The stock priced yesterday at $28 a share, valuing the company at north of $5 billion, and shares opened at $47.05. In late trading, they were around $49, a 75 percent increase.

The debut of the shares culminated a process that began in earnest almost a year ago to the day, when Workday announced that it had raised an $85 million institutional round. It wasn’t long before it was looking for bankers, and eventually settled on Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Allen & Company and J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., who ran the offering.

I got a few minutes with co-CEOs Aneel Bhusri and CFO Mark Peek at the NYSE today, all of them wearing broad smiles. While the company is still technically in a quiet period and thus can’t speak to specific future plans, we did talk generally about what’s next for Workday.

AllThingsD: Let’s talk a little about momentum. I couldn’t help but notice that, at the recent Hewlett-Packard analysts meeting, Meg Whitman mentioned that it has adopted Workday along with Salesforce.com. That sounds like a pretty big customer win for you. Is that an indicator of things to come?

Aneel Bhusri: I think it means that the cloud is mainstream. It’s gone from being a question to being a certainty in customer relationship management (CRM) with Salesforce, and human resources with Workday. And we’re hoping to make that case in finance, as well. And HP is a testament to the fact that the largest companies are now adopting the cloud. It’s now our biggest customer. I think they have more than 300,000 employees. Our biggest before was Flextronics, at about 200,000. There just aren’t many companies that are as big or as global as HP.

How is the financial product? Last we talked about it, it was still an up-and-coming product.

Bhusri: Very well. We still have some work to do to bring it to parity with the legacy systems. Our HR business took off once it hit feature parity with the legacy systems, and I think the same thing will happen with the financial systems. Right now, we’re selling it to more medium companies. There’s a few public companies that are using it now.

And when we talk finance, we’re talking things like a company’s general ledger and things like that?

Bhusri: Yes. It’s a full suite. General ledger, accounts receivable, accounts payable, assets, purchasing. People don’t buy it in individual pieces anymore, but as a suite.

Let’s talk about Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. He’s been beating up on Workday every chance he gets. Obviously, there’s some history there, since Oracle acquired your previous company, PeopleSoft. What do you think of what he’s been saying? Oracle is also doing a big pivot toward running all its applications in the cloud, and in a mixed on-premise and off-premise manner. What do you think of all this?

Bhusri: First of all, I think it’s great that Oracle is embracing the cloud. I think it makes it easier for the customer. And so is SAP. It’s all good for the customer. We personally don’t believe in the hybrid model. At the end of the day, without a true multi-tenant, one version model, you can’t really solve the pain of the upgrade cycle. With a customer that is hosted, or on-premise, the upgrade path is no different than it was before. We take over all the software upgrades, and that’s where all the cost savings come from. And Salesforce sees it the same way, and so do Amazon and Google.

Obviously, the mixed on-premise and off-premise approach doesn’t work for you. You can’t deliver Workday in a hybrid manner?

Bhusri: We could. We just choose not to, because we don’t think its the right model. It would be very easy to give a customer a copy of our software and let them run it on their own hardware, but the whole beauty of the on-demand model is that the upgrade process is now the domain of the vendor. That is why people are on versions of other software that are three and four versions behind, because they couldn’t get the upgrades done.

What sort of competitive threat do you see coming from Oracle’s Fusion apps? Every Oracle application runs in the cloud now.

Bhusri: Oracle is definitely a formidable competitor. You can see how fast we are growing. I’m not sure that Fusion was ever meant to be a cloud application. Its name comes from “fusing” Oracle and PeopleSoft and JD Edwards. It was never intended to be a cloud app, but Oracle has the resources to get that done. We see it competitively, but so far it isn’t really slowing us down. The good thing is that the market is going to expand, because no one is waving the flag for on-premise software anymore. I mean, Oracle and SAP have both basically said they’re all in on the cloud. We happen to be the youngest company of the three, but we have the most mature product. We’ve been doing this in the new way for seven years, and they are just getting going.

So, with the caveat that I’m not asking for guidance, where do you want things to be by this time next year?

Mark Peek, CFO: Today, about half of our R&D spend is on the financials product. So we’re really working on expanding the market. We believe there are about 23,000 companies in the world that have 1,000 or more employees. Today, we have 340 of those in HCM (human capital management), and 30-plus in finance. And so our R&D focus is on financial. We want to hit the updates and grow the business in HR, and get additional flagship companies in the financials product, as well. We’re also going to focus a lot on international expansion. About 90 percent of our revenue is from North America, so we’ll want to expand internationally and work with partners who can work on the deployments for us.

Bhusri: We will have done three more updates, and I would like to say a year from now we’ll be showing off a few flagship customers in finance, like we did with HR in Flextronics and Chiquita. We have very good customers in finance right now, but they’re not Fortune 500 customers just yet. Once we have a few, it will be the tipping point for financials going into the cloud, as well.

After HR and finance, is there a third leg to the stool that you want to add down the road?

Bhusri: Down the road, if there’s one area we’re intrigued with, it’s analytics. Anything that ties in to the HR world and the finance world. We’re doing a great job on transactions, and we have our embedded business intelligence. But then there’s this whole data warehouse space that needs to be disrupted, as well. That’s an area on the radar. But for the time being, what we’re doing on in the HR and financial space is going to keep us really busy.

Back to international expansion for a minute. How are you seeing Europe, given all the trouble there?

Bhusri: Our European business, though its growing off a small base, is the fastest-growing piece of our business. I think Europe is going through a tough patch right, now, but in some ways we help them cut costs. It’s not the reason for being, but it’s a benefit that’s helping. In the cloud, we’re about half the cost over a five-year period as the legacy systems. And European customers want the same cost-benefit as the North American ones.

Peek: When the economy is tough is when people tighten their IT budgets, but they are also looking for ways to save money. Back during the recession, we were growing 50 percent. Even though people were taking discretionary money and moving quickly. If they can save money, they will.

Here’s a video of Workday’s bell-ringing ceremony at the NYSE this morning:

Fresh from presenting at Allen & Company’s highly exclusive Sun Valley conference earlier this month, CEO Nirav Tolia told AllThingsD that the new funds would be used to continue growing the company over the next four years, with no immediate plans for big purchases.

Nextdoor’s major focus is on the “local,” a concept trumpeted by Benchmark partner and Nextdoor investor Bill Gurley (seen most recently in a well-reasoned post on his personal blog). As Tolia describes it, we use Facebook for friends, LinkedIn for business and Twitter for interests. Nextdoor fills in the smallest and yet most personal of cracks — the neighborhood.

The site is essentially home to thousands of smaller social networks, each one focused on a specific neighborhood (drawn out by Nextdoor using district maps and other publicly available data). Users within each neighborhood can communicate with one another on topics that are most relevant to them, be it a local bake sale or alerting one another to suspicious activity in the neighborhood.

Nextdoor has gained significant traction as an alternative to larger social networks like Facebook and Twitter in the nine months since the site launched. The site has grown to encompass nearly 3,600 neighborhoods across 48 states, while retaining strong user-engagement numbers.

Some of the company’s largest challenges lie in its very structure. It is private by design; new users are only able to join the site after verifying by mail that they live at their stated address. And while the site’s initial growth is admirable, it moves at a snail’s pace by Internet standards. It can’t ride the same viral growth curve as a Facebook or a Twitter, as invites are doled out slowly through word of mouth and direct mail, rather than a wave of Web-based promos.

Tolia isn’t concerned about this, citing it as more of a strength than a weakness. The private, non-spammy nature of Nextdoor’s growth is what draws people to it in the first place. It’s sort of a riff on the Kevin Costner movie line: “If you build it” — and build it privately — “they will come.”

The next steps involve continuing that growth throughout the U.S. and exploring partnerships with interested parties like local governments and businesses. And, of course, the long view has Tolia’s sights set on broader horizons, potentially growing the team to support international expansion in the future.

Asa Mathat / AllThingsD.com

Cook’s attendance at this gathering of the technology and media superpowers is a rarity for an Apple executive. Company co-founder Steve Jobs rarely accepted his Sun Valley invitation, so Cook’s appearance at the event this year is something of a surprise. And it’s fueling all manner of speculation about his intentions. Clearly, he’s not there for the bike rides or fly-fishing.

One thing that’s certainly on his agenda: One-on-one meetings with some of the media executives in attendance. “We are talking to a lot of people here,” he told the New York Post.

Why? Cook declined to say, but word around the campfire has it that these discussions have something to do with the long-rumored Apple Television, in whatever form it ultimately appears.

