Forbes magazine put out its much-watched Midas List today, which is kind of the Oscars for venture capitalists in tech. (Caveat: Think more khakis and dudes than glitz and glamour.)

On the Top 10 list of 100 of the best-performing and most influential tech investors, Jim Breyer of Accel Partners and Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz led the list at No. 1 and No. 2, as they did last year. And several others in last year’s list remained on it: Peter Fenton of Benchmark Capital, Greylock Partners’ Reid Hoffman, and also David Sze, Peter Thiel and Bessemer Venture Partners’ Jeremy Levine.

Accel scored well on the rest of the list with nine partners named; Sequoia Capital had six VCs on the list; Benchmark, Greylock and New Enterprise Associates got five slots; Bain Capital Ventures, Bessemer, Kleiner Perkins and Meritech Capital Partners had four; and Andreessen Horowitz, Institutional Venture Partners and Venrock each had three.

As usual, there were few women on the list — only three — reflecting the lack of gender equality in the top tier of the VC business, which solidly remains a boy’s club, despite a lot of noise about changing it (see the pictures here and become depressed once again). Those women who did manage to get on the Midas List were Jenny Lee at GGV Capital, who jumped from No. 94 to No. 36; Kleiner Perkins’s Mary Meeker, who dropped from No. 42 to No. 47; and Theresia Gouw of Accel at No. 82, up from No. 92.

One notable part of the massive Forbes package of VCs on parade was the intense and multipart focus on the travails of Kleiner Perkins and its longtime leader and legendary VC John Doerr. Doerr clocks in at No. 26 on the list, dropping from No. 12 last year, a significant fall.

He does address the nagging issues at the storied firm, including ill-conceived investments in clean tech, a late-to-the-game move into social media, and even its big stake in stock-declining online gaming giant Zynga, in a video (below) and in several pieces, one of which is titled ““John Doerr’s Plan To Reclaim the Venture Capital Throne.”

More like “Game of Thrones” from reading it; there is another, more critical article in the New York Times that appeared yesterday. That piece focused on Kleiner’s investment in the troubled green-car startup, Fisker Automotive, and also the firm’s ongoing sex-discrimination lawsuit with former partner Ellen Pao.

“It was a challenging year, one of my more challenging years in the venture business,” said Doerr to Forbes.

Indeed, although Forbes does hand Kleiner a hey-we-have-some-sharpie-young-folks-here-too! gimme with its focus on “new generation” partners Megan Quinn and Mike Abbott in an interesting Q&A, as well as yet another piece on Kleiner supporters — such as Google’s Eric Schmidt — touting the firm as perhaps down but definitely not out in the “mojo” department.

“John always wins eventually, and the reason he always wins eventually is because he has the processing power and human energy,” Schmidt told Forbes. “Whatever the set of challenges, he will drive the change in the firm. They’ll have a crisis meeting and another crisis meeting, but he will do it. It may be messy but he will get them there.”

Presumably, if Doerr and team can get some mileage out of its Twitter investment next year and somehow turn around Zynga’s moribund stock. (Kleiner has held on to a pile of it, which is why Doerr recently joined the board that already had Kleiner’s Bing Gordon on it.)

On problem for Kleiner, and boon to others like Accel and Greylock, was that the firm was not early in Facebook, whose IPO — as rocky as it was — gave many VCs making the top of the Midas List the needed turbocharge in terms of performance. Other key companies to help VCs look good this year, according to the Forbes report: Workday, LinkedIn and Skype.

Here’s Doerr, who is indeed a legend, even if more bruised and battered this year, talking about it all to Forbes’s Connie Guglielmo, in the video interview:

Speaking of media attention, here’s a more provocative video interview by Forbes with Sequoia’s Doug Leone (No. 4, up from No. 18 last year), in which he takes aim at VC firms that do too much self-promotion — three guesses which pioneering browser inventor he is referring to here, and the first two don’t count. He called it an “embarrassment,” although Sequoia did hire an excellent PR person from Google this year — nonetheless making the point that the focus should be on entrepreneurs and not investors.

Except, of course, when it comes to scoring high on the Midas List.

