NebuAd's CEO Packs His Bags

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September 3, 2008

Kenneth Corbin at InternetNews notes that NebuAd’s CEO is quitting and wonders if it’s the beginning of the end for NebuAd itself:

“The company that tracks people’s Web surfing habits from Internet service providers to serve targeted ads has lost its CEO, Bob Dykes, who stepped down today in favor of a position as CFO with payment-services provider Verifone.

“NebuAd, which declined to comment on Dykes’ departure, has taken a beating this summer, beginning with the announcement by Charter Communications that it was shelving plans to trial NebuAd’s service in response to privacy concerns raised by lawmakers.”

Dykes didn’t make NebuAd’s corporate life any easier. You might remember him as the guy who self-pityingly likened himself to Galileo when he testified in front of a congressional committee. Most news reports painted his testimony as alternately condescending or snide. That’s a bad person to put in front of Congress when it’s in a legislating mood.

In fact, I’d suggest that Dykes moving out could signal retrenchment, not impending failure. As I noted in May, the company preferred to operate quietly prior to the Charter debacle that thrust it into the limelight:

“A search of the news archives shows NebuAd had been enjoying a quiet period of VC love and media tolerance for vague answers about who the company was working with. Maybe it was inevitable that taking a client as large as Charter (ISP Planet says it’s number 8 in the U.S.) would expose the company to more scrutiny.

“NebuAd also relied on simple corporate opacity on the part of its ISP clients to operate with such a low profile for so long. The NebuAd appliance that works the surveillance magic sounds like a turnkey, plug-n-play box, so the ISP’s support personnel don’t really need to know anything about it. The ISPs don’t care to describe the business relationship they’re using to ‘enhance the user’s browsing experience,’ as they euphemize the surveillance, which means even if they do much to disclose the surveillance, its mechanisms remain largely obscured, sometimes requiring users to carefully sift through their own network traffic to understand why something is strange about their Internet connection’s behavior.”

Losing a CEO who seemed intent on antagonizing lawmakers befits a company looking to find its way back out of the limelight.