HEAD COUNT HEADLINERS / AUGUST 21
SARA POOLE, formerly a general manager at UUNet and VP of corporate development at Cello Technologies, now executive director of Osborn Capital
CURTIS WELLING, formerly CEO of SG Cowen Securities, now chairman and CEO of Princeton eCom
ALSO: Cowpland waves goodbye to Corel, and eVentures appoints yet another CEO.

Starting your career at UUNet will get you places. UUNet, the wildly successful Internet service provider now owned by Worldcom (Nasdaq: WCOM), has made a number of people quite wealthy and experienced, including its founder Rick Adams. Its first vice president of sales, Jeff Osborn, also made out like a bandit, retiring in 1996 to live the high life and invest his own pile of riches.

Meanwhile, Sara Poole has also been riding high on UUNet's success -- and Mr. Osborn's money. A former general manager of Web hosting at UUNet, Ms. Poole was recently named executive director of Osborn Capital, the fund that not only bears Mr. Osborn's name, but holds him as its sole limited partner. Ms. Poole joins the firm's two other partners -- Eric Janszen, the managing director, and Mr. Osborn himself, who spends much of his time on his sailboat off the coast -- in helping to invest Mr. Osborn's dough in technology infrastructure.

Ms. Poole started the northern Virginia office of Osborn Capital in May, but says she's been so busy that she forgot to get the press release out that she had joined the firm. Unlike many other East Coast investors, she says Osborn Capital's small staff has no interest in establishing a Silicon Valley presence or investing on the West Coast. "We're up to our eyeballs in work," she says of her busy days, which consist of schmoozing with other local VCs, sifting through a dozen business plans a day (she insists she reads them all), and spending time with existing portfolio companies, including BroadIP Networks, Netwhistle, and eHarbor, as well as Worldcom's accelerator program.

All this and she's only 31 years old. Ms. Poole started at UUNet at just 21, as one of the company's first three salespeople. "I was there when it was still a startup," she recalls. "We were nothing. We were still fighting people over whether [Internet access] should be free or not." Ms. Poole says Mr. Osborn walked in "like a knight in shining armor" and got the sales force up and running. She considers Mr. Osborn her mentor, and kept in touch with him even after they both had left the company. She went on to become VP of corporate development at Cello Technologies, a high-end home theater company which recently filed for bankruptcy, and also helped out UUNet's Mr. Adams when he began doing his own investing. She jumped at the chance to be Mr. Osborn's newest partner.

"We really get to pick and choose our investments," says Ms. Poole. In other words, as a seed investor with just one bank account to reward, she's not under the same constraints of $1 billion funds which, under pressure to return investments to hungry limited partners, must invest at a lightning pace. In the three months she's been at Osborn Capital, Ms. Poole hasn't made a single investment -- yet. Stay tuned.