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The Secret Life of a Serial CEO

Four months later, Cramer seems a little different than I remember him. He appears a bit sharper-edged, a little faster to pull out his Treo. He's speaking more quickly. Maybe it's just the coffee.

He explains that he stopped taking calls about CEO opportunities shortly after our last meeting. "It's like looking for a house," he says. "After a month, you've seen everything promising on the market, and there's no point in looking anymore." But he recently started looking again. There's a biodiesel start-up that looks interesting, but he's made a decision: He doesn't want to settle for something interesting. He's determined to build the Next Big Thing online.

Any promising prospects? As a matter of fact, he knows one outfit that might come close, though it's not one he intends to run. He recently joined the board of that band-management start-up, which is called Nimbit. The real money in the music business, he points out, has traditionally been in high-profile bands that are promoted by major record labels. But now that music is freely sold, bought, and shared on the Web, artists don't necessarily need the big-money backing of a label. They can do nearly everything themselves online--and make more money because they get to keep most of it. As a result, the money flowing to independent bands is expected to grow from about 20 percent of music industry revenue to more than half; indie music is already a $16 billion market, he says. There are plenty of online sites that help independent musicians sell MP3s, and sites that sell CDs, and sites that sell merchandise, and sites that sell tickets to concerts, making for a heavily fragmented industry. What's missing is a service that coordinates and monitors all of these activities. That's Nimbit. "I love the vision," he says. "And it addresses that artistic side of me."

The investors want him to be CEO, he says, but he has accepted only the title of executive chairman. "I want to mentor the young guy who's the CEO-founder and help the company get funded," he says. "I'm just giving them two to three days a week of my time. That leaves me time to paint and play music."

As it turns out, he and the Nimbit team are planning to meet the day after tomorrow to go over the presentation for the company's first pitch to VCs, scheduled in two weeks. "They already have a million in angel funding, but I don't like angel funding," Cramer says. "Angels are for small ideas. They need VC money." But the team needs to gird for battle, he adds: "Boston VCs don't get the music business. And the process of raising VC money is all about making entrepreneurs jump through hoops. That's how they learn about you. They want to see what kind of stick-to-it-iveness you've got."

But he knows how to work the VC process, he notes, and he has faith in it, just as the VCs have a lot of faith in him. "When they say no, there's a good reason," he says.

Febuary 28, 2007
Nimbit Headquarters, Framingham, Mass.

Nimbit's office is too far outside Boston's high-tech Route 128 belt to be considered part of it. Indeed, the neighborhood is a bit seedy, the building is dingy, and the offices are cramped and helter-skelter. Scattered among the mismatched chairs in what serves as a conference room is the Nimbit team. Cramer is running the show; it's his laptop connected to the projector. Next to him is Patrick Faucher, CEO and co-founder, whose long wavy hair, facial stubble, and hip eyewear all nicely accent the grungy cherubic looks of a former boy bander. Though Faucher did in fact do a fair amount of gigging back in the day as a trumpeter, his background is mostly in software and e-commerce; he previously developed and sold an online shopping site. Across the table is COO and co-founder Phil Antoniades, an impressively biceped, unsmiling, and generally rough-edged-looking fellow whom you could easily picture climbing off a hog to administer a beating to someone like Faucher just on principle. Antoniades was a touring drummer who for a time averaged 200 nights a year on the road before he built up a band management business and then a $1 million CD replication company that he merged into Nimbit. (And despite his appearance, he turns out to be perfectly civil, if a little intense.) Cramer is again dressed in blazer, T-shirt, and jeans. Others in the room include Robyn Glaser, a former executive at EMI who heads marketing at Nimbit, and Bill Snapper, who by all accounts is a genuine website-coding magician.

Faucher has put together a PowerPoint presentation, which Cramer is critiquing. Cramer tries to tease enlightenment out of Faucher through a sort of Socratic dialogue rather than just telling him what to do, but it's hard to miss the fact that Cramer thinks there's a lot Faucher doesn't understand. Cramer fires off questions relentlessly: "Do we need all these screen stats?" (VCs see a lot of presentations, he notes, so the way to get them to remember yours is to keep it uncluttered and repeat key images.) "Is this slide showing the product as it is now or as it's going to be?" (It actually can hurt you to try to make your existing product look too good, because the VCs will wonder why you haven't hit it big yet if your product is so great.) "How are you going to be noticed with all the other players out there?" (Faucher says there isn't a one-line answer to that question, and Cramer tells him to get one.)