A Conversation with Scott Jones, Indiana's Serial Tech Entrepreneur

It's been a busy Spring, and so no entries for a while. To catch up, I wanted in late April to write about a late night conversation/interview I had then with Scott Jones, Indiana's premier serial tech entrepreneur. At the time, Jones had just consummated a $260 million deal to sell Gracenote, one of his many successful companies.

I covered the news of the sale in my Chicago Midwest Business column, which can be accessed directly from this link: http://www.midwestbusiness.com/news/viewnews.asp?newsletterID=19122.

One of the many things that didn't make it into the column was the tenor of Scott's seemingly never-ending enthusiasm for the role that technology can play in improving the quality of human life.

When my cell phone rang, it was about 10 p.m. and I didn't recognize the number. It was Scott, driving from the Indy airport, where he had just arrived back from the deal signing in California. I was driving as well, so I thought I'd better pull over, because one thing is for certain: you can't talk to Scott Jones on a cell phone, drive a car on I-465 and take notes all at the same time. So there, sitting on the north side of I-465, Scott animatedly told me about Gracenote and its impact on Apple and the rest of the music world.

Scott seemed in a hurry to wrap up his comments about Gracenote, which I mistakenly presumed meant he was tired from the trip from California. Having written a number of speeches (2000-2001) for Scott, I should have known better. Scott simply wanted to talk about the next big thing. Gracenote was sold and that was cool, but ChaCha -- the mobile search wunderkind -- was clearly on his mind. The next day, Scott hinted, the Wall Street Journal was going to drop the all-time validation of ChaCha technology in the form of a column from tech icon Walter Mossberg.

Scott, of course, was right. And like days of old, he emailed a WSJ link to the story to me at about 2 a.m.

Now I had two stories to cover in one column, which does not for a short period of time make.

The other bit that didn't make it into the column was the comments that Sequoia Capital -- the mega-tech venture capital firm that posted up some serious dough in Gracenote -- had to make about Jones and his work. I called out to Sequoia in the Silicon Valley for some background info about Scott, and unfortunately didn't secure that (there are, by the way, three hours time difference between Indiana and California) until after the Hoosier Coefficient column was shipped up to Chicago barely on deadline.

As VCs go, an investment by Sequoia in your tech company basically means that you're in the top 1% of all desirable and viable investments on the continent. There certainly wasn't any surprise on behalf of Sequoia that Scott had nailed a cool quarter of a billion as an asking price. What they wanted to know was what Scott was interested in doing next, suggesting that the Gracenote investment wasn't the last one they'll be making in a Scott Jones company.

Indiana is lucky to have him.