Indeed, Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes told the New York Times’ DealBook that he expects to talk to Cook about some sort of Apple TV partnership that he envisions being similar to the alliance Apple struck with AT&T to launch the iPhone. “It will probably be a lot more painless than everyone thinks,” he said.

Reached for comment, Apple confirmed that Cook is indeed attending the conference, but declined to provide any details on his plans while there.

Aneel Bhusri

Sources familiar with the company’s plans tell AllThingsD that Workday has chosen the four bankers that will lead it through the IPO process: Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Allen & Company and JPMorgan Chase & Co. The search for bankers caps a process begun in December.

The company’s IPO path calls for an S-1 filing to be made with the Securities and Exchange Commission by mid-July. After a late summer or early fall road show, its shares would debut between October and December, depending on how favorable market conditions are, sources familiar with the matter tell me.

The process began in earnest after Workday hired its new CFO, Mark Peek, away from VMware, where he was also CFO.

Workday is feeling emboldened in part by the successful offerings of Jive Software and Splunk, both enterprise companies with their hands in the cloud business. Workday itself is a pure cloud software play, specializing in human resources applications, a white-hot area of enterprise that has seen a lot of M&A activity of late.

In December, software concern SAP spent $3.4 billion to acquire SuccessFactors. Then, in February, software giant Oracle spent $1.9 billion to acquire Taleo, in a deal that took place shortly after I interviewed Taleo’s CEO. Even Salesforce got into the act, acquiring the start-up Rypple for an undisclosed amount in December.

Much of that dealmaking came in response to concerns about Workday, especially after its impressive $85 million Series F round of institutional funding at a $2 billion valuation, which AllThingsD reported exclusively in October. A Bloomberg News report said that round was oversubscribed and grew to $100 million when Michael Dell’s MSD Ventures joined.

Investors in that round included several who also took part in institutional rounds in Facebook and Web gaming player Zynga: T. Rowe Price, Morgan Stanley Investment Management, Janus, and Bezos Expeditions, the personal investment entity of Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos. William Danoff, the manager of Fidelity’s $80 billion Contrafund, the mutual fund giant’s largest stock-based fund, also participated in that round.

A Workday IPO, which would raise about $500 million, would make for a sweet payday for the company’s earlier investors, which include Dave Duffield and Greylock Partners, who invested $90 million in four rounds, and New Enterprise Associates, which joined a $75 million Series E round in 2009. By my math, Workday’s total capital raised comes to a cool $195 million.

So how’s business? With the company having disclosed $160 million in billings total bookings in 2010, sources familiar with its operations tell me bookings in 2011 exceeded 100 percent growth. That would be above the $320 million in 2011 bookings CEO Aneel Bhusri told me he expected last October.

Workday is essentially the creation of PeopleSoft vets Bhusri and Duffield. They started the company in 2005, not long after losing a pitched battle to resist a $10 billion hostile takeover by Oracle. Bhusri and Duffield concluded that the next battlefield for enterprise software would be in the cloud. They kickstarted Workday using their own money and some funding from Greylock, and brought some PeopleSoft employees with them.

The idea was to re-create PeopleSoft, which makes software that businesses need to run day to day, but to deliver it from the cloud.

And unlike other cloud players that approach smaller companies and work their way up to ever-larger customers, Workday’s customers are already in the big leagues. The average Workday customer — there are 280 — has between 10,000 and 15,000 employees. The biggest is Flextronics, the huge electronics manufacturing company, which has 200,000 employees. Other customers include Time Warner, Thomson Reuters, Chiquita Brands and Salesforce.com. There are Workday records on more than two million employees on its system. All that after only four-plus years of active selling. A second, newer line of financial applications aimed at helping companies more efficiently manage their spending is getting traction, too.

Workday will probably be the biggest among a pending batch of enterprise-oriented IPOs set for summer and fall after the Facebook madness is over. For one, there’s Violin Memory, which I’ve been reporting on quite a bit. And Reuters is reporting that cloud storage and collaboration concern Box is looking like it’s eyeing an IPO in 2013. The bankers are going to be busy.

Aneel Bhusri

Allen is said to have advised Workday on its recent funding round, which closed in October. As exclusively reported by AllThingsD at the time, Workday raised $85 million at an implied valuation of $2 billion. The Series F was led by T. Rowe Price, Morgan Stanley Investment Management, Janus and Bezos Expeditions, the personal investment entity of Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos. Bloomberg also says that Michael Dell’s personal investment vehicle, MSD ventures, was in on that funding round, which grew to $100 million since the closing.

Previous investors include Dave Duffield and Greylock Partners, who are in for $90 million across four rounds; and New Enterprise Associates, which joined a $75 million Series E round in 2009.

Apparently encouraged by the successful IPO of Jive Software earlier this month, and the performance of its shares, which are up nicely since the debut, Workday now appears poised go through with the IPO that CEO Aneel Bhusri (pictured) hinted in October would take place during the second half of 2012.

And there’s no question that Workday is in a hot space. SAP’s $3.4 billion acquisition of SuccessFactors last month, plus Salesforce.com’s deal for Rypple last week, attest to the urgency with which larger companies want to be in the HR software business.

Think about it: Every company — of any size — needs to keep track of its people, their salaries, performance-review information and so on. And why bother with software that runs on the local machines, when the cloud is so much more efficient?

Bhusri was a senior executive and co-chairman of PeopleSoft’s board, and was on hand for that company’s hostile takeover by Oracle. After losing that battle, he and co-founder Dave Duffield concluded that the next battlefield for enterprise software would be in the cloud.

Workday’s average customer has between 10,000 and 15,000 employees. Among its 250-odd customers, the biggest is Flextronics, the huge electronics manufacturing company, which has 200,000 employees. Others include Time Warner, Thomson Reuters, Chiquita Brands and, perhaps unsurprisingly, Salesforce.com. Workday has some two million employees in its system.

And while there’s no S-1 filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission to peruse yet, the IPO watch on Workday officially begins now.

Is this investment-banker-hype week and nobody told me?

It certainly seems so from all the almost ridonkulous rumors about everyone and their mother being “imminently poised” to make a bid for Yahoo.

In fact, the process is only beginning to chug along with the Yahoo board, aided by Allen & Company and now Goldman Sachs.

At this point, it is lots of folks rubbernecking, books being prepared and all the other stuff bankers do to look like they are busy, busy, busy.

Among the most serious players: Silver Lake and a shifting group; and a consortium that includes former News Corp. exec Peter Chernin and Providence Equity Partners.

And, just slightly, News Corp. (which owns this Web site) is considering dipping a very small toe in as part of a larger group.

That has been copiously reported here and elsewhere a badillion times already.

But — and I have been clear on this, as have others — no one is near anything of substance, which has not stopped this really lame game of Clue being pumped up by bankers who should know better.

Yesterday, it was Silver Lake, DST Global and the Alibaba Group in the billiard room with foreign money. Nope, nope, nope. Silver Lake and DST are indeed looking hard and Alibaba is a player here, but there is no grand troika going at this moment.

In fact, Alibaba’s Jack Ma — after declaring he was “very interested” in buying Yahoo — has since backed off.

And today, it’s a thinly sourced and carefully worded report of Microsoft in the basement, interested in bidding with a pile of their own dough.

How can I put this delicately? How about: No.

According to my sources, throughout this entire process Microsoft execs have taken pains to make it clear that they are not going to be among the bidders in any significant manner.

In addition, the company has also been communicating with bidders that — while Microsoft is interested in a stable Yahoo, given their search and advertising partnership — it would not throw in with anyone in the process yet.

And, finally, if a winner eventually emerges, it might — and this is only might — consider making a token investment to help get the deal completed.

Certainly, Microsoft has been and is willing to talk to anyone interested, said sources, given their Yahoo business relationship. But this does not make it a bid of any shape or size. They are not even “considering” it, unless that means watching from a distance.

I suppose in some incredible shift Microsoft could change its mind, but most credible sources I spoke to said that is not happening now.

In fact, after its bruising and failed takeover attempt of Yahoo several years ago, said multiple sources, Microsoft now has the deal it wants with Yahoo.

“Why buy the cow when you can get the search and advertising deal for free,” joked one person close to the situation.

Participants in the financing include a mix of strategic and financial investors, such as USAA, Capricorn Investment Group and GRP Partners, McCombs Family Partners and DealerTrack Holdings, GSV Capital, Passport Capital, International Investment House and Allen & Company. Debt capital was provided by Silicon Valley Bank.

