Of note, his CEO seems extremely well-suited for the next phase of his company’s growth:

Nathan Richardson was most recently the head of Dow Jones Online, a brand that includes WSJ.com, Marketwatch and Barrons. He joined Dow Jones in 2005 after spending three years as head of the biggest finance site online, Yahoo Finance. While at Yahoo, Institutional Investor named Nathan the #1 Executive in Online Finance, the “impresario” of the finance space.

Paid Content - or rather, parent Content Next Media - is one of the better positioned blog-based empires.  I suspect this will only accelerate its trajectory.  Ali remains Chairman, I do wonder how receptive he was to the change.  I can certainly imagine he prefers not handling CEO duties, but all founders have a hard time not being CEO, even if they say otherwise.

I touched base on all of this in “Step Away from the Machine, Give me the Keys“.

In no way is this a knock at Ali (the man built an empire with the power of his pen, or, should I say, keyboard), but he was a content guy first and an executive by force… so I can imagine he must be relieved to some extent, but this begs the question:

If the company wasn’t VC-backed (Allan Patricof’s Greycroft plunked down some money in 2006), would we be seeing these changes?  To me, Ali’s company remains in a league of its own, but with the surge of new contestants Tech Crunch and Nick Denton’s Valleywag and of course, Henry Blodget’s Alley Insider, were the powers-that-be at Content Next Media worried about losing steam?

Net-net: major validation of his company and a natural progression of the blog-based, B2B publication space.