As of Friday afternoon, I am no longer the CEO of Netvibes. Even though TechCrunch broke the story, I wanted to wait until everything was formally done to communicate the news. As promised, it’s now the time to announce my new role with Netvibes, the company I founded nearly three years ago.
Last week we decided in a board meeting to name Freddy Mini, my second in command, as the new CEO. I am supportive of this decision, which will enable me to have a non-executive role to focus on strategy and the big picture, not on day-to-day issues. And as one of the largest shareholders of the company, I will continue to sit on the board and support the company to the fullest extent.
I understand that my decision may have come as a surprise to many people people and I apologize for the short notice, but this is something that we had been planning internally for quite a while.
Last year, driving back from a Facebook meeting with Freddy on the 101, I told him that I would step down before the summer — once I had the feeling that the company is on the right track. I told him that he should be ready to become the next CEO. Even after looking at other candidates, Freddy was the obvious choice . If someone can bring Netvibes to next level, it’s him.
Freddy is not the only person that will have new responsibilities: my executive team, Franck who runs the product team and Annabelle my CFO, and my beloved team now has the opportunity to execute our vision for the future of Netvibes.
As I said at the Netvibes.org developer conference in Paris, four things matter to me : the opinion of my team, our users, our clients, and the developer community, and nothing makes me more happy than their commitment to Netvibes. From the bottom of my heart, I thank them for their continuous support.
I have created 7 companies so far, and Netvibes is by far the most international and the one with the largest number of employees. With Netvibes I have always considered myself as a founder CEO.
That means two things: a founder and the first CEO of the company.
As a founder you have to provide the ambition, the vision, and hire the best team possible to do the job. I believe that we have succeeded in doing so. People who are not entrepreneurs sometimes do not fully understand the unbelievable level of commitment you need to create a company.
Before founding Netvibes, I didn’t know if I was capable of such commitment, dedication, and will for a project. For a project like Netvibes, you have to give everything or it doesn’t work. You have to believe for yourself and the rest of the world, and provide your team with constant energy, making sure that you can get the best of each person on a daily basis.
You have to channel your doubts into operational focus, because it’s not where you start that matters but how you can lead your team to fulfill your vision and to the difficult road to success. This is why I have respected and admired entrepreneurs ever since I was a child.
As the founder of Netvibes, I am here to create something that ultimately has meaning: for the market, the team, and clients, but also fundamentally something that has meaning for myself. It’s that last factor that truly defines entrepreneurs.
What about strong competition with seemingly unlimited funding and workforce against us? This served as even further motivation to get excited about the project and pursue it despite the related challenges.
As a founder CEO my vision is very simple: you have one mission, make sure that the company executes your vision and that it hires the best people in order to render yourself unnecessary as quickly as possible at the operations level. That is the only advice I would give people, hire people you like and respect and that are much better than you in their areas of expertise. Furthermore, give people a chance to express their full potential because sometimes you will be fascinated by the result.
And one last thing, keeps egos away as fast as you can. The Netvibes team is by far one of the best teams assembled in the web 2.0 world and is still extremely hard working, modest, and funny.
Before handing over the CEO position to Freddy, I wanted to make sure that I had completed my to do list for the company:
An ambitious vision: a startpage combined with a monetized widget platform that is now the only alternative to google. An elegant alternative to google.
A strong team: Netvibes has a team that is 100% committed to the challenge, extremely talented and capable of creating miracles every day. We’ve had a very low turnover — 90% the team is still there and still rocking as usual.
A sexy business model: As Freddy has stated in interviews, Netvibes’s revenue is increasing every quarter. He expects the company to break even next year and I am fully confident of this. For us, the monetization of Netvibes was never the problem, it’s how you monetize while respecting the user that is the hard part. You can’t go for the simplest solution and use the traditional tricks of web 1.0 monetization. But if you find a way to make your user accept sponsored widgets as a suggestion and not an obligation, you have a winner.
The sponsored widgets model is Adsense 2.0 and Netvibes will play a key role in this transformation.
In general I am proud of what we have done and I would change very little of what we did.
It is important to note that decisions are made in a context that is often not public, and that Netvibes has always seemed bigger than it is. Our staff of 35 people is not that big when you think of it.
This is why it took us more time to deliver what we announced, but we always delivered:
* a complete rewriting of the Netvibes backend to support APIs,
* a new and more flexible front end that can evolve and be more easily improved,
* the public page (Netvibes universe) that is becoming more and more popular every day ,
* our latest product development: the Netvibes activities that will add the much-anticipated social component (an updated version is coming soon),
* the new ecosystem with more tools for developers and better stats,
* the sponsored widget ad network
* and last but not least, our open source widget platform that will provide an incredible opportunity for developers to connect and mash our technology up. I will follow what will come out of this very closely.
In my experience, finding a good business model is not easy: you need to experiment, measure, understand what the client wants, have inventory and drive adoption, all a part of the key knowledge that makes Netvibes invaluable vis-a-vis the widget economy. Freddy and the business team have been instrumental in this phase and it is now the time to unleash the full potential of this opportunity.
With an incredibly dedicated team we have made all the changes needed to see Netvibes play a major role in the widget economy. The coming challenge is very exciting and I am highly confident that the team will succeed. I will be available to help the team in whatever way possible.
After such a long haul, I will take some time off and start thinking about a new idea of mine. I will also have more personal time, which is not a bad thing 
and I will spend more time blogging and observing the world. I will soon travel around the world to meet entrepreneurs and friends alike.
On a very personal note, I want to thank all the people that contacted me and all of the friends that supported me and advised me about this move. I was amazed by the incredible number of supportive emails, and happy to see that some VCs already have interest in my next idea.
I will be mindful of timing, and in another post, I’ll talk about the lessons I learned from starting Netvibes, especially in Europe and running it from Paris. This comes at the request of numerous friends and journalists.
Again, I’d like to give a big thanks to the Netvibes friends, team, partners, developers, and users for some of the best years of my life.
Enjoy
