A little more than two years after launch, Path, the self-proclaimed “private social network” startup, is beginning to focus more on monetization.

Hence the hiring of Kim Jabal as the company’s first CFO, who will spearhead the large task of eventually turning Path into a profitable service.

Jabal comes to Path after a year-long stint as VP of finance at Lytro, the experimental camera startup, where she handled the company’s finance, accounting and tax-related activities. Previous to that, she spent more than eight years at Google in multiple finance-focused positions, including directorships in the online sales department, investor relations, and ultimately as director of engineering finance.

In an interview, Jabal echoed Path CEO Dave Morin’s recent comments on monetization prospects, focusing in the near term on potential monetization options like virtual goods, or a premium subscription service. Her hiring, too, could begin to dispel the notion that Path is looking for an exit through an acquisition by another major company like Yahoo or Google (the latter of which has courted Path before).

“Look, we’re trying to build a long-term, sustainable company,” Jabal told me. “We’re not trying to sell the company. I wouldn’t have come if I thought they were going to get bought next month.”

She also made it clear that the company is still looking to heavily recruit software engineers.

Jabal started her first day at Path just last week.

Here are a few highlights from our conversation:

Earnings: At 82 cents a share, HP pretty much blew out its earnings versus the consensus of Wall Street analysts, which was 71 cents. But that also amounts to a 15 percent beat on the high end of HP’s own guidance for the quarter. “That is one of the biggest beats I’ve seen at HP,” Lesjak said.

Cash flow: Cash flow from operations improved to $2.6 billion. That’s especially good news, Lesjak said, because the first quarter of the year tends to be seasonally weaker than others on the cash flow front.

Net debt: There’s been a lot of worry of late about HP’s debt situation. Debt investors over the summer started paying ever-higher prices to insure against the possibility, however remote, of a default. On paper, HP’s long-term debt is still rather high: $21.8 billion, or about 65 percent of market cap as of Thursday’s close.

But out of that, only $4.7 billion is debt derived from the operating company, the portion of HP that makes stuff and sells it. The rest is incurred for the purpose of HP Finance, the unit that lends money to help customers pay for HP products and services. Lesjak said there’s a pretty good chance that, on that basis, HP will be debt-free by the end of 2013. “Our goal is roughly zero,” she said.

And, as Lesjak said on the conference call, when that happens, there’s a new round of decisions to be made, such as, what to do with the cash from operations that’s flowing in. HP will have to start thinking about other ways to use that cash, such as increasing the dividend payments, buying back more shares, or maybe thinking about buying another company. That’s a good problem to have.

The Austin, Texas-based company said Jeffries will manage WhaleShark’s global finance, legal, facilities and human resource teams — and at this rate, he’s presumably being brought on board to expand the company’s management team ahead of a potential IPO.

In late 2011, the company raised a massive $150 million round to continue buying up coupon sites around the world. Some of its brands include RetailMeNot and Deals2Buy in the U.S., VoucherCodes in the U.K., Bons-de-Reduction in France and Deals.com in Germany.

The company is conducting a classic rollup, in which it achieves scale through acquisition. In total, it has raised $300 million in capital from major investors such as J.P. Morgan Asset Management, Institutional Venture Partners, as well as others, including Austin Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Adams Street Partners and Google Ventures.

It’s logical to have a proper money manager to keep track of the burgeoning business, but a WhaleShark spokesman declined to say if a public offering was in the making, adding, “Right now, we’re focused on growing our business.”

Most recently, Jeffries was EVP and CFO at Taleo, a software company purchased by Oracle for $1.9 billion last year. Prior to that, Jeffries played top financial roles at Palm, where he was CFO, and eBay, where he was VP of finance and chief accounting officer.

In the release announcing the new executive appointment, WhaleShark confirmed that it was “highly” profitable last year, and that it clocked more than 450 million visits to its websites.

WhaleShark’s business plays nicely with the deals craze. While the practice of coupon-clipping is ancient, investors have embraced tech startups in the space, as consumers start looking for deals online rather than in the Sunday newspaper.