On Deck announced this morning that Google Ventures has led an additional $17 million investment with participation from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and Industry Ventures. Other investors in the round include Institutional Venture Partners, RRE Ventures and First Round Capital.

That round comes on top of a $100 million round of debt financing raised last year from Goldman Sachs and Fortress Credit Corp., and a $15 million Series C led by SAP Ventures in 2011.

So far, On Deck has funded more than $450 million in loans to small businesses. Its borrowers, CEO Noah Breslow told me yesterday, tend to be small: Restaurants, auto body shops, doctor’s and dentist’s offices, construction contractors. Most of them have 200 employees or less. “Our customers tend to be businesses that do a large number of small-ticket transactions,” he said.

Launched in 2006, On Deck has turned out to be sort of a right-time, right-place story. Commercial banks were being tightfisted with loans, even to healthy businesses. But they also tend to be challenged by the time and effort that goes into underwriting a smallish loan that the borrower only needs for a short period of time.

Where banks tend to focus more on the personal credit rating, the On Deck software gathers live digital data from a business’s operations in order to help evaluate the business’s health. The point is to use that data that banks and other potential investors usually don’t see, as a tool to realistically evaluate the risk of making a loan that goes beyond the simple credit rating of the business owner. On Deck then takes it a step further and actually makes the loan.

Breslow said loan volume is up 100 percent over last year, and is on track to grow again by 140 percent this year. By the end of the year, it will have loaned more than $1 billion to small businesses.

As the business grows, On Deck has gathered a lot of data on its applicants. And as so many companies are starting to realize, that aggregated data is yielding some interesting insights. Stay tuned for more on that later this year.

Institutional Venture Partners led the round, with existing investors RRE Ventures, SAP Ventures and First Round Capital also participating.

To date, the New York-based company has raised $75 million in equity, and even more if you count the $100 million in debt it secured from Goldman Sachs and Fortress Credit in August.

On Deck said it will use the capital raised today to fund additional growth, which includes new product development and getting the word out to more merchants about the company.

On Deck lends between $5,000 and $150,000 in short-term loans to small businesses, ranging from auto repair shops to bridal boutiques. It vows that the loan application process can take as little as 15 minutes because it uses technology on the back end to evaluate a company beyond its credit scores.

Other lenders provide loans online, but most are targeting other online entities. For instance, some of the companies that have entered that space include Kabbage, which has raised $56 million in capital, and more recently, Amazon.com.

Since 2008, On Deck says, it has deployed $400 million to thousands of small-to-medium-sized businesses.

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:

Image copyright pupunkkop

The IPO is the lifeblood of our stock markets; it’s the vehicle that helps bring capital, liquidity and a sense of optimism to the U. S. economy. In the late 1990s, we had a market that was flush with technology-related IPOs. Today’s IPO market has been a series of stops and starts compared to then, and notably tainted by highly scrutinized, extremely volatile offerings.

While there have been recent successful IPOs like Eloqua, FleetMatics, Palo Alto Networks, ServiceNow, Splunk, Workday and Yelp, the investing public and the media are still skeptical. We keep seeing headlines like “The Other Tech IPO that Just Faltered,” “IPOs Remain Out of Kilter,” and “Lofty Gains Lift Gloom in IPO Market.” I have yet to talk to anyone who thinks much is going to change. It’s unfortunate, because I believe if you step back and look from a broad perspective, the elements are in place to bring the IPO pipeline closer to what it once was. It’s time to stop bashing it and look forward.

Throughout my years as a securities lawyer, investment banker and now venture capitalist, I have been intimately involved with over 100 initial public offerings. Most of them have been venture-backed companies in the technology sector. Many who have tracked my career would say I have worked on more technology IPOs than any other venture capitalist out there, with my first rodeo being with Four Phase Systems in 1975 all the way to FleetMatics, which went public in October.

I spent almost 20 years as a technology investment banker, eight of which were spent at Montgomery Securities, where I ran technology investment banking. It was there that I saw our IPO deal pipeline — at its peak — larger than Wall Street’s entire venture-backed company today. I came to this stark realization only recently, when I looked at a half-page sheet of upcoming public technology offerings from all the investment banking firms. It’s shocking to see. Our own deal sheet at Montgomery would always run onto a second page — and we were just one of the major firms at the time.

