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more, even as she cared for her two young children. After her marriage ended, Richardson moved to Boston and looked for a company that might pay for her to get an M.B.A. She found Atlas Venture, a VC firm that wanted a secretary with research skills.

It was 1989, and no one Richardson knew had any idea what venture capitalists did. She grabbed a book on venture finance and started reading. “I thought it was the coolest thing I had ever seen,” Richardson said. She stayed at Atlas more than six years, promoted again and again until she reached associate, helping to bring in deals including Firefly and Vermeer Technologies, which developed what is now Microsoft's FrontPage publishing tool. “She was energetic and worked hard,” said Atlas partner Barry Fidelman. Richardson's biggest value to the firm, he said, was her ceaseless networking. She spoke at university panels and garnered local press as a rare woman in venture capital. Her good looks and self-described flirtatious manner didn't hurt: They got her calls returned more quickly. The public attention brought more deals to Atlas. And it was at the networking functions in the early 1990s that Richardson met people like John Doerr, Intel cofounder Gordon Moore, and local technology star Yosi Amram of Individual Inc.

Richardson stayed in touch with Amram even after Individual blew up in 1996, and they met up that year at the Agenda conference, one of the top annual technology gatherings. With Amram at the meeting was another Individual employee whom Amram seemed to like a lot, a disheveled young salesman named Bill Bales. “I liked him personally,” Richardson said of Bales. “He was so full of energy, and he was fun to hang around with.”

That same year, a new Chicago venture firm recruited Richardson to join them as a partner. JK&B Capital was flush with money from investor George Soros and Charles Wang, the founder of Computer Associates International Inc. Richardson signed on as a full partner and the sole software expert. JK&B had hit after hit, funding Exodus Communications, Phone.com, and other then-stars. On one of Richardson's trips west, Bales tried to sell her on a small company he was working for called Quote.com Inc. She wasn't interested. But when he mentioned his other job, at a small Web content-management company called Interwoven Inc., she got very interested indeed and went to look at the firm's Los

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