Competition includes CouponCabin.com, Coupons.com, CouponTrade.com and many others.

Here’s the TV commercial WhaleShark rolled out for the holidays; it ran across several TV networks, including HGTV, E!, TLC and Bravo:

Xerox said Friday that Maestri, who joined the company as CFO in February 2011, will step down in February to join Apple as corporate controller, taking over a job vacated by Betsy Rafael, who retired from the iPhone maker last October. He’ll report to Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer.

Apple spokesman Steve Dowling confirmed the hire to AllThingsD, saying the company is “thrilled that Luca Maestri will be joining us. He brings more than 20 years of experience in finance and management, and we look forward to working with him.”

As it should. Maestri has quite the resume. Before joining Xerox, he served as CFO of Nokia Siemens Networks for a few years. Prior to that, he spent 20 years working his way up at General Motors.

Joi Ito/Flickr Newly dubbed Twitter COO Ali Rowghani

Rowghani, who has been with the company since 2010, came to Twitter to act as chief financial officer after leaving the same role he held at Walt Disney Company’s Pixar animation studios. He was at Pixar for more than nine years, serving as CFO for half that time.

Update 7 pm PT: Twitter CEO Dick Costolo just confirmed the news via tweet: “Congratulations to @rowghani on his new role as COO and to @mgupta on his new role as CFO.”

Rowghani has often been noted as the quiet, behind-the-scenes body man to Twitter CEO Costolo, taking on far more operational responsibilities than that of typical CFOs. Rowghani has had his hand in many important areas of the business, including contributing ideas around Twitter’s Promoted Suite of ad products, a key component of the company’s monetization efforts.

So effectively, Rowghani as COO is less of a new role than it is a solidification of his current efforts — a title change, as it were.

Newly dubbed Twitter CFO Mike Gupta

Twitter did not immediately respond for a request for comment.

The shuffle also comes on the heels of a major departure for Twitter, as VP of Growth Othman Laraki announced his departure from the company via tweet on Wednesday evening. Laraki was responsible for growing Twitter’s user base over the past year, which the company seems to have achieved; on Wednesday, Twitter announced it had reached the 200 million active user mark. He did not name his next landing point, though I assume he’ll be taking some time off, as he and his wife just had their first child.

The changes in the top ranks have been some time coming, as Twitter has spent the past year reorganizing the company into different teams, headed by high-profile tech hires stolen from other big companies around Silicon Valley (Google perhaps being the prime poaching target).

Earlier in the summer, Twitter snapped up Google sales guy Richard Alfonsi to become VP of global online sales, wrangling in most of the small and medium sized businesses that make of the long tail of Twitter’s ad business. Michael Sippey left SAY Media in January to head up Twitter’s VP of consumer product role, while Chris Fry and Adam Messinger were poached from Salesforce and Oracle, respectively, now holding VP of engineering posts.

Former VP of Growth Othman Laraki

Another potential pitfall is Twitter’s ability to hold on to key talent, as top figures like Laraki may prefer to leave the company after only a handful of years, opting instead to pursue the entrepreneurial route and build a new start-up. (Facebook, too, has this challenge to deal with.)

But it’s also another series of hires on Twitter’s long road in preparation for an IPO — which could potentially come in the next two years — solidifying key executive positions and building out the different divisions of the company under them.

New York magazine just published what will doubtlessly be the first of many larger-scale profile pieces on new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer (Fortune’s at work on one, too).

Titled “Can Marissa Mayer Really Have It All?” New York’s version is a very solid and fair effort that raises a lot of pertinent questions about the Silicon Valley Internet giant’s latest leader.

That, of course, includes pondering the high-profile issues around her coping with a newborn (really new) and work; her carefully crafted public glamour-geek-girl persona that is at odds with her sometimes more tetchy private one; Mayer’s mostly-up-and-then-down-at-the-end career at Google as a key exec; and the myriad challenges she faces in turning around the long-troubled Yahoo.

Writes Lisa Miller quite astutely: “This newest version of Marissa, the mom-geek-CEO, will surely test Mayer’s iterative powers, for she’s playing to a tougher crowd, one that won’t be placated by tweets, Manolos, and rapturous praise for pineapple malts.”