The financing comes on the heels of two recent acquisitions made by TrueCar: Automotive Lease Guide (ALG), which tracks car values, and Carperks, which is a group-buying site that offers discounts on cars through programs offered to employees of major companies, like Coca Cola, Wells Fargo and Home Depot.

Terms of the acquisitions were not disclosed.

In August, the company said it sold 20,000 vehicles, bringing the total number sold since inception to more than 350,000. It estimates that it saves consumers an average of $4,154 off of a car’s suggested retail price.

Reuters reports that the company is gearing up for an IPO in the first half of next year, and executives likened the company to the “Groupon for cars,” by offering group discounts and feeding off consumers’ desires to find the best deal possible using the Internet.

Photo Credit: futureatlas.com.

According to multiple sources close to the situation, Ning has been talking recently to a large pool of companies about selling itself, including Google and Groupon, as well as to a number of private equity companies.

Interest has been both incoming to and outgoing from Ning.

The talks around the fate of the high-profile social networking platform — co-founded by Silicon Valley icon and investor Marc Andreessen — are still early and might not result in a sale, although a number of sources said the company was being valued at up to $150 million.

That price is well below previous loftier valuations for Ning and would mean only a break-even for investors, who have put close to $120 million into Ning since it was founded in 2004.

Among its investors: Andreessen, LinkedIn Chairman and investor Reid Hoffman, Legg Mason, Allen & Company and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

There are no bankers involved in the preliminary efforts, in which Andreessen has been involved, although discussions with Google and Groupon have been substantive in nature.

Several other companies — including AOL, Demand Media and Go Daddy — have also been approached or are kicking tires at the site. Most would be interested in Ning’s technology for creating premium social networks.

Ning bills itself on its site as “The World’s Largest Platform for Creating Social Websites.”

The sales effort grew out of a parallel one to possibly raise more money for the start-up. Sources said there was some incoming interest, so talking to a larger pool of buyers was undertaken recently.

Such a move would be an interesting one for Ning, which has undergone a series of ups and downs over its history, including dramatic management and business plan shifts.

Its most recent plan has been to go all-premium, trying to find a way to turn the start-up into a profitable enterprise.

That’s worked out well, the company has previously said, with strong growth. Since its business shift a year ago, Ning has said, it has had 400 percent year-on-year revenue growth, going from 17,000 to more than 100,000 subscribers and with 60 million monthly active users.

Ning’s shift has been under the leadership of Jason Rosenthal, who had been COO of Ning until he replaced its founding CEO, Gina Bianchini, in early 2010.

Ning has also recently tried to get into the highly competitive mobile social communications arena, with a service called Mogwee. The traction for the product does not appear to have been significant.

Ning’s Rosenthal declined to comment about any sales efforts when reached by me today.

I love the smell of blog wars in the morning!

Acting as Facebook often does to Google, a new site started by former Engadget editor Josh Topolsky just hired away yet another passel of tech journalists from the giant gadget news and reviews organization.

Editorial movement is not uncommon on tech news sites, but this level of it from one site to another is somewhat, um, aggressive.

Engadget, which is owned by AOL, is one of the largest tech-focused sites on the Web. Topolsky left his editor-in-chief job there in March.

By April, he had grabbed eight prominent Engadget staffers who had left the huge tech site amid editorial tensions, in order to start a new competing gadget property for the well-funded sports content start-up SB Nation.

Now, sources said, Topolsky has added Thomas Ricker, an Engadget senior editor, who had run its European coverage; Sean Hollister, a senior associate editor, who ran its West coast team; and Joseph Flatley, an associate editor.

Also hired: Thomas Houston, editor-in-chief of Switched, an AOL tech site that was recently subsumed into its Huffington Post Media unit; and Dieter Bohn, who was editor-in-chief for the Smartphone Experts network of sites, including Crackberry and others.

And other possible new hires soon from Engadget: Another European editor, Vlad Savov, and writer Jacob Schulman.

The Topolsky-helmed site is still unnamed but is now operating as This Is My Next. It already has 16 writers, compared to Engadget’s two dozen, and is set to debut in the fall with a new name.

It will be the first content expansion at the Washington, D.C., SB Nation, which completed a $10.5 million Series C round, led by Khosla Ventures, in the fall.

Before that, SB Nation had already raised about $13 million in total venture funding from Accel Partners, Allen & Company and Comcast Interactive Capital, as well as from angel investors such as Ted Leonsis and others in Silicon Valley.

Another AOL link: SB Nation was founded by former AOLer, CEO Jim Bankoff, who had bought Engadget for AOL many years ago.

Engadget Editorial Director Josh Frulinger said that the impact of the talent drain on Engadget — mostly from This Is My Next raids — has been small, since the site has also been aggressively hiring.

“We’re past the people leaving and into celebrating what we’ve accomplished in six short months, and we welcome any new competition,” he said. “Dana Wollman, Brian Heater, Myriam Joire, Zach Honig, Joe Pollicino, Richard Lawler, Michael Gorman, Sean Buckley, Joseph Volpe, Brad Molen, Terrence O’Brien, Amar Toor and Sharif Skar — all brought on in the past six months — are your Engadget stars of tomorrow.”

To prove it, AOL said unique visitors for Engadget in June were up 1.1 percent from May and will be up again for July. In recent reports, the site had 14 million unique monthly visitors.

In case you haven’t heard, the tech and media moguls have jetted their private planes to Sun Valley, Idaho, for the exclusive annual Allen & Company confab and are probably easing into the cocktail hour just about now.

Break out the Kistler Chardonnay and name tags!

(I secretly love that the 300 moguls all wear name tags, even though they are all so fabulously famous.)

Among the highlights for the weeklong confab beginning today will be an interview of Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg by Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, in which I assume they will fall all over themselves in a race of mutual admiration.

To be fair, it seems genuine and Sun Valley is not for unpleasantries anyway.

While Allen & Company — in its investment banker mode — likes to keep the schedule a state secret, it never is, so I am here to tell those planning their time in Sun Valley that the chit-chat will be Saturday.

Also sure to get a lot of ink, since all the owners and possible marks, um, potential buyers, will be there: Whither Hulu?

The premium online video service is famously for sale, and the moneybags at Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Yahoo (smaller bags!) are all taking a gander.

It will not be sold by week’s end, of course, although there will be all kinds of breathy media coverage as the powerful players shuttle to and fro from their gratis luxe condos in noisy hush-hushery.

Who will then come over to the bar to tell the gathered and increasingly drunken reporters — press is not invited in, but they’re there like kudzu all week — all about it.

Of course, there will be some cute anecdotes about the rich and famous — one year, it was News Corp. head Rupert Murdoch losing some item of his wife’s in said bar with everyone scurrying around to find it.

If Us Weekly were covering Sun Valley, that section would be called “Moguls Are Just Like Us!”

Actually, they’re not at all — mostly, they are meaner and more aggressive and greedier, although endlessly riveting.

That’s why the most awkward part of the event will be all the Sun Valley photos that appear without fail of these powermongers in shorts and fleece.

(Note to newcomers: Very few look good in shorts and fleece.)

Lastly, it would not be a modern Allen & Company Sun Valley gathering without continued fretting and fixating on the digital onslaught, even though there are scads of those invited techies competitively mountain biking the pretty mountains there.

This year’s focus will be the IPO gang from Zynga, Groupon and, of course, Facebook, whose insane market valuations are the envy of the media gang, who are mostly older and continually grumpy about it all.

But, the kids love this Internet thing and so the moguls will cope with the change, even as what happens in Sun Valley — power playing, but with a better view — never ever changes.

How’s this for irony:

It was less than a year and a half ago that Owen Van Natta was ousted from his job as CEO of Myspace.

But last week — just as the failed social networking site sold for a paltry $35 million — Van Natta could have bought it himself for a fraction of his stake in Zynga, the social gaming phenom that just filed for its IPO and where he’s a top exec and shareholder.

As the San Francisco-based Zynga’s chief business officer, he was listed second after CEO and founder Mark Pincus on its S-1 on the list of top management and also serves on its board.

The filing also showed that Van Natta got about $43 million in total compensation in 2010.

That was due to part of his large Zynga holdings, including about three million shares he owns outright via restricted stock units that Zynga calls ZSUs, as well as 6.75 million more in options priced at a low $6.43 each.

All told, he has a 1.6 percent stake in the company. That could be worth upwards of $325 million if Zynga garners an expected $20 billion valuation. And it could be even more if its public offering pops higher as other recent Internet outings have done.

And that’s why when Van Natta arrives at the fancy and exclusive Allen & Company mogul fest in Sun Valley this week, he might want to thank News Corp. digital head Jon Miller — the man who fired him from Myspace.