I am a firm believer that things can change. We can boost the pipeline of attractive offerings in today’s market by looking at it as a three-legged stool so that we start to fill more pages.

Three-Legged Stool Beneath the IPO Ecosystem
I view the IPO market as a three-legged stool that needs to be supported by a specific triad of parts to stay stable. Two of the three are already in place. The first leg is represented by a huge crop of strong attractive growth companies. The second is based on a favorable regulatory environment due to the recent passage of the Jumpstart our Business Startups (JOBS) Act. The third leg involves the investment banking system, which is the leg that needs adjustment. Once the three are aligned together, I believe the market can be ripe for recovery.

Leg No. 1: An Abundance of Venture-Backed Innovative Growth Companies
From what I am seeing right now, there are an incredible number of entrepreneurs creating compelling growth companies. While there were significantly more IPOs in the 1990s, the number of private companies currently being built is about five times what it was during that time. For example, in 1991, there were 319 venture investments in the core areas of the technology we know today. In 2011, there were 1,825. Yet there are far fewer IPOs.

Today’s entrepreneurs are defining massive, fast-growing markets that hardly existed 15 years ago, such as enterprise mobility, social marketing and big data analytics. They are also disrupting large established industries like travel, transportation and legal services. Compared to the 1990s, technology companies today have more sustainable, scalable models that can result in successful public companies in the long-term, where as we all know, only the strong will survive under the scrutiny of the public markets.

Companies today are vastly ahead of those I saw 20 years ago — stronger management teams, less capital intensive, bigger markets and better business models. An abundance of venture-backed innovative growth companies exists today. From this perspective, it is the best time ever. Therefore, the first leg of the stool is in full effect.

Leg No. 2: Favorable Regulatory Environment
Much of the previous regulatory clampdown (e.g., Sarbanes-Oxley and the Spitzer settlements) has been relieved under the JOBS Act. Now a smoother path exists to guide growth companies to go through the IPO process. This regulation has the potential to significantly affect the IPO process for smaller companies in a number of ways:

• Creating an IPO “on-ramp” for emerging growth companies (EGCs) with reduced SEC filing requirements
• Providing for realistic scaled disclosure, governance and accounting obligations for EGCs
• Relaxing restrictions on research analysts
• Allowing “testing of the waters”
• Allowing confidential IPO filings

Although there is now more flexibility, companies are not taking full advantage of the actions that are now allowed under the JOBS Act. While there are still some elements where the SEC needs to issue fuller guidelines, companies could be bolder and take advantage of the new laws.

Two of these areas — testing the waters and confidential IPO filings — are huge changes that companies should embrace. I’ll explain.

Testing the waters offers a huge advantage to young companies trying to gain an understanding of potential market reception. Historically, a company had to rely on feedback from its lead investment bankers as to what the likely reaction of the institutional buyer would be. While the bankers offer a reasonable proxy, they are far less informative than real life dry runs with a few institutional buyers. The bankers, having sold hard to get the business, have a natural optimistic bias and a tendency to support the company’s existing positioning. Testing of the waters is a terrific opportunity to explore the receptivity of the institutional buyer to the company, its positioning and target valuation. This can mitigate the risk of a disappointing or failed IPO. Amazingly, not everyone is doing this.

The confidential IPO filing is probably the most important change. Historically, EGCs were understandably concerned about showing their hand to competitors, suppliers and customers in an IPO filing unless they were quite sure that the IPO was going ahead. This created a certain caution by management teams. Now, companies can file confidentially and avoid these issues. They can get the clock rolling, work out any disclosure or accounting issues with the SEC, and only when they are ready to market the IPO do they need to show their hand. And this doesn’t preclude the “dual tracking” of an IPO and an M&A exit. A company can announce that it has filed even though the contents of the filing are still confidential. Nothing wrong with having your cake and eating it, too! The confidential IPO filing is a no-brainer that should be embraced and will allow companies to file that otherwise would have been on the fence and waiting.

