Kleiner Perkins changes continued & Yodel

Om writes that there’s been changes at Silicon Valley’s leading venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. He says partners Kevin Compton and Doug Mackenzie “are leaving the nest and setting up their own firm, Radar Partners.”

We just reached Compton, and he gave us the sense that the changes are gradual. Radar has been “around for 15 years,” he said. Compton and MacKenzie run it “on the side,” and it is for non-technology investments, he said. It is funded entirely with their own money, he added, and there are no plans to raise a fund from outside investors. They have stepped down from making new investments for Kleiner, as reported earlier, but even then they’ve both made a couple investments “alongside” Kleiner recently, he said. It is true, however, that Radar has made an investment in San Francisco tech company, Yodel Search.

By the way, here’s more on Yodel, from the site of Tony Conrad, who is CEO and Co-founder:

…backed by Doug Mackenzie, Kevin Compton, Will Hearst, Phil Black, David Mahoney, Mike Winton, David Mahoney and Vince Vannelli. I teamed with 3 world class entrepreneurs, Martin Remy, Steve Neiker and Toni Schneider to form Yodel Search in April, 2005. Yodel�s mission is to create a great search engine for discovering high quality blogs. We�ve been in a dark hole the past several months developing an authority algorithm that will help more authoritative blogs surface to the top of a results page. I got the idea through discussions with Toni Schneider and my experience with Oddpost (a webmail client with integrated RSS aggregation features), an investment that I led that was sold to Yahoo! at a handsome return.

Update: See comment below about the Compton/Mackenzie investment in the Bear Valley ski resort. (Thanks Mitchel!)