After the Myspace debacle in February of 2010, according to its filing, it appears that Van Natta bounced back quickly to enter into a consulting agreement with Zynga in mid-April via his Luminor Group.

By August, he was hired on full time by Pincus and also became a director.

One reason for getting that plum post, Zynga said, was Van Natta’s experience as a longtime Internet exec at Amazon and, more importantly, Facebook.

He left the social networking giant in mid-2007 — where he had served as COO and, later, chief revenue officer — after relations with its CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg became somewhat tense.

But that’s water under the bridge now; and, in fact, the filing was full of information about the close relationship with Facebook, which is a critical one for Zynga.

And, of course, for Van Natta, who gets my award for best Silicon Valley recovery of 2011.

Had he stepped up and bought Myspace from his large Zynga proceeds, though, he would have gotten my lifetime achievement award for pure moxie.

Earlier this week, he hired away eight staffers from AOL’s Engadget in order to create a competing tech news and gadget reviews site.

And now, according to sources close to the situation, the former AOL content head is close to hiring another former top AOL media exec, Marty Moe (pictured here), to manage it and also more niche sites the blog network is contemplating launching.

Sources said the hiring of Moe is not yet complete, but is close to being struck.

Tyler Bleszinski, SB Nation’s founder and sports editorial director, will continue to manage the start-up’s sports blog network, while Moe will focus on the company’s tech vertical and any other future categories.

Moe left AOL less than a year ago, after nine years working at the New York-based portal, including with Bankoff.

Both had been involved in the purchase of Weblogs Inc., which included the flagship Engadget site.

Now, it seems they will be trying to remake the concept of a content network, although in a more entrepreneurial and innovative setting.

The new tech site–which is still unnamed and will be helmed editorially by outgoing Engadget Editor in Chief Josh Topolsky–will debut some time in the fall. It is the first content expansion at the Washington, D.C., SB Nation, which has heretofore been exclusively focused on sports.

Topolsky will be joined by former Engadget managing editor Nilay Patel and also former staffers Paul Miller, Joanna Stern, Ross Miller, Chris Ziegler, Justin Glow and Dan Chilton.

All of the above had left Engadget in a series of departures of late, all due to increasing unhappiness with AOL’s management and content strategy.

Paul Miller and Ross Miller, who are not related, both stated publicly that they did not like the editorial direction AOL was going in, especially a controversial content strategy document titled “The AOL Way.”

New AOL content head Arianna Huffington has shifted toward a more journalistic path, but the talent bleed began before AOL’s $315 million purchase of the Huffington Post.

Many new upstart content sites such as SB Nation have begun to try to eat away at the big portal’s content strategy–pushed by its CEO Tim Armstrong–with perhaps more nimble efforts of their own.

And those smaller companies are also well funded.

SB Nation completed a $10.5 million Series C venture round, led by Khosla Ventures, in the fall.

It had already raised about $13 million in total funding from Accel Partners, Allen & Company and Comcast Interactive Capital, as well as from angel investors such as Ted Leonsis and others in Silicon Valley.

Jim Bankoff, the fomer AOL exec responsible for buying Engadget for the Internet portal, has grabbed eight staffers who had recently left the huge tech site amid tensions, in order to start a new gadget property.

The site–which is still unnamed and will be run by outgoing Engadget Editor-in-Chief Josh Topolsky–will debut sometime in the fall. It is the first content expansion at the Washington, D.C. sports news site SB Nation, which is helmed by Bankoff.

“The technology we built is applicable beyond sports,” said Bankoff, in an interview with BoomTown tonight. “It was an opportunity to apply our model…into another content category where there was an overlap in demographics.”

That would be fanboys and, well, boys-who-will-be-boys.

UPDATE: In related news, sources said that AOL has zeroed in on Tim Stevens, Engadget’s automotive editor to replace the outgoing Topolsky. The New York-based company had already named Darren Murph as its new managing editor.

Now Stevens will be competing with Topolsky, as well as managing editor Nilay Patel, who will also lead the Engadget tech-exodus (techxodus?). The others include former Engadget staffers Paul Miller, Joanna Stern, Ross Miller, Chris Ziegler, Justin Glow and Dan Chilton.

Stern and Ziegler are still on Engadget’s editors site as current employees.

All of the above had left Engadget in a series of departures of late, all due to increasing unhappiness with AOL’s management and content strategy.

Paul Miller and Ross Miller, who are not related, both stated publicly that they did not like the editorial direction AOL was going in, especially a controversial content strategy document titled “The AOL Way.”

In his blog post, Topolsky threw another smackadoo at AOL, noting “SB Nation believes in real, independent journalism and the potential for new media to serve as an answer and antidote to big publishing houses and SEO spam–a point we couldn’t be more aligned on.”

New AOL content head Arianna Huffington has shifted toward a more journalistic path, but the talent bleed began before AOL’s $315 million purchase of the Huffington Post.

In a blog post, which is embedded below, Topolsky said the new SB Nation gadget site will be similar in pace and topic, but it will be broader than Engadget.

The move is an interesting one for SB Nation, which completed a $10.5 million Series C round, led by Khosla Ventures, in the fall.

It had already raised about $13 million in total venture funding from Accel Partners, Allen & Company and Comcast Interactive Capital, as well as from angel investors such as Ted Leonsis and others in Silicon Valley.

In related news, also restarting tomorrow will be a popular gadget podcast that Topolsky, Patel and Paul Miller had done for Engadget.

The New York Times’ David Carr mentioned the new site in the middle of a column earlier tonight.

Here is Topolsky’s blog post on the move, titled “This Is My Next Project”:

As you may have already heard (or read), there’s some activity going on in the world of Joshua Topolsky. Earlier this evening, David Carr published a piece in the New York Times about a new project that I’m embarking on…and I want to just say a few things about it.

Firstly: yes, this is happening. I’ve decided to join the team at SB Nation to build something brand new in the tech space. Now I know it might seem odd to some that I would be partnering with a sports publisher to build a technology news site, but that’s only half the story. This isn’t just about sports, or tech, or lone silos. What we will build together at SB Nation is a new media company–buoyed by the absolutely incredible work SB Nation has already done in publishing–and part of that new media company will be the as-yet-unnamed gadget and technology site that I’ll be working over the next few months to create. When we launch (hopefully in the fall), I will be editor-in-chief of a property that I hope will inform, entertain, and engage fans of technology in whole new ways.

I should say that I wouldn’t want to build something like this alone, and thankfully, I won’t have to. I’ll be joined by some very good friends at this new venture–people like Nilay Patel, for instance.

Of course, the natural question I’m sure a lot of people have is: why SB Nation? The easy answer is that the people at SB Nation share my vision of what publishing looks like in the year 2011. They think that the technology used to create and distribute news on the web (and mobile) is as important as the people who are responsible for the content itself. And that’s not just pillow talk–SB Nation is actively evolving its tools and processes to meet the growing and changing needs of its vast editorial teams and their audience communities. They’re building for the web as it is now. From the perspective of a journalist who also happens to be a huge nerd, that’s a match made in heaven. SBN isn’t just another media company pushing news out–it’s a testbed and lab for some of the newest and most interesting publishing tools I’ve ever seen. In short, I was blown away when I saw what kind of technology they’re using to get news on their front page and engage audiences, and even more blown away when I started talking to them about what could come next.

But beyond the technology (and possibly more important than the technology), there’s another factor here that’s driving my decision. It’s that SB Nation believes in real, independent journalism and the potential for new media to serve as an answer and antidote to big publishing houses and SEO spam–a point we couldn’t be more aligned on. This is a group of people that not only think independent media works, but are reaping the rewards of new publishing done right. As the fastest growing online sports publisher, they’re seen as a source for credible and honest journalism, which is why industry stalwarts like Rob Neyer have recently joined their ranks (ranks which include hundreds of talented sports experts). This isn’t tabloid page grabbing or content farming–it’s news and insight by and for a passionate and informed group of people. And that’s exactly where I want to be.

So, what happens next? We get to work.

In the coming months I’m going to be laser focused on one thing: building the best tech site in the world–and I would love to hear what you guys think the next phase in technology and gadget news should look like. Ping me with ideas, gripes, or even better–come and work here! SB Nation is looking for new developers as we speak, and as we ramp up to launch, we’ll be bringing on lots of talent to work both on the front page and behind the scenes.

I couldn’t be more excited and enthusiastic about what we can build right now, and I can’t wait to share what we’re going to make with the rest of the world. The months ahead are going to be filled with lots of early mornings and sleepless nights, intense debates, triumphs, and trials–and I can’t wait.