Leg No. 3: The Investment Banking System
And now for the area in need of the most improvement: The investment banking ecosystem, which will require some changes and adjustment to reach its full potential and further drive our IPO pipeline.

The healthy IPO market of the 1990s was in large part created by the “Four Horsemen” of the technology investment banking world: Montgomery Securities, Hambrecht & Quist, Alex Brown and Robertson Stephens. Along with the well-known “Bulge Bracket” firms, those four boutique banks drove most of the technology IPO business during that period. These firms were small, nimble and not afraid to take risks. While those specific firms no longer exist and there have been many changes to the investment banking landscape, there is still top talent at both large and boutique growth-oriented investment banks.

Those people who have the skills and knowledge to bring value to growth companies exist today, and I can think of a number of firms fully qualified to be the next “Four Horsemen.” But even though we have the banks and the talent, the banking system still needs the economic incentive to get the banks more involved and motivated to bring companies public.

Currently, underwriting syndicates are being created in a way that dramatically limits the economic incentives to small firms. In the 1990s, the economics, or banking fees, were more favorably divided among the lead banks and the co-managers of the deal. In the current environment, a co-manager receives only 5 percent to 10 percent of the economics compared to 20 percent to 50 percent in the past. Therefore, most investment bankers are more incentivized to work on an M&A deal, because the fees are there. More money.

In addition, we have seen six to eight firms underwrite each of today’s deals. I believe companies should hire one firm as lead and between two to four co-managers, and give all participants the economics to incentivize them to develop a great deal. We have the investment banks that can provide research and trading support, but better deal flow and attractive economics are required to make the engines run.

Finally, the banking industry needs to make adjustments in pricing strategies. During my career, I have learned that the psychology of maintaining momentum is essential to complete a successful IPO. At pricing, the perception is that you need to price at least slightly above the range or revised range to prove it was a “hot” deal. Just look at all the headlines of recent IPO pricings and you’ll clearly recall who did well on day one.

Unfortunately, with some of the large IPOs that priced in 2012, the size of the deal and the price range was set too high. This has been problematic. It sets unachievable expectations and the deal becomes viewed as a failure and disappointment when it fails to meet those expectations. This is true not only for the IPO, but for a company’s early future as a public company.

I believe not every deal needs to be huge and highly publicized, and changing our viewpoints toward this will help. We used to have a higher frequency of smaller-sized IPOs. In recent years, all the offerings have been viewed as either great or horrible, which creates a huge perception gap. It ultimately discourages institutional and individual investors alike from taking a position in a new IPO deal. But in the past, there was more of a bell curve and most IPOs were considered “moderately” successful and many went on to become great public companies. Today, we have a bimodal distribution.

The smallest category as we see in this chart is the “well-priced” deal, up modestly (up to 20 percent). Rather, the bigger categories are big winners or big losers.

Source: Dealogic

So what now?
While things are not going to change overnight, we can create a more fertile environment when the venture capital industry, investment banks and growth companies begin to collaborate and drive changes in the IPO ecosystem and get deals flowing again. My experience tells me it’s possible. I’ve seen it before, and it can happen again, at an even greater scale, to become the most robust IPO market in history. We have been complaining for years that the IPO market is dead, but with a few small tweaks, it’s here for the taking.

Sandy Miller is a General Partner with Institutional Venture Partners (IVP). He focuses on later-stage venture and growth equity investments in technology, Internet and digital media companies. He was recognized by Forbes Magazine as one of the top 100 venture capitalists in the world by his inclusion in all of the Forbes Midas Lists since 2007.

The marketing software concern for which the software giant will pay $871 million might have also made a logical fit at Salesforce.com, though Salesforce might have had to take on some debt to pay that price.

Anyway, there’s speculation that today’s deal for Eloqua may amount to a starting gun for a new round of acquisitions in the cloud software space. In a note to clients today, Karl Keirstead, an analyst with BMO Capital Markets, argues that Salesforce may answer Oracle with some acquisitions of its own.

