FoxTrot, Garfield, Ziggy comics via RSS (god – I loved FoxTrot – I forgot it existed…)

Greg Reinacker (NewsGator’s founder) also put up a post discussing his thoughts about changing the NewsGator name. He’s looking for feedback – go to the post and tell him what you think. As a board member, I can assure you that your opinion will count here as we’re currently pondering what to do.

Tim Robbins is a genius.  In 1994, he made a satirical movie called Bob Roberts that documented a fictional right-wing candidate’s (Bob Roberts – played by Tim Robbins) run for senate in Pennsylvania against a 30-year incumbant democrat (played by Gore Vidal) in the 1990 election cycle.  Amy and I saw it in Boston when it came out and both “kind of remembered it.”

We watched it tonight.  We’re both tired from the week and I’m sick, so it was an easy decision to lay on the couch and melt our brains with a movie.  Oops – wrong movie.

Bob Roberts is incredibly handsome, charismatic, a son of hippies who runs away and goes to military school, makes a fortune on Wall Street, and then becomes a folk singer who decides to run for office while trading Nikkei futures (“you can always get information before everyone else – you just have to know how and work for it,”) travelling around in a campaign bus that says “Roberts PRIDE” on it, and starting each day with a fencing match of indeterminate length before hopping on his motorcycle to lead the tour bus to the next campaign stop.

It’s magnificent.  And frightening.  And depressing.  The songs are poetry (in that sick, twisted way) – Robbins performs them all.  As a character, Bob Roberts is incredible and goes to any end to get elected, including faking his own attempted assasination.  Robbins plays him flawlessly, which is deliciously ironic given how liberal Robbins is.

It’s amazing that 10 years later it’s right on the money.  Bob Roberts is a winner when you get sick of watching the CNN or Fox election coverage.

I have a close friend – Jenny Lawton – who is a long time, extremely talented, and irrepressible entrepreneur.  For a decade she ran a high-end network integration company that was doing Internet stuff well before Internet stuff was cool.  She sold that company to a public company that was a large application service provider and stayed on for several years, playing a number of different leadership roles in that company. 

She retired (burned out, got tired, decided to move on) and – rather than dive back in to technology – bought a bookstore called Just Books in her home town of Old Greenwich, CT.  Several months later, she decided to expand and opened a second book store (Just Books, Too). 

Today she announced that she is buying the coffee shop next to one of the bookstores.

Viva entrepreneurship – way to go Jenny!  If you are ever near Old Greenwich (or Greenwich where their other store is located), stop in, tell Jenny hi, and buy some books (and coffee) from her. 

If you follow my Read Recently list, you know that I plowed through a lot of books this summer.  However, I’ve been stuck on What Einstein Told His Cook for two weeks.  It’s not a bad book (in fact, if you are a foodie, it’s a very interesting book.)  However, as I’ve been crushed with work the past two weeks, I haven’t been reading much and the book hasn’t pulled me in to escape from the world.

When I was a teenager (and reading a ton – remember the “bookworm” – ok – that was me) I decided that it was ok to simply stop reading a book when I wasn’t getting through it.  I know a lot of folks that seem to be unable to bail on a book – I’ve never completely understood this as I think it feels liberating to decide that a book wasn’t meant to be finished.

On to the next one – Blue Mountain: Turning Dreams into Reality – Susan Polis’ story of how she, her husband Stephen, and her son Jared created a greeting card giant that spun off Bluemountain.com – one of the most financially successful Internet bubble-era exits.