Four-year-old WeatherBill is announcing today $42 million in Series B funding from Google Ventures and Khosla Ventures as well as previous investors NEA, Index Ventures, Allen & Company, First Round Capital, Atomico and Code Advisors.

WeatherBill CEO David Friedberg was previously a member of Google’s corporate development team, while CTO Siraj Khaliq led technical projects such as the company’s distributed computing infrastructure. They are actually some of the first former Googler co-founders funded by Google Ventures.

With the offering, LinkedIn hopes to raise $175 million. The company reports revenue for the 2009 fiscal year of $120 million and a loss of about $4 million. And for the first nine months of 2010 it reported revenue of $161 million with a profit of $1.9 million, or about 4 cents a share. It may be profitable now, but it doesn’t expect to be profitable on a GAAP basis in 2011 because it expects its costs to increase. Leading the list of costs it expects to increase: Technology infrastructure.

As of Sept. 30 it was sitting on nearly $90 million in cash.

As BoomTown’s Kara Swisher reported earlier today, the offering will be led by Morgan Stanley, with J.P. Morgan Securities, Allen & Company and UBS Securities all part of the underwriting team. No mention of Goldman Sachs however, which is also an investor.

The Mountain View, Calif., company runs what it calls “the world’s largest professional network on the Web with some 90 million members in 200 countries and territories.” The filing reports a monthly average of 65 million unique visitors during the three-month period ended December 2010, nearly double the 36 million from the same period in 2009, and 5.5 billion page views during the same period, up from 2.8 billion in 2009.

LinkedIn’s had a head count of 1,000 990 full-time employees as of Dec. 31. Of those, 524 were in engineering, product development and customer operations; 313 were in sales and marketing; and another 153 were classified as general and administrative.

Revenue for the first nine months of 2010 breaks down like this:

LinkedIn says that 27 percent of net revenue came from customers outside the U.S.

CEO Jeffrey Weiner made $462,297, including a base salary of $250,000 a year and a bonus of more than $211,000. He has options to purchase 3,521,237 shares at an exercise price of $2.32 per share, and blocks of these options vest on a monthly basis. So far, options on about 1.6 million shares, or about 45 percent of his total option grant, have vested.

CFO Steven Sordello made $342,507, with a base salary of $240,000 and a bonus of $101,306. He has options to buy about 295,000 shares in various blocks, with strike prices that range from 46 cents to $2.32 a share.

Founder and chairman Reid Hoffman owns more than 19 million pre-IPO shares, or a little more than 21 percent of the company. With valuation estimates for the company ranging from $2 billion to $3 billion, Hoffman’s stake would be worth somewhere between $428 million and $642 million.

Weiner owns 3.8 million shares, or about 4 percent, a stake worth between $82 million and $123 million. Among LinkedIn’s VC investors, Sequoia Capital has a little less than 17 million shares, or 19 percent, followed by Greylock Partners, with 14 million shares, or a little less than 16 percent. Bessemer Venture Partners has 4.6 million shares, or about 5 percent. They invested total venture funding of $103 million and collectively hold stakes worth between $796 million and $1.19 billion, depending on the valuation.

LinkedIn’s long-awaited entry into the public market is one that many expect will be followed by other Internet firms in the coming year, including Zynga, Chegg and, finally, Facebook. And news of the filing comes on the heels of yesterday’s IPO by Demand Media, a Web publisher based in Santa Monica, Calif., which went public yesterday, with an offering that valued the company at $1.5 billion. Another anticipated IPO, by Skype, looks like it will be delayed until later this year.

Yet an IPO is only one of the various scenarios that could take place at LinkedIn. According to NetworkEffect’s Liz Gannes, one scenario could be an acquisition by Google or Microsoft that takes place either right after filing of the S-1, or right after an IPO. Recent stock purchases have pegged the company at a valuation of about $2 billion, and an IPO would likely push it even higher.

Next week, at the DLD conference in Munich, Germany, BoomTown will be interviewing one of my favorite start-up CEOs: Andrew Mason of Groupon.

And what’s my very first question for the adorkable toast of the digital town, who has just collected a billion dollars in funding, giving his hot social buying site a $4.75 billion valuation?

No, it’s not about what Mason is going to do with all that moolah.

Not, it’s not about why Groupon spurned the $6 billion acquisition offer from Google (and the Yahoo one before that).

No, it’s not about what hair care products Mason uses to get his hair looking so much like Justin Bieber’s coif.

Most of all, what I want to know is how he’s going to manage his ridiculously large–and, let’s be honest, very opinionated–investor group, which is made up of a big chunk of the digital arena’s most prominent VC firms, institutional investors and angels.

Consider the list, which is much more diverse than Facebook’s at a similar time in its gestation (and, in fact, it feels a lot like the social networking site’s current investor stampede):

Andreessen Horowitz, Battery Ventures, Greylock Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Mail.ru Group (formerly DST Global), Maverick Capital, Silver Lake, and Technology Crossover Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, Accel Partners, T. Rowe Price, Fidelity, Capital Group, Morgan Stanley, former AOL exec Ted Leonsis and others.

(How in the world is the ubiquitous Ron Conway not shoved in this pig pile? Or is he?)

And, of course, the inevitable Allen & Company acted as financial advisor for this massive funding, which also feels like a bit of a private pre-IPO.

It will be interesting to see exactly whom among this shareholder group that Mason and the other top Groupon execs will listen to and who will have the most influence over the next year.

None of the new moneybags got a board seat, which is probably a good thing. As most entrepreneurs know all too well, investors can be a tricky thing–at once helpful and then not so much.

Mason, a clearly gifted exec, certainly has his hands full now, managing expectations for the fast-growing company, as well as the business itself.

Let’s hope that now that this surreal investor sideshow circus is over, that Groupon’s precious time can be focused on just that.

SB Nation, the Washington, D.C.-based sports blog and news start-up, has just completed a $10.5 million Series C round, which is being led by Khosla Ventures, according to sources.

SB Nation has already raised about $13 million in total venture funding from Accel Partners, Allen & Company and Comcast Interactive Capital, as well as from angel investors such as Ted Leonsis and others in Silicon Valley.

Accel and Comcast will also be participating in the new funding, sources said.

People familiar with the situation said SB Nation’s post-investment valuation, after its most recent round last summer, was about $30 million, making the new one at least double–if not triple–that.

The big new investment is predicated on the boom in traffic to sports blogs, such as SB Nation, which recently launched 21 regional sports sites.

With a mix of professional and user-generated content aimed at engaging passionate fans, SB Nation now has 290 topical sites and real-time content–all with a big dollop of social tools to spur online conversations and engagement.

While it has been around since 2003, founded by Daily Kos’s Markos Moulitsas and others, the start-up has been aiming more recently, under the leadership of former AOL exec Jim Bankoff, at the sweet spot of local sports coverage in newspapers.

The new funds will be used to fuel growth, enabling more investment in SB Nation’s technology platform, its bloggers, mobile, local, advertising sales and a few relevant acquisitions.

Here is a video interview BoomTown did in May with Bankoff about where SB Nation was headed:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101108/sb-nation-raises-10-5-million-in-khosla-ventures-led-series-c-round/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20101021/kleiner-perkins-announces-250-million-sfund-for-social-start-ups/ http://allthingsd.com/20101021/kleiner-perkins-announces-250-million-sfund-for-social-start-ups/#comments Thu, 21 Oct 2010 17:38:54 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=51090 During a press event at Facebook headquarters this morning, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers announced a new $250 million fund for start-ups playing in the social space. The venture capital firm’s partners in the effort: Amazon.com, Facebook, Zynga, Comcast, Liberty Media and Allen & Company LLC.

The release below; Kara Swisher is covering the event live.

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers Launches $250 Million sFund Initiative for Social Web Entrepreneurs

Amazon.com, Facebook, Zynga, Comcast and Liberty Media to Invest and Help Accelerate a New Wave of Social Web Innovations

October 21, 2010 – Palo Alto, Calif. – Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) today announced the sFund, a new $250 million initiative to invest in entrepreneurs inventing social applications and services. Amazon.com, Facebook, and Zynga, the leading companies defining today’s social and online environment; entertainment and media leaders Comcast and Liberty Media and Allen & Company, LLC, have committed to invest in the sFund and serve as strategic partners. The sFund will provide financing, counsel, and relationship capital for a new generation of entrepreneurs to deliver on the promise of the social web.

