Eric Marcoullier is the founder of MyBlogLog (acquired by Yahoo). He didn’t start it as a widget company — it kind of morphed into that after a year or so, with the now famous "Recent Readers" widget (see mine to the right). 
The company launched very simply in March of 2005, just to look at the outbound links of a site. It was purely a stat service at that time and, after a year, some 14K blogs were using it. Then Scott Rafer asked them to consider the aggregate value of all the data they were gathering, and, voila, Scott was CEO within a month, Eric said. Skip forward, and it’s now M&A history….
Eric left Yahoo a couple of months ago, and I would expect we’ll be hearing about him starting something new in the not too distant future. (The rest of the MyBlogLog team remains in place at Yahoo, he told me later.)
Eric gave us some of his personal views towards the end of his talk (he was careful to state these are not Yahoo’s views), and one of the most interesting is to be clear that "widgets are not free advertising." He said that many companies, advertisers, etc, see widgets and think, "Wow, how do I get some of that?" Eric says that’s the wrong way to think. "People are dying to syndicate your content if (1) you don’t take users away from their site, and (2) you can do it for free." The key, he said, is to widgetize your content. He raised an interesting question: "If iTunes would have had a widget years ago, would Last.fm even have had any success?" Another point Eric really emphasized: "As you pursue your widget strategy, think about how you’re going to promote your widget."
The rest of the team other than Eric and me are still there, that is….