The Secret Life of a Serial CEO

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The crowd is fairly gregarious, and moods soar even higher when, just after they all settle down to seats and put down their chopsticks, one of the partners reads his fortune-cookie message aloud: "The universe without music would be madness."

Cramer takes immediate control by giving himself a power introduction: Nimbit CEO and a 26-year veteran of software start-ups who has guided eight companies to six successful exits. (He twice left companies for other opportunities.) The intros run around the table, bringing things back to Cramer, who signals Faucher to begin the presentation.

This turns out to be a calculated move. The partners by now all know Cramer and the business case. The trick tonight will be to win rave reviews from the music insiders. And that calls not for Cramer's hard-edged business gab but for ex-rocker Faucher's passionate view of Nimbit's mission to empower independent musicians.

As Faucher describes how Nimbit will rescue the beleaguered artist from the claws of iTunes and the drudgery of staying on top of 20 different websites, Borgen, whose looks are a rugged riff on the haunted-artist motif, can't keep from loosing an enthusiastic "Wow." All eyes turn to him. "If someone offered me a way to keep everything up to date, it would be huge," he says.

Borgen's enthusiasm proves contagious, and the partners and insiders suddenly can't seem to find enough things to love about Nimbit. "Doesn't this have the potential to become a virtual label?" asks one partner. "The timing is perfect, because bands are shifting away from labels and trying to do more with their managers," says Nordin. "All the indie labels will support this," adds Rose. "Could Nimbit sponsor showcase events in different cities?" asks Borgen, whose opinions seem to carry great weight tonight.

The meeting starts to dissolve into bubbly side conversations, but Nordin signals for the group's attention. "I believe there's a huge market for Nimbit," he says. "But I have some anxieties. There already are ways to do all of this separately, and I'm not sure the message that you can do it all in one place is enough to pull people in. Nimbit is offering more efficiency, but it would be better if it could offer more functionality--if it let you do something you couldn't do anywhere else."

Cramer, who has been content to let everyone else do the blabbing as long as the talk is happy, immediately jumps in. It's true, he says, that websites have been springing up to address every niche that's out there for independent musicians. But that's left musicians facing a fractured industry that's just begging for centralization.

The crowd doesn't seem to buy it. "It's a lot to ask someone, to move everything they've been doing on these other sites to Nimbit," says a partner.

"If you don't figure out a way to move a large number of people to Nimbit as fast as possible, you won't be nearly as successful as you need to be," says another.

Cramer, Faucher, and Antoniades all start to reply at once, but Nordin cuts them off. "I had a couple of guys from some of the bands I work with go to your site," he says. "They saw things they liked, but not enough to jump."

This lands like a bomb and is followed by a moment of heavy silence. But Cramer quickly recovers. "The site today doesn't reflect the vision of the business," he says. "There are lots of things we can do to get people to the site. Not one big magic thing, but my experience in business is that it takes lots of effort and tuning and iteration to figure it out, and once you do that, you just turn the crank and scale it up."

This doesn't do the trick; the crowd seems to want the one big magic thing. A host of new objections now spring up faster than Cramer can respond. Wouldn't it be difficult to build software that can automatically dispense good advice to musicians in all situations? Aren't these market numbers suspect? Couldn't Nimbit be torpedoed by a competitor that simply took a smaller cut of the musician's revenue, or even no cut at all? Wouldn't it be better to take a small monthly fee?

Seizing on this last point, one of the partners asks Borgen if he'd be willing to pay $10 a month for what Nimbit is offering. The room falls silent. All eyes are riveted on this young artist as he thinks it over. "I'd need more proof," he says, finally.

"We give him all this sushi and a personal pitch, and he still isn't sure it's worth $10," says one of the investors, playing it up for the room as a joke. Everyone laughs politely--except for Cramer, Faucher, and Antoniades, who smile gamely but look stricken.

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