“In our view, the deal is a modest net negative for Salesforce.com, making it incrementally tougher for them to pick off Oracle’s Siebel client base,” Keirstead wrote this morning. He also believes that about 50 percent or more of Eloqua’s customers are also Salesforce.com customers.

That might spur Salesforce into action on the acquisition front, he says. Having already made significant acquisitions of Radian6 and Buddy Media in the last two years, Salesforce might move on two privately held cloud-based companies in the marketing field.

One is Marketo, a fast-moving company that specializes in revenue performance management. It raised $50 million in a Series F round led by Battery Ventures last year, bringing its total capital raised to $108 million. Its other investors include Institutional Venture Partners, InterWest Partners, Mayfield Fund and Storm Ventures.

Another possible target for Salesforce, Keirstead argues, is HubSpot, a social media marketing outfit based in Cambridge, Mass. It raised $35 million in a fifth round of funding last month. The round brought its total capital raised to about $101 million, and Salesforce had invested in earlier rounds. Its other investors include Google Ventures, Sequoia Capital, General Catalyst Partners, Matrix Partners, Altimeter Capital and Cross Creek Capital.

The point, Keirstead says, is that Salesforce will seek to build its own “marketing cloud” offering. Of course, Salesforce doesn’t have the financial flexibility that Oracle does. It has only $1.4 billion in combined cash and short- and long-term investments as of the close of its most recent quarter. That’s almost pocket change compared to Oracle’s $34 billion as of the quarter reported earlier this week.

The $50 million round brings the company’s total raised to date to $117 million. Institutional Venture Partners led the fourth round with existing investors, with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Greylock Partners and Tiger Global Management also participating.

Also joining the round was strategic investor Scripps Networks Interactive, which owns TV networks, including HGTV and Food Network. Scripps and One Kings Lane became familiar with each other this winter after One Kings Lane ran its first-ever TV advertising campaign.

One Kings Lane CEO Doug Mack says the funding follows a strong year of growth, which was fueled by aggressive — and expensive — expansion plans in 2012.

Today, the online retailer employs 350 people, including the addition of four new executives to its management team. The growth necessitated getting new offices in San Francisco, where it now occupies 52,000 square feet of the Market Square building, and in Los Angeles and New York. As mentioned above, the company also kicked off a pricey advertising campaign, which cost millions of dollars in the fourth quarter alone.

But, Mack says, all that spending has been offset — at least partially — by top-line revenue growth, allowing it to cut its losses by a third compared to 2011. This year, One Kings Lane is on track to record $200 million in revenue, or double what it achieved last year.

Mack declined to discuss the company’s valuation, although he said it has gone up since the company raised money a year ago. However, one glaring milestone left for the company to achieve is profitability, which he believes could occur in the next year or two when the company hits $400 million in revenue.

Mack said this will be the company’s final round of private capital before going public.

“We weren’t really thinking we’d raise, but the consumer-based IPOs are not doing well, and we wondered if they weren’t doing well, if it would ripple back and affect us,” he said. “Basically, we got proactive because someday we might need it.”

Other e-commerce companies have had no problems raising capital recently, including Wayfair, another home decor site, which raised $36 million; flash sales sites like Zulily, which sells children’s apparel; and Fab.com.

Mack was reminded last month why it’s good to have a little more cash in the bank. During Hurricane Sandy, the One Kings Lane office in New York went dark for a week and a half. The staff had to scramble to take photos and write copy for the site from makeshift offices around town. “It was a good reminder — it can even be an act of God that can take you out,” he said.

Even with the difficulties that Sandy presented, Mack said the company is on track to surpass its goals for this holiday season. This year, consumers went “gangbusters” on Thankgiving, with 50 percent of the site’s visits coming from mobile devices (compared to the high 20 percent range normally).

Sales continued to be strong the week after Thanksgiving, fueled by a big Cyber Monday, to make the company’s best week ever, Mack said. The site isn’t focused on running promotions this holiday since most of its inventory is discounted anyway. Instead, it offered a greater selection, by updating the site twice a day instead of just once on Cyber Monday.

The new funds will go toward hiring more technology talent to help its mobile efforts and data tracking. Mack also plans to continue spending on marketing after seeing a huge return on investment from its TV campaigns, which not only brought new people to its site, but translated to more sales. It will also continue spending on its merchandising team, as it continues to add more product.