“We’re at the beginning of a new era for social Internet innovators who are re-imagining and re-inventing a Web of people and places, looking beyond documents and websites,” said KPCB partner John Doerr. “There’s never been a better time than now to start a new social venture.”

The sFund will be led by KPCB partner Bing Gordon, former chief creative officer and longtime executive at Electronic Arts and board director of Amazon.com and Zynga. Gordon said, “Social is just getting started and the opportunities are vast. As in the early days of the Internet, the race is on. Today every business, organization, and entrepreneur should have a social strategy.”

“Social apps are viral, and when they hit, it often happens suddenly, and then they grow explosively. That’s one of the reasons the scalable, elastic, no capex, variable cost nature of Amazon Web Services is ideal for social apps,” said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com. “The top three companies that develop for Facebook all use AWS.”

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, said, “The Web is being rebuilt around people, and we’re at a point where any app, website, or device can be designed to be social from the ground up. We’re focused on enabling entrepreneurs to build companies that can disrupt their industries.”

Mark Pincus, founder and CEO of Zynga, noted, “Zynga’s successes – such as FarmVille and Mafia Wars – show the speed with which entrepreneurs can transform existing industries and invent entirely new ones through social platforms. Our model demonstrates consumers’ desires to connect with others in new and valuable ways.”

Brian Roberts, chairman and CEO of Comcast Corporation, said, “Social businesses play an increasingly important role in our entertainment and communications products. We’re very pleased to be a part of the sFund and look forward to seeing the great innovations that are generated from its investments.”

All anchor investors in the sFund initiative are prioritizing developer services for entrepreneurs, who will be part of an active ecosystem. The strategic partners launching the sFund each bring unique contributions. Amazon Web Services (AWS) will provide AWS Getting-Started Support for one year, priority access to worldwide Startup Events, and dedicated business and technical support. Facebook will contribute access to its platform teams, beta APIs, and new programs, like Facebook Credits. Zynga will host periodic sessions with sFund companies to focus on management and technical development, including open source collaboration. Comcast Interactive Capital, Comcast’s venture fund, will provide access to Comcast’s resources, teams, and relationships.

Over the past year, there has been unprecedented innovation in social applications. KPCB’s latest social ventures show the breadth of the social opportunity, from seed stage to scale-up, and enterprise to entertainment, including:

Cafébots — The first company dedicated to Friend Relationship Management. By building applications that are useful, fun, and scalable, consumers will be able to extract more information from and make better use of their social graphs. KPCB led a Series A funding for the company founded by a team of Stanford PhDs.

Flipboard — The world’s first social magazine, delivering a beautiful, personalized experience of the news, images, and information being shared by your friends across social network feeds on your iPad.

Jive — Jive’s social software leverages innovations in social to radically change the way work gets done in the enterprise. Jive has over 3,000 customers serving 15 million users. KPCB led a growth stage funding round in July.

Lockerz — A new social commerce company aimed at ages 13-30 creates a revolutionary new way to shop, play content, and connect. In less than a year, Lockerz has grown to more than 17 million members, offering major discounts on the best fashions, electronics, music, and more.

KPCB will have 10 U.S. partners working on the fund, including Chi-Hua Chien, John Doerr, Eric Feng, Bing Gordon, Lila Ibrahim, Randy Komisar, Aileen Lee, Matt Murphy, Ellen Pao, and Ted Schlein. Another four KPCB partners in Shanghai will extend the sFund’s reach in China.

Go to www.kpcb.com/sfund and www.facebook.com/kpcbprofile, or follow us at twitter.com/kpcb to learn more about the sFund.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101021/kleiner-perkins-announces-250-million-sfund-for-social-start-ups/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100505/washington-post-announces-a-one-time-fire-sale-for-newsweek/ http://allthingsd.com/20100505/washington-post-announces-a-one-time-fire-sale-for-newsweek/#comments Wed, 05 May 2010 14:54:22 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=19094 This is how bad things are at Newsweek: Not only has owner Washington Post Co. (WPO) hired Allen & Company to sell the magazine, but it’s not pretending otherwise.

From the release:

“The losses at Newsweek in 2007-2009 are a matter of record. Despite heroic efforts on the part of Newsweek’s management and staff, we expect it to still lose money in 2010. We are exploring all options to fix that problem,” said Donald E. Graham, chairman of The Washington Post Company. “Newsweek is a lively, important magazine and website, and in the current climate, it might be a better fit elsewhere.”

In corporatespeak, this is equivalent to hastily scrawling out a “Going Out of Business–Name Your Price” sign and plastering it on the front window.

Anyone want to make a bid? Newsweek saw revenue decline 29 percent last year and ended up losing $29.3 million on sales of $184 million.

Meanwhile, it’s worth noting that things are comparatively awesome for rival Time Magazine: Owner Time Warner’s (TWX) Time Inc. just reported that ad sales are up (unit-wide) for the first time in two years.

Ah. Here’s Time’s grave-dancing statement right now, via a press release: “TIME continues to be healthy and profitable, and a trusted source of news, reporting and analysis for millions of people in America and around the world in print, online and on the iPad. We had a highly profitable year last year and will have an even more profitable one this year.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100505/washington-post-announces-a-one-time-fire-sale-for-newsweek/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100504/lets-go-to-the-videotape-sb-nations-jim-bankoff-speaks/ http://allthingsd.com/20100504/lets-go-to-the-videotape-sb-nations-jim-bankoff-speaks/#comments Tue, 04 May 2010 15:30:55 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=27973 While in Washington, D.C., recently, I paid a visit to Jim Bankoff, who is now helming a fascinating start-up called SB Nation, a fast-growing sports blog and news platform.

With over 200 individual communities, it’s a mix of professional and user-generated content aimed at engaging passionate fans.

A former AOL (AOL) exec, Bankoff (pictured here) has worked on such products as TMZ.com, Moviefone, MapQuest and Netscape, as well as its AIM and ICQ messaging offerings.

After that, he became a senior adviser to Providence Equity Partners.

SB Nation has raised about $13 million in total venture funding from Accel Partners, Allen & Company, Comcast Interactive Capital, as well as angel investors such as Ted Leonsis and others in Silicon Valley.

People familiar with the situation said SB Nation’s post-investment valuation, after its most recent round last summer, is about $30 million.

SB Nation has used its funding to grow like gangbusters, especially since Bankoff arrived in late 2008 as chairman and CEO.

While it has been around since 2003, founded by DailyKos’s Markos Moulitsas and others, the start-up has been aiming more at the sweet spot of local sports pages, especially as newspapers have become weaker.

Here’s the video of my interview with Bankoff, as well as a tour of its D.C. HQ:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100504/lets-go-to-the-videotape-sb-nations-jim-bankoff-speaks/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20100225/left-at-the-altar-by-aol-associated-content-hires-allen/ http://allthingsd.com/20100225/left-at-the-altar-by-aol-associated-content-hires-allen/#comments Thu, 25 Feb 2010 20:15:59 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=16729 Interested in buying Associated Content, which specializes in generating lots of low-cost, search-friendly content? The company isn’t technically for sale, and there’s no pitch book.

But if you’ve got an offer, you can go ahead and contact Allen & Company, the media banker hired by Associated Content late last year.

Associated Content looks and acts a lot like Demand Media, the Santa Monica-based “content mill” that’s drawn a lot of attention in the last year or so–though both companies bristle when you compare the two. It’s also thematically related to AOL CEO Tim Armstrong’s push to automate the production of content at that company.

That’s why Armstrong worked very hard to buy Associated Content last summer, as Silicon Alley Insider reported. I’m told a deal in the $90 million range was all but done, but ultimately nixed by Time Warner (TWX) CEO Jeff Bewkes, who wanted Armstrong to buy stuff on his own dime after AOL (AOL) spun out from the media giant.

AOL is free and clear now, but it doesn’t have a bankroll for big acquisitions. Earlier this year, the company spent $36.5 million on video platform StudioNow, but AOL execs have said they can’t and won’t spend any more than that on acquisitions for some time.

So if Associated Content, which is backed by Canaan Partners*, Softbank and Armstrong himself, wants an exit in the near term, it will have to look elsewhere.

Like where? Prior to bringing on Allen, the company flirted with Yahoo (YHOO), which has yet to do much M&A in the Carol Bartz era, but will one day. And sources says CEO Patrick Keane has even chatted to Demand Media, his company’s chief rival, about the possibility of a combination.

Another possible route: Conventional media outlets, some of which are already using the start-up to help fill their Web pages with cheap content.