Indeed not, which is why sources said Mayer is likely to begin to make postpartum appearances back at Yahoo as early as this week. She delivered her first child with husband Zach Bogue, whom she dubbed “Big Baby Boy Bogue,” on Sept. 30.

Among the initiatives she has been working on up to and after her son’s birth, said numerous sources, is the redo of Yahoo’s powerful home page, a reorganization of top management duties, and an announcement about whether it will buy back shares or give a dividend from its recent multibillion-dollar sale of part of its lucrative stake in China’s Alibaba Group.

In addition, said sources, Mayer is also putting into place her new methodology of keeping track of employee performance and rewards. There is an all-hands meeting scheduled today, in fact, apparently to go over the system, which Mayer spoke about in her last all-hands meeting.

The home page redo is also in the late-stage works for unveiling soon, said sources. Those who have seen it said it has a starker and simpler design ethos, and will stress user personalization, customization and more social elements. It will also have ample opportunity for third-party developers to offer a variety of services on it (maybe Mayer can save Zynga by copying a little bit from Facebook!).

The reorg will also be interesting. Mayer has made a number of top exec appointments, including adding a new CFO and head of HR. She will also be rejiggering other roles of existing management.

For example, expect tech and operations EVP David Dibble — who got a mess of new responsibilities right before Mayer was appointed — to have some of that dialed back.

The disposition of all $3.6 billion of Alibaba cash is perhaps the most immediate issue, especially for investors, who are largely hoping for a buyback of stock. Such a move will likely cause Yahoo shares to rise, as happened at AOL.

That would be nice, since Yahoo stock has stayed pretty flat since Mayer got to the company in July. (That compares, ironically, to a 31 percent rise at Google since she left.)

But Wall Street analysts and others have been making bullish calls on Yahoo recently, including CNBC’s screamy stock guru Jim Cramer of “Mad Money.”

Boosted by the growing value of its Asian assets — in China, as well as in Japan, which Yahoo is trying to sell — and also anticipating some kind of magic mojo from Mayer, price targets for Yahoo shares have been as high as $22.

That was from Goldman Sachs, which reinstated coverage of Yahoo with a “buy” rating recently. Analyst Heath Terry noted that “while user engagement continues to decline, the company lacks a mobile strategy and significant talent has left the company, Yahoo still has hundreds of millions of users, valuable Web properties, and the financial resources to fuel a potential turn around over time.”

Translated: Yahoo kinda stinks, but it still might be able to buy itself out of this mess with a $10.6 billion pile of dough from Asia.

All eyes will be on the actual business Yahoo operates itself in two weeks on Oct. 22, when the company announces third-quarter results. Sources said the quarter will come in as expected, but will still tell a story of lackluster growth in advertising, engagement and, well, every key part of its native offerings.

That said, Mayer is expected to be on the call — her first at Yahoo — to outline her grand vision in more detail, as a spokeswoman has noted.

That’s good, since shiny profiles of her can only do so much. It’ll be nice to finally hear her say something definitive in public about how she’s going to fix the company that has given the mediagenic exec even more press.

(And, let’s hope, without the tweets, Manolos and pineapple malts.)

Marissa Mayer, in a move that was not unexpected, has replaced Yahoo CFO Tim Morse with longtime software-focused financial exec Ken Goldman.

When she bounced Yahoo’s longtime HR exec David Windley in August, just a month into her tenure, I noted:

“Several sources at the company said that they expect Mayer to replace almost the entire current executive team, from its CFO Tim Morse on down.”

Thus: Check, please!

Morse’s departure is part of a major house-cleaning by Mayer of many longtime Yahoo execs that she had not hired herself.

Besides Morse and Windley, many others have hit the road, including former interim CEO and media head Ross Levinsohn, CMO Mollie Spillman, U.S. sales head Wayne Powers and former strategy exec Jim Heckman.

(In fact, if I were a senior Yahoo exec B.M.M. — Before Marissa Mayer — I would be doing a resume refresh about now.)

