Former Netscape chief to e-scape from venture capitalism

NEWS Jim Barksdale, former Netscape chief executive and one of the leading architects of the dot-com bubble, has announced his decision to quit his venture capital group. His company, The Barksdale Group, has invested all of its existing $180m fund and has decided not to try to raise any more - showing just how radically times have changed in the high-tech venture capital business. Barksdale was brought in to Netscape by Jim Clark in 1995 to bring some serious executive experience to the group of eccentrics and students who founded the company. Together with Clark he made millions as the company reached a stock market valuation of over $1bn. The Barksdale Group's investments include another Clark project, myCFO, an online financial services company launched to help him and other wealthy individuals look after their money. Barksdale told the Financial Times he is still optimistic that the fund will give its investors a positive return, a feat few of the venture capital funds invested in 1999 and 2000 will do. The Barksdale Group has only been involved with one failed project so far, Home Grocer, which merged with the ill-fated Webvan and went bankrupt last year. The Barksdale Group's other investments include middleware vendor BEA, content management company Vignette, online music company Listen.com and Ofoto, which was bought by Kodak. Since October, Barksdale has been on George W Bush's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board - a job which will no doubt take up a large slice of his time. He has also launched a reading project in Mississippi, funded with $100m of his own money.