Venturesome Capitalist
By Margie Wylie and Rose Aguilar
Staff Writers, CNET NEWS.COM

Ann Winblad is a successful venture capitalist with a $95 million fund, but she will be forever known as the woman who dated Bill Gates.

Winblad isn't the only woman to ever date Gates, but the gregarious, outgoing, and refreshingly frank 5-foot-something blonde is the one who never hesitated to discuss the association with candor, including the Microsoft captain's lax personal grooming habits.

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In the Silicon Valley smog of double-talk and superstitious marketingspeak, Winblad's incisiveness is her trademark. The software engineer started her own business in 1976 with 500 borrowed dollars, then sold it in 1983 for over $15 million. After consulting with Apple, Microsoft, and others for several years, she was finally persuaded by ex-NBA basketball player and then venture capitalist John Hummer to bring her know-how to an exclusively software investment fund. Located across the San Francisco Bay in Emeryville, California, and worlds apart from the Ivy League boys club of shady venture capital enclaves in Palo Alto, Winblad and her partner were outsiders in more than one way. At first derided as "Goldilocks and Lurch," the team have become respected, if not insiders.

Compared to venture giants like Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, Hummer Winblad's fund is small. Winblad maximizes its impact by picking small companies with good ideas but green founders, and nursing them to success. NEWS.COM chatted with Winblad in her spacious Pacific Heights home.

NEWS.COM: Did you ever think that the Internet would have this kind of impact on the market?
Winblad: If I said "yes" I'd be lying. And one thing about venture capitalists is that any venture capitalist who tells you she is a visionary is not doing her job because her job is to be an opportunist. We're all sitting around using email. In many companies we're using the Internet, especially Unix software companies, as part of the fabric of the whole corporation. So we're sitting in the middle of the thing not noticing it's really happening. It's not hard to speculate that there'll be many events in the future that we can't predict.

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