Sources said she has been looking for a replacement for Morse since she arrived, seeking to put in place her own execs.

That would be Goldman, along with several other recent hires. He comes from Fortinet, a provider of threat management technologies. He has some consumer Internet experience, having previously worked at one of Web 1.0’s most exquisite disasters, Excite@Home.

Morse, who was hired in mid-2009 by ousted CEO Carol Bartz, had served — including as interim CEO — through a number of major crises at Yahoo.

(On a personal note, Morse has always been a polite, affable and stand-up guy in my dealings with him, even in some very dicey moments and though I most definitely had to have been very irritating to the buttoned-up exec.)

Sources said Morse had been trying to leave the company for some time now, but wanted to get through its board meeting last week before departing. He has been talking recently to a number of companies about moving there.

That’s no surprise, since sources also said that Mayer had been increasingly sidelining Morse — who had previously been a key player in decision-making at Yahoo — when making a series of decisions about Yahoo’s future.

For example, he was not heavily involved in the recent strategic presentation that she unveiled in very broad strokes to Yahoo employees today.

Here’s Yahoo’s official press release on the CFO switcheroo:

Yahoo! Names Ken Goldman as Chief Financial Officer

SUNNYVALE, Calif. – Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) today announced that Ken Goldman will join the company as chief financial officer (CFO), effective Oct. 22. In this role, he will be responsible for Yahoo!’s global finance functions including financial planning and analysis, controllership, tax, treasury, and investor relations. Goldman will report directly to Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer.

“Ken is one of the most accomplished and respected financial executives in the technology industry having served as a CFO for more than 25 years, and we’re thrilled to have him join Yahoo!,” said Mayer. “His track record leading the financial strategy and stewardship of many successful public and private companies makes him an ideal choice for Yahoo! as we enter our next phase of growth.”

“Yahoo! is an iconic brand with an incredibly strong business model and balance sheet,” said Goldman. “I believe there is a lot of runway ahead for this business, and I look forward to working with Marissa and the rest of the executive team as we define Yahoo!’s future.”

Goldman brings more than 30 years of experience in financial, operational and business management. He joins Yahoo! from Fortinet, a provider of threat management technologies, where he served as CFO. Prior to Fortinet, Goldman spent nearly six years as senior vice president of finance and administration and CFO of Siebel Systems, until the company’s acquisition by Oracle Corp. in January 2006. He has held CFO positions at Excite@Home, Sybase, Cypress Semiconductor and VLSI Technology.

Goldman has served as a director on several public and private sector boards and has been named among “America’s 15 Most Connected Capitalists” by Forbes magazine.

Goldman succeeds Yahoo! CFO Tim Morse, who has been with the company since June 2009. Morse will leave the company later this fall.

“Tim has been a trusted leader for Yahoo! over the past three years and has expertly guided the company through some key periods as well as our most important strategic deals,” added Mayer. “I’ve personally relied on Tim’s knowledge and leadership in my first few months at Yahoo!. I know I speak for everyone in wishing him the best.”

Previously, she was CFO at CBS Interactive for two years; prior to that, she was CFO at PayPal. Hentges will start at the Walnut Creek, Calif.-based company on Oct. 1.

In the past year, YapStone’s revenues have jumped by 50 percent, and profits have more than doubled. Sites that it operates include rentpayment.com, utility-payment.com and vacationrentpayment.com. The company’s growth was fueled by a $50 million investment by Accel Partners. The company has plans to expand into new verticals and internationally.

During her seven years at PayPal, Hentges helped grow the company’s revenue to $2.6 billion.

Here’s the full release:

YAPSTONE HIRES PAYPAL VETERAN MARY HENTGES AS CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER

Accel-backed YapStone hires CFO from CBS Interactive and PayPal to lead its finance team and drive its rapid global growth in online and mobile payments

WALNUT CREEK, CA (September 21, 2012) — YapStone, a leading global provider of Web and mobile payment solutions and processing for targeted vertical markets, has hired high-profile Chief Financial Officer, Mary Hentges. In her new role, Hentges will lead the company’s global financial operations and work closely with the management team on the creation and execution of its business strategy, operating plan and corporate development activities.