Alternately, the company can stay solo and hope its story becomes more attractive as time goes on. People close to Associated Content say it’s on a $15 million run rate, up from $4 million earlier in the year. ComScore pegs the company’s audience at 10 million unique visitors (though as usual in these cases, the company says it has many more, and Quantcast puts the number at 20 million).

Associated Content declined to comment.

*An earlier version of this article incorrectly described Polaris as an investor in Associated Content.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100225/left-at-the-altar-by-aol-associated-content-hires-allen/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100203/yahoo-unloads-hotjobs-on-monster-for-225-million/ http://allthingsd.com/20100203/yahoo-unloads-hotjobs-on-monster-for-225-million/#comments Wed, 03 Feb 2010 21:43:45 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=34184 Apparently, Yahoo’s efforts to sell off some of its noncore properties are going quite a bit better than previously thought. Moments ago, the company said it will sell Yahoo HotJobs to Monster Worldwide (MWW), proprietor of rival online career site Monster.com. Price: $225 million in cash.

The deal, which is expected to close in the third quarter, involves a three-year traffic agreement under which Monster will become the provider of career and job content on the Yahoo (YHOO) homepage in the U.S. and Canada.

Obviously a smart move for Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, who has been trying to narrow the company’s focus to its core portal business–most recently by selling email technology provider Zimbra to VMware (VMW).

Now, if only Bartz can unload Yahoo Games and Yahoo Shopping.

The release, below.

Monster to Acquire HotJobs Business and Enter into Multi-year Traffic Agreement with Yahoo!
NEW YORK & MAYNARD, Mass., Feb 03, 2010 —— Monster Worldwide, Inc. (MWW 16.42, +0.38, +2.37%) announced today that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire the assets of Yahoo! HotJobs, a leading online recruitment website, from Yahoo! (YHOO 15.46, +0.29, +1.91%) for $225 million in cash. Monster and Yahoo! have also entered into a three year commercial traffic agreement, to take effect upon the closing of the acquisition, in which Monster will become Yahoo!‘s provider of career and job content on the Yahoo! homepage in the United States and Canada. The traffic agreement calls for performance based annual payments calculated by clicks and expressions of interest, subject to annual floors and ceilings. In addition, the traffic agreement provides Monster with an exclusive right for a period of time following the closing of the acquisition to negotiate similar traffic agreements with Yahoo! properties on a global basis, including countries in Europe, Asia and Latin America, subject to certain limitations.

“HotJobs with its significant customer base plus the traffic agreement are an ideal complement to Monster’s innovative recruitment solutions and global reach,” said Sal Iannuzzi, chairman, chief executive officer and president of Monster Worldwide. “These agreements, combined with Monster’s career Communities and our recently introduced 6Sense(TM) semantic search technology, will bring substantial new benefits for employers seeking more qualified candidates and job seekers searching for more relevant opportunities across a wider range of industries—globally.”

“Bringing together Monster and HotJobs creates even greater access and opportunities for both recruiters and job seekers,” said Hilary Schneider, EVP, Yahoo! (NSDQ: YHOO). “The transaction with Monster enables us to continue to provide an important service to our users through the traffic agreement. Yahoo! remains focused on its core businesses and delivering exceptional experiences to users, partners and advertisers.”

Monster believes that the acquisition of HotJobs and the traffic agreement with Yahoo! will provide a number of benefits to jobseekers and employers, who today have more diverse competitive choices than ever before, and a value to all of its stakeholders, including its shareholders. These include:

Anticipated increase in job matches and search efficiencies–By bringing more diverse job and career opportunities, tools and resources together in one place, employers and job seekers will enjoy greater convenience and more precise search results and better matches with Monster’s patented 6Sense(TM) search technology and other innovative products.

Expected expansion of job seeker pool for employers–Monster will be able to offer its employers a significantly larger pool of candidates across diverse geographies and industries. Based on Media Metrix comScore (NSDQ: SCOR) reporting, last year HotJobs averaged 12.6 million unique visitors per month.

Expected expansion of the number of job postings across industries for job seekers–Through the combination of Monster and HotJobs job postings, job seekers will have access to more job opportunities in one place in those industries currently leading job creation, including healthcare, finance and insurance, retail, manufacturing, information and wholesale trade.

Broader reach anticipated for recruitment advertising through additional media alliances and reseller agreement–With the addition of HotJobs’s network of more than 600 daily and weekly newspapers, Monster’s alliances with local papers will grow to a total of approximately 1,000, giving Monster reach in all 50 states. The additional newspaper alliances, through their online and print classified ads, will further Monster’s current strategy of connecting job seekers with smaller, local businesses, particularly in healthcare, education, and skilled and hourly job categories.

Yahoo! will continue to manage its broader Newspaper Consortium (NPC) partnership, including providing both search and display advertising, content distribution, and its ad-serving platform, to newspapers in its NPC.

The transaction is subject to clearance under Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act and other customary closing conditions. The transaction is currently expected to close sometime during the third quarter of 2010, subject to regulatory review. Monster expects to realize operating synergies from the acquisition and currently anticipates the transaction will be breakeven on a pro forma full year earnings in 2010 and accretive thereafter, inclusive of the costs incurred under the traffic agreement.

Stone Key Partners LLC and Bank of America Merrill Lynch acted as financial advisors to Monster in connection with this transaction. Allen & Company LLC provided a fairness opinion to Monster’s Board.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100203/yahoo-unloads-hotjobs-on-monster-for-225-million/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090420/the-shocking-spot-runner-lawsuit-vs-the-boomtown-video-of-ceo-nick-grouf-in-happier-days/ http://allthingsd.com/20090420/the-shocking-spot-runner-lawsuit-vs-the-boomtown-video-of-ceo-nick-grouf-in-happier-days/#comments Mon, 20 Apr 2009 17:33:33 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=12497

As everyone knows by this morning, Spot Runner–the heavily-funded and once-hyped online-offline advertising agency–is being sued by one of its more prominent investors.

Ad behemoth WPP, which is making a variety of harsh allegations in a lawsuit filed about two weeks ago, is saying it is still not too big to be snookered by the start-up’s top execs and some of its other investors.

WPP (WPPGY), which has been quite active in making digital ad investments over the last several years, is alleging that Spot Runner sold over $54 million in “secondary” shares to line its own pockets without telling WPP much, all while losing money, running out of funding and not building a sustainable business.

The lawsuit essentially paints an ugly picture of Spot Runner as the Bernie Madoff of Web 2.0.

In its strongest phrasing, the lawsuit alleges:

“Rather than working to make Spot Runner a successful and profitable venture, they perpetuated a ‘pump-and dump’ scheme in which they aggressively promoted the Company to new investors (often by promoting that WPP was an investor in and supported of the Company) and then sold new investors large quantities of their own secondary shares at ever-increasing valuations. Such secondary sales were accomplished surreptitiously and without disclosures to Investors required by the controlling Investor agreements or federal and state securities laws.”

Those named in the suit include: Spot Runner CEO and co-founder Nick Grouf, CTO and co-founder David Waxman, venture investors Battery Ventures and Index Ventures, and board members, such as former AOL exec Robert Pittman.

This is obviously a bad turn of events for Spot Runner, which is currently reeling from the advertising downturn too.

Before that, it had gotten over $100 million in funding from a strong slate of investing luminaries.

Investors included international media giants Daily Mail and General Trust and Grupo Televisa, investment company Legg Mason Capital Management (LM) and luxury conglomerate Groupe Arnault/LVMH.

Spot Runner’s previous investors are Allen & Company, Battery Ventures, Comerica Bank (CMA), Lachlan Murdoch, Vivi Nevo, Capital Research and Management, CBS (CBS), Index Ventures, Interpublic Group (IPG), Tudor Investment Corporation and WPP.

All that money had, when times were good, given Spot Runner an eye-popping valuation upward of $500 million.

And that’s the very kind of bubble economics that apparently allowed some at the company to make those lucrative secondary sales the lawsuit alleges, with lots of demand to get in to the latest hot start-up.

To be clear, such sales are not uncommon at tech start-ups in Silicon Valley, often done to allow entrepreneurs to take some money off the table, especially if there is no clear path to liquidation.

But the scope of the sales alleged is quite unusual, with Grouf getting half the proceeds of the transactions, which were made from early 2006 to early 2008.

That said, WPP–which is seeking $11.5 million in damages, as well as legal fees, after investing $10 million–leaves itself open to its own tsk-tsking, since it finally got to participate some in the sales too, dumping $900,000 worth of shares in the last one.

