A Great Week at Radar

I know I owe you the next installment in my Venture Capital 2.0 monologue,  but I wanted to take a moment to brag about some cool things happening at Radar Networks.  Radar is a company we funded in Q2 of this year.  You may recall I refer to it as my "Semantic Web" investment. Now they describe themselves as providing "content enrichment."

Well, some very exciting things are happening there.  About a week ago, I went to a Board meeting with my colleague, Steve Hall from Vulcan Capital (who is a great partner, and whom I highly recommend to any entrepreneur, BTW).  We got a view of the alpha version of the service they are building and we both came out of there saying, "Wow, ship it."  Of course, it is alpha, so we won't, yet.

Well, now a couple of other folks who ought to know better have joined us.  Monday (August 28)  we are announcing that Lew Tucker has joined us as VP  and CTO.  You may not know Lew, but you know his work. He is the guy that conceived of and built AppExchange over at Salesforce.  He was VP AppExchange. And you know what a runaway success AppExchange is for Salesforce.com.  Before AppExchange, Lew was the guy at Sun that turned Sun's web presence in to a showcase for Java.  He was part of the Java team and responsible for all of Sun's web-facing applications.  Lew is all about building open, extensible, leading-edge showcase applications.  Getting off the Salesforce rocket and onto the Radar Networks launchpad is a huge compliment to Nova and what his team has built.  Lew is a fantastic add.

If that weren't enough, Mike Clary has joined our Board at Radar as well. This, too, will be announced.  Officially Mike is an Entrepreneur in Residence over at Kleiner, Perkins.  The reason he's there, and the reason we wanted him to join us, is that he has unparalleled experience in taking leading-edge technology and driving it into the mainstream.  Mike has been Bill Joy's 'go to' guy for many years, taking lots of innovation from Sun and moving it into the market.  One of the most important achievements to his credit is the transition of Java from internal R&D to a licensed, adopted standard throughout the world. 

One measure of who these two are is revealed a historical social network of Sun Microsystems. A plot of connectedness of key people and concepts reveals that Lew and Mike are two of the most important players that you never heard of in Sun's rise throughout the 1990's.  I tend to think of them as the Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce of Java.

Both Lew and Mike have their pick of opportunities with which they could align. We are flattered that they chose our little company.  Acceleration of momentum is one of the most intoxicating elements of early stage investing.  Having others that you respect see the same shape emerging from the mist is one of the real sources of gratification. 

Another "Wow." 

Two in one week.