Hentges has been CFO at CBS Interactive for two years, and prior to that held the position of CFO at PayPal. In her 7-year tenure as CFO at PayPal, she grew revenue ten-fold to $2.6 billion. Hentges will join the YapStone team beginning October 1.

“I have been fortunate to work with some of the leading interactive media and payment companies. With Yapstone’s lead in vertically-focused payment solutions, I look forward to augmenting the company’s success in this new role,” said Hentges.

Recently, Yapstone rolled out new Web and mobile bill pay products in several new vertical markets and the company also has plans to expand globally. In the past year alone, YapStone’s revenue is up 50%, profits have gone up over 100%, and Accel Partners led a $50 million minority investment in the company.

“I’m confident that Mary will have a profound impact on the future of YapStone as we are entering the most exciting time in the company’s history,” said Tom Villante, Chairman and Co-founder of Yapstone. “Mary will be more than our senior-most finance executive – she has the ability and experience to help YapStone disrupt and innovate payment markets around the world. She’s one of very few who have done it before.”

And, as usually happens when a new CEO comes to a company, there has been a lot of upheaval among the senior management ranks at AMD. The latest is CFO Thomas Seifert, who resigned in order to pursue other interests.

Sources familiar with the situation say that Seifert, 48, is interested in finding a job where he has a shot at being CEO. He served briefly as acting CEO at AMD after the surprise resignation of then-CEO Dirk Meyer 19 months ago. Read was named CEO after a search that dragged on for seven months.

As I said, some upheaval is natural. But the departures from AMD are starting to pile up — the confirmed exits, counting Meyer and Seifert, are now 26 by my count, and I’m sure I’m missing some. Among them is a name not yet reported but confirmed by AllThingsD: Chris Cloran, VP in charge of AMD’s Client business — “client,” in this case, refers to PCs for both businesses and consumers — who left the company late last week, though his status on LinkedIn is not yet updated to reflect that fact.

Some of the people were fired, caught up in a reduction in force which Read ordered late last year. But most left on their own power, bound for jobs at places like Samsung, Synaptics and Calxeda.

Now, it’s not as if there haven’t been any key hires at AMD. Just last month, the company brought on Jim Keller, the former head chip designer at Apple. And last year it hired its CIO away from Hewlett-Packard. And there have been new hires in the graphics business. It also named Jack Harding, the chairman of eSilicon, as a director on its board. So there are some new people offsetting some of the departures, but the number of recent departures listed all together — all of them having taken place since Meyer was pushed out last year — is pretty stunning.

It’s worth nothing that AMD shares fell by more than 7 percent, or 30 cents, on the news of the CFO’s resignation. It’s been a rough ride for AMD shareholders over the course of the last year. Before Meyer’s ouster, the shares were trading above $9. On Monday they closed at $4.01, down 56 percent. The stock only fell further — another 7.5 percent — in after-hours trading, as markets reacted to word of Seifert’s departure.

Meyer’s 2011 ouster is said to have been precipitated by an argument with the board of directors over the direction of the company. Chairman Bruce Claflin, a former 3Com CEO, is said to have quarreled with Meyer over the need to invest heavily in chips for mobile devices, like tablets. Meyer is said to have resisted, arguing that AMD needed another year of improved stability before investing in any significant new product directions. Claflin disagreed, and pushed for a more aggressive stance in light of advances by Nvidia into mobile PCs and tablets.

Update: As of noon ET, AMD shares have fallen on the New York Stock Exchange by 32 cents, or nearly 8 percent, to $3.69.