That makes it seem like WPP is just miffed that it did not get enough while the getting was good, which is underscored by the small amount of money being asked for in the lawsuit, in comparison to the large and loud accusations.

Worse still, perhaps, for everyone involved, is the suit’s revelation that Spot Runner was not the revenue geyser it had touted itself as being–which should not come as a huge shock to anyone who has followed any Web 2.0 company in an even cursory way.

Very few, including the star, Facebook, make money, as BoomTown and others have pointed out a lot to little interest.

The lawsuit says the profit-free Spot Runner had $5 million in revenue in 2007 and $9 million in 2008. It alleges too that the company only has $20 million left of its funding and is spending $35 million to $45 million a year.

That’s because Spot Runner was trying to create a new online ad system, which was essentially a do-it-yourself model that tries to iron out inefficiencies in the buying and selling of advertising and bridge the gap between the traditional and online ad markets. It has since changed its strategy and is working on other products, such as a digital-media buying platform called Project Malibu.

Other than Spot Runner’s statement that it would defend itself vigorously, there were mostly no comments all around.

“This situation is unfortunate; we had hoped that we would have had a long relationship with WPP. We believe the claims are without merit and we will vigorously defend against them, including taking all necessary legal action to protect Spot Runner’s reputation,” said a Spot Runner spokeswoman in a statement.

But one source close to the Spot Runner side, while not addressing the specific allegations, noted in an interview with me that what looks bad now did not then:

“These are different times and things look differently.”

You can say that again. And again after that.

As point of that fact, check out a video I did, below, with Grouf last July at Spot Runner offices in Los Angeles, right after it had gotten one of its giant piles of money. (Grouf is pictured here.)

This video took place right after a lot of the transactions that the lawsuit alleges, which makes sense since Spot Runner was the hot start-up at that moment and many would have been trying to get into the action.

I met Grouf many years ago when he–along with Waxman–founded PeoplePC and Firefly Networks.

Grouf sold the struggling PeoplePC–which hawked computers bundled with an online service–to Earthlink (ELNK) in 2002 for $10 million and assumption of $35 million in liabilities, in a Web 1.0 meltdown deal that followed a disastrous IPO.

But with a hot new start-up, everything looked pretty again, perhaps too pretty, for Grouf.

As I wrote at the time about the hype, which including rumors of Spot Runner being sold for big bucks to Google (GOOG) or Microsoft (MSFT):

“This is its biggest burden, I think, setting expectations very high for what is still a little start-up…Who knows whether the company will be able to overcome its hype, but time (and money) will tell.”

Obviously, we can tell a lot more now.

Here’s the Grouf video (the full lawsuit text and a memo Spot Runner sent to employees about it are also below):

Here is the full lawsuit (click on + button to zoom in):

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Business & Law spot runner WPP

And, finally, here is the letter Spot Runner sent to employees, who have suffered from layoffs, about the lawsuit:

Team,

As you may have heard, WPP, a minority shareholder (less than 3%) in Spot Runner since 2006, filed a lawsuit against the company and its board members primarily related to the sale of Spot Runner stock and Spot Runner’s communications with WPP. This situation is unfortunate, as we appreciate and value the relationships we have with all of our investors and we had hoped for a long and supportive relationship with WPP. We believe these claims are without merit and we will vigorously defend against them, including taking all necessary legal action to protect Spot Runner’s reputation.

We feel strongly that WPP’s complaint contains many baseless accusations and we want to give you a broader perspective on the matter. This lawsuit is unrelated to our products and services–it is centered on legal agreements entered into with WPP, a sophisticated investor, regarding the way that shareholder stock sales were handled. WPP alleges that Spot Runner’s board members failed to disclose to WPP the stock sales by shareholders, allegedly in violation of the board’s obligations to stockholders, among other things.

We are confident that Spot Runner complied with all of its obligations under the various shareholder agreements. When these sales occurred, there was overwhelming demand for Spot Runner stock and the company did not want to dilute existing shareholders by issuing new shares. Therefore, the founders (in 2006) and the board members and other preferred shareholders (in 2007 and early 2008) agreed to make room for important, new investors and respond to their desire to invest in Spot Runner by selling their own shares. In 2007 and 2008, WPP and other preferred shareholders were given notice that the sales were occurring and they had the opportunity to participate in the sales. In fact, WPP signed various documents acknowledging this opportunity.

Spot Runner and all of its employees conduct business with the utmost integrity. Our team, technologies, and products and services are core assets of which we can all be proud. It is because of your hard work that we have come this far. To that end, we continue to drive hard toward successfully launching Project Malibu and realizing its full potential. You also should know that our board members remain majority shareholders in Spot Runner–a concrete sign of their commitment to and confidence in the business.

Our outside counsel will work with the board and management team to develop a formal reply, which ultimately will be filed with the court. These legal proceedings should not affect our day-to-day operations.

We are grateful that we can count on you to remain focused on serving our clients and partners to the best of your abilities.

Thank you again for all that you do for Spot Runner.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090420/the-shocking-spot-runner-lawsuit-vs-the-boomtown-video-of-ceo-nick-grouf-in-happier-days/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20080731/spot-runners-ceo-nick-grouf-speaks/ http://allthingsd.com/20080731/spot-runners-ceo-nick-grouf-speaks/#comments Thu, 31 Jul 2008 17:05:42 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=2466

On one of my many trips to Los Angeles (what can I say? I like to hang where LoRo* hangs), I dropped in to see Nick Grouf of Spot Runner.

As many might know, Spot Runner is an online-offline ad agency play that has gotten big funding and even bigger hype of late.

We’ll see how that goes. But Spot Runner actually seems to be tackling an underserved (and unexciting) market of local and national clients in need of cheap online ad solutions married to more traditional marketing venues to boost revenue.

Here’s my video interview with Grouf at Spot Runner’s offices on Wilshire Boulevard:

I met Grouf many years ago when he–along with Spot Runner partner David Waxman–founded PeoplePC and Firefly Networks.

Grouf sold the struggling PeoplePC–which hawked computers bundled with an online service–to Earthlink (ELNK) in 2002 for $10 million and assumption of $35 million in liabilities, in a Web 1.0 meltdown deal that followed a disastrous IPO.

He then started working for the Presidential campaign of Sen. John Kerry, helping figure out how to best and most cheaply place critical television ads–crunching all sorts of data about lots and lots of neighborhoods and towns and cities nationwide to figure it out.

What Grouf figured out, though, was that a system for doing so was nonexistent.

That experience turned into Spot Runner, which is essentially a do-it-yourself model that tries to iron out inefficiencies in the buying and selling of advertising and bridge the gap between the traditional and online ad markets.

Offering cheap ad templates, clients can make and place low-cost television and radio ads for small and national businesses, as well as political campaigns, and get analytics about the impact of the ads. Some ads cost as low as $500.

Spot Runner got a pile of cash to try to do that better, recently nabbing $51 million in funding to add to the $60 million already raised.

Investors include international media giants Daily Mail and General Trust (DMGT.L) and Grupo Televisa (TV), investment company Legg Mason Capital Management (LM) and luxury conglomerate Groupe Arnault/LVMH (MC.PA).

Spot Runner’s previous investors are Allen & Company, Battery Ventures, Comerica Bank (CMA), Lachlan Murdoch, Vivi Nevo, Capital Research and Management, CBS (CBS), Index Ventures, Interpublic Group (IPG), Tudor Investment Corporation and WPP.

Its board includes Index’s Danny Rimer and former AOL exec Bob Pittman.

All that money has given Spot Runner an eye-popping valuation upwards of $500 million.

This is its biggest burden, I think, setting expectations very high for what is still a little start-up.

And while there are rumors of both Microsoft and Google, as well as Comcast, being interested in acquiring the company, Grouf dismisses the speculation.

He says Spot Runner is more intent on using the money raised to buy companies and improve its offerings.

For example, it recently bought Weblistic, a local search listings creator, and hired former Microsoft exec Joanne Bradford.

Bradford, who was a VP and chief media officer of MSN Media Network, is executive vice president of National Marketing Services at Spot Runner, focusing on getting national advertisers to also think small and targeted.

Who knows whether the company will be able to overcome its hype, but time (and money) will tell.

(*And a free D6 bag for anyone who correctly identifies who I am referring to here, either by sending in a comment or an email to me at kara@allthingsd.com.)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20080731/spot-runners-ceo-nick-grouf-speaks/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20080714/iphone-3g-huge/ http://allthingsd.com/20080714/iphone-3g-huge/#comments Mon, 14 Jul 2008 18:00:26 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=2766

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