Additionally, to fuel the company’s growth, it has plans to hire aggressively, and recently appointed four new high-level executives.

“We want to be the most-visited premium home site in the U.S.,” Mack said, adding that the goal is to rival household names, like Pottery Barn, Crate & Barrel, Williams-Sonoma, West Elm and Restoration Hardware.

The four new hires are VP of Brand Development Sascha Jamall, who most recently ran brand and sourcing at Michaels Arts and Crafts; VP of Legal and General Counsel Susan Stick, who previously held a similar title at Skype; Chief People Officer John K. Anderson, who joins from Quidsi, a subsidiary of Amazon.com; and Chief Product & Technology Officer Jean Sini, who most recently ran engineering at Mint.com.

By the end of the year, Mack said, the San Francisco company could add 30 to 50 employees to bring the total headcount to as many as 350. Most of the new hires will be engineers, he said, adding that Sini has a “blank check” to add as much talent as needed.

One Kings Lane was founded in late 2008 by Susan Feldman and Alison Pincus (wife of Mark Pincus, founder and CEO of Zynga, the social games company); Mack joined two years ago.

The online retailer sells designer items for the home, ranging from large oriental rugs to sophisticated and modern side tables. Most of the products are sold at deep discounts, and because of limited inventory and scarcity of availability on other sites, some items can sell out in as little as five minutes. If they don’t, they are pulled from the site within 72 hours.

Mack, who is insanely bullish about the company’s prospects, said that even though it is not yet profitable, he doesn’t consider the plans frivolous. Over the past year, One Kings Lane has been able to double top-line revenue, while also managing to cut losses in half.

Still, despite the retailer’s accomplishments, it has remained fairly quiet about its plans, with the exception of announcing several large funding rounds. Last September, the company raised $40 million from Tiger Global Management, Institutional Venture Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Greylock Partners. The round brought total funding to $67 million and valued the firm at $440 million.

Since launching more than three years ago, the company has slowly expanded beyond its roots as a flash sales site.

In 2010, it added “tag sales,” which lets larger-scale interior designers sell off unused items on the site, and this year, it introduced a marketplace, allowing third-party boutiques to sell their unsold inventory on the site — although not all that apply are approved.

To keep up with demand from its five million members, Mack estimates that the site is now listing between 1,000 and 2,000 new products every day, but the goal is not to increase that number too much. Instead, he said, the company wants to stock more of each item to keep from selling out. That way, the site continues to be easy to browse, unlike large retailers that stock millions of items.

Mack said there are two primary ways that One Kings Lane will grow in the future.

The first is by gaining a larger share of home decor purchases, as more shopping shifts online.

He estimates that in 2007 the online home decor market totaled $9 billion, and that by 2015 it will be worth $23 billion. He also anticipates shopping to continue to increase on mobile phones. Already, mobile makes up 22 percent of the company’s sales, and it’s still growing. Other flash sales sites, including Gilt Groupe and Fab.com, are also hoping to benefit from this trend.

The second opportunity is for One Kings Lane to begin designing its own product lines, which is precisely why Mack hired Jamall, the company’s new VP of brand development. As part of Jamall’s responsibilities, he will work with existing suppliers to create one-of-a-kind products for the site. The products could either carry the vendor’s name or the One Kings Lane brand.

At some point, Mack said, an IPO is an option for One Kings Lane, but he isn’t in a hurry — especially as it spends aggressively during this hiring blitz.

“We are enjoying being nimble and operating in the private capital markets,” he quipped.

At 32 years old, the venture firm has backed more than 300 companies and has witnessed 90 companies go public. Some of its better-known deals include comScore, Dropbox, HomeAway, Kayak, LivingSocial, Netflix, Twitter and Zynga.

Today, it is announcing that it will continue its legacy, having raised its 14th fund, totaling $1 billion. In total, it now has $4 billion under management.

In an interview, IVP’s General Partner Dennis Phelps said the fund is the firm’s largest to date, exceeding its current fund of $750 million.