Here’s what I’m sure is only a partial list, gathered from various news stories, LinkedIn profiles and chats with people familiar with AMD’s operations:

Bob Rivet, Executive VP and COO
Nigel Dessau, Chief Marketing Officer
Marty Seyer, Senior VP of Corporate Strategy
Patrick Moorhead, Corporate VP, Strategy
Patrick Patla, VP and General Manager, Opteron unit
Jim Mergard, VP and Chief Engineer
David Wang, Corporate VP Products Group
Ben Williams, Corporate VP and General Manager of Asia Pacific
Dave Kroll, VP for Global Communications
Jon Volkmann, Corporate VP and Marketing Fellow
Jeff VerHeul, Corporate VP of Platform Solutions Engineering
Bob Feldstein, VP of Strategic Development
Chris Cloran, General Manager, Processor Division
Andy Tseng, Corporate VP and General Manager, Taiwan
Frank Lee, Senior VP for Greater China
Anand Mandapati, Senior Director of Engineering
Carrell Killebrew, Director of Products Group
Eric Demers, Graphics CTO
Godfrey Cheng, Director of Client Technologies
Rick Bergman, General Manager, Products Group,
Gamal Refai-Ahmed, Senior Architect, ATI
John Bruno, System Architect, Office of the Chief Engineer
Paul Teich, Senior Fellow Corporate Strategy for Servers
John Fruehe, Director of Server Product Marketing
Emilio Ghilardi, Senior Vice President and Chief Sales Officer

Yes, the expected attention will rest on the company’s admitted weaknesses: Facebook’s young advertising business faces stiff challenges as consumers flock from desktop to mobile. Also looming is Facebook’s symbiotic relationship with Zynga.

But a more persistent question remains: It’s not about Facebook’s balance sheet, but its CEO and his relationship status with Wall Street.

To this point, Mark Zuckerberg has made it abundantly clear: He couldn’t care less what the Street thinks of him. He only appeared at some, not all investment bank stops during the company’s IPO road show, much of the time clad in a hoodie (gasp!). His focus is the product and strategy of the company, and he lets lieutenants like Sheryl Sandberg and David Ebersman deal with investors.

“We don’t build services to make money,” Zuckerberg wrote in his founder’s letter last February. “We make money to build better services.”

So how, then, will Zuckerberg deal with the rigmarole of quarterly earnings, the needling of analysts?

It is possible — though not probable, I’d bet — that he’ll pull a no-show the first time around. When I asked whether or not Zuckerberg would be on the call, Facebook had no comment.

More likely: He’ll pull a flyby, akin to the likes of Larry Page’s first earnings call as CEO — though (hopefully) better executed.

Think back to when Page first took the reins, a little more than a year ago. Instead of leading the call, Google scripted an awkwardly staged Larry drop-in at the beginning, with Page essentially reading from a list of Google’s quarterly accomplishments and then bailing. He handed his Q&A duties off to Patrick Pichette — the practiced, well-spoken Google CFO — instead of sticking around.

Since then, Page has grudgingly agreed to stay for the whole thing — when he can – but expects his deputies to handle most of the call’s formalities, and Wall Street now seems okay with that. I think Zuckerberg will use the same script, and will ask Sandberg and Ebersman to carry most of the load, as they did in the months leading up to the company’s Nasdaq debut.

Still, despite delegating those concerns to his colleagues, investors will still want to hear from the man at the top, the one who has the greatest insight into long-term strategy.

Zuckerberg can speak to potential retention problems, for instance, especially in the wake of his deputy and CTO Bret Taylor leaving the company to work on his own start-up. And he could broadly sketch Facebook’s M&A strategy, following up on the dozen or so acquisitions the company has already completed this year, while giving guidance as to what’s on its shopping list — especially with a fat $16 billion burning a hole in its pocket after the IPO.

In a critical hire to solidify its top corporate ranks, Airbnb has hired Intuit finance exec Andrew Swain as CFO.

At Intuit, he was VP of finance for the financial software company’s $1.5 billion consumer group, which includes its well-known TurboTax, Quicken and Mint products. Previous to that, Swain was VP of corporate strategy and development.

Swain also worked at the Boston Consulting Group. He got an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BS from the University of Manchester.

The San Francisco-based Airbnb said that Swain would “provide strategic leadership and build the company’s financial infrastructure as it continues its rapid global growth.”

