NewsGator (I'm CEO :-)) announced today that we've acquired the assets of a Seattle-based company called Ranchero Software, whose main product is NetNewsWire, the leading Mac OS RSS reader. (More importantly, we're joining forces with Brent and Sheila).

You can read all about the transaction from the point of view of the principles here and here and here and here and here.

Since this is a more personal weblog, I'd rather comment here on how wonderful it is to be CEO of a company brimming with excited entrepreneurs, all of whom share a vision of the way folks will just work with information... and are working extremely hard to bring that future closer.

It's been diverting to read all the blogentary about NewsGator as a 'behemoth' and 'juggernaut' building its 'empire', as we grow the company organically and by selective acquisitions.

Just feels like an expanding family to those of us working to make it wonderful.

Riffs; it's personally gratifying to see the egoless-CEO style validated. Sounds contrarian, but I'm a big believer that the best execs tilt the floodlights to those around them... Tim Koogle was the man as Yahoo! exploded in no small part because of that attribute...

Other interesting angle on this; P.R. in the WeMedia age. We'd carefully orchestrated our public relations approach, culminating with a press release tomorrow morning to coincide with O'Reilly's Web 2.0, which both Brent and Greg are attending. Happy blog fingers pre-empted that. Now, the press release is just one meteordustbit of the swirling universe of live-time commentary defining what it all means. I'm tracking the conversation via my NewsGator smartfeeds ... from New York ... while Greg and others are in SF ... all of us throwing into the melange from afar, in real time, hours before the release was ever to 'hit the wire'...

So much more fun this way....