AirBnb also hired a head of talent — former Apple HR exec Joni Reicher. She was most recently senior director of HR, focused on Apple’s sales org and also on its international recruiting.

Barely two weeks after hiring former Jive exec Lynda Smith as its chief marketing officer, today it will announce that it has a new CFO. It’s Lee Kirkpatrick, and he’s leaving Say Media, where he had the same title. He started his new job on May 7.

Twilio is growing so fast that it’s a little hard to keep track of all the news coming out of it. In his new role, Kirkpatrick will be responsible for Twilio’s finances and worldwide strategy. The company recently added Belgium, Finland, the Netherlands and Sweden to the steadily growing stable of countries where it is operating. It also recently struck a deal with Microsoft to add telephony features to its Azure cloud computing platform, so, yeah, maybe now might be the time to add a CFO.

What’s Job One? Well, here’s a funny tradition at Twilio: Every employee, no matter their level or level of technical ability, is required to build a Twilio application in order to become familiar with how the service works. So, part of this week will be devoted to that. Companies like eBay unit StubHub, Salesforce.com and Airbnb have used it to create some custom apps that include the use of a phone.

It’s a very Twilio sort of thing to do. When the company was in the process of raising its most recent funding round — a $17 million series C led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Union Square Ventures — Bessemer partner Byron Deeter created a Twilio-connected number and asked CEO Jeff Lawson to call it. As VentureBeat reported at the time, when Lawson called, he heard an automated voice message asking him to press 1 for $5 million, press 2 for $10 million and press 3 for $15 million.

It turned out that C round topped out at $17 million late last year, bringing its total capital raised to about $34 million, so there’s a decent-sized pile of money to look after. Before Say Media, Kirkpatrick held executive jobs at Ofoto, the Kodak Gallery and Reuters.

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.

The company has hired Robert J. Lawson, whose last gig was as CFO of Codexis, a biofuel company. His resume also includes stops at Intuit and General Electric.

RingCentral is essentially an Internet-based phone service that gives a small company an easy way to seem bigger than it is. Its investors include Sequoia Capital, Khosla Ventures and DAG Ventures, and it has raised a combined $44 million in capital since being founded in 2003. The company has about 200,000 businesses signed up, and its service is resold by AT&T.

It has been getting early IPO buzz for about a year. And while the company won’t say that Lawson’s brief will include shaping things up for a roadshow, the fact that Codexis went public in 2010 isn’t exactly going to tamp down the expectation that RingCentral could file an S1 before the year is out. Could hiring bankers be next?

The online restaurant reservations company said today it has appointed Duncan Robertson to the position of CFO. Robertson previously co-founded and served as CFO of SnapStick, a mobile app company. Prior to that, he was CFO of Aricent, a technology services company.

Three months ago, the company surprised Wall Street when its CFO Matthew Roberts was promoted to president and CEO and said Jeff Jordan, the president and CEO, would transition to executive chairman.

Jordan has since taken a job at Andreessen Horowitz, the large Silicon Valley VC firm.

When Jordan’s departure was announced, OpenTable’s stock fell $17 to $96. Today, the company’s stock continued spiraling downward, slipping another 9.5 percent, or $6.51 a share, to stop at $68.90 a share in after-hours trading.

OpenTable reported second-quarter revenues of $34.3 million, a 53 percent increase over the same period a year earlier. It was that figure that narrowly missed analyst expectations of $35.3 million, according to Thomson Reuters.

The company’s quarterly profits totaled $6.3 million, or 26 cents a share, up from $2.6 million or 11 cents a share in the second quarter 2010.

Despite executives playing musical chairs, Citi’s Internet Research Managing Director Mark Mahaney wrote in a note to investors that the company reported an “intrinsically robust” second quarter, and that revenues were only modestly below his estimates, whereas adjusted earnings per share of 33 cents beat expectations.

Other positive results:

• Its base of restaurants increased 27 percent to 15,560 year over year and diners seated totaled 22.2 million, a 47 percent increase in North America.
• Internationally, it saw even stronger growth, with its installed base of restaurants growing by 276 percent and seated diners up 249 percent year over year.