Despite a larger fund this time, Phelps said it will be business as usual. The plan is to invest about $10 million to $100 million in 10 to 12 companies a year, or 25 to 30 companies over the fund’s 10-year life. The one thing that will change is the average deal size, which will get slightly larger.

“We’ve had the opportunity to make larger investments, but we didn’t have the fund size to support it,” Phelps said. “Companies are choosing to remain private longer, but it doesn’t change our investment model.”

In general, the company’s sweet spot is later-stage companies with roughly $20 million in annualized revenue in the Internet and digital media, enterprise technology, and mobile and communications sectors, he said. But he noted that they do not invest in life sciences or clean technology. Currently of IVP’s active portfolio companies, more than half have revenue of $50 million or more, and a third of them are profitable.

“We feel like our deal flow is as strong as it’s ever been,” he said. “We’ve had amazing momentum in the marketplace, and view us as a firm on the ascendancy.”

Other firms to recently pocket a lot of cash include Andreessen Horowitz’s monster $1.5 billion fund, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers’ $525 million fund for early-stage companies.

IVP has six general partners: Phelps, Todd Chaffee, Norm Fogelsong, Steve Harrick, Jules Maltz and Sandy Miller.

Here’s a visual snapshot of the firm’s history:

Hipmunk, the offbeat travel site that has made “taking the agony out of travel planning” its tagline, tells AllThingsD that it has raised $15 million in a second round of funding.

The financing will enable the team to double — to 32 employees — in the next six months, and to accelerate its product plans going forward.

Hipmunk is different from other travel services because it displays search results visually. Instead of seeing a list of flights, the user can easily scan flights by price, duration, and departure and arrival time in a grid layout. Users also can sort by “agony,” which is a combination of price, number of stops and duration.

Since launching in 2010, the company has created a mobile application that has been downloaded more than one million times; the app recently added hotel search. In the future, Hipmunk plans to continue improving flight and hotel search on both the Web and mobile, while also expanding internationally.

“We want to be the de facto travel tool,” said Hipmunk CEO and co-founder Adam Goldstein. “We have a great user interface that helps people find the best options, but we knew our ability to ramp would be easier with additional funding. The fact is that now, instead of building one thing at a time, we can build multiple things at once.”

The company’s second round was led by Institutional Venture Partners (IVP) with investors from the company’s first round, including angels and Ignition Partners, also participating. In total, Hipmunk has raised $20 million.

IVP’s General Partner Todd Chaffee, who previously invested in Kayak and HomeAway, will join Hipmunk’s board.

Goldstein said that Hipmunk is not just about creating a better user interface, it’s about creating new experiences.

“Hipmunk is a different place to shop, with alternate sources of inventory,” he said.

For example, when searching flights, it features private jets alongside traditonal flights; when searching for hotels, it displays apartments for rent on HomeAway and Airbnb.

As with other travel sites, like Kayak, Hipmunk earns a commission from traffic it sends to aggregators such as Orbitz or Expedia. He declined to disclose the agreement it has with HomeAway, Airbnb and less-traditional sites.

Chaffee said that even though Goldstein is only 24 years old, he feels like he’s talking to a veteran CEO.

“He’s incredibly well versed on how to run a business that’s way beyond his years,” he said of Goldstein.

Hipmunk is just one of a few companies that are trying to upset the status quo by trying to make booking travel less painful. Google recently purchased ITA Software to integrate flight information into its search results, and other start-ups, like HotelTonight, allow you to find a hotel room on your mobile phone for the same day.

“People woke up and finally realized that the travel companies haven’t meaningfully innovated in a decade,” Goldstein said. ”The travel start-ups don’t have entrenched financial interest in the status quo, but the big ones are global distribution systems who are unwilling to experiment with new experiences, that don’t want to risk losing customers who have been using them for 10 years.”

Chaffee said the opportunity to build another massive company like Expedia, Priceline, Orbitz or Kayak still exists. The game isn’t over yet.

“The real story here is, if you look at the overall share of purchases going through Kayak and Hipmunk, it’s unbelievably small,” he said. “The bulk of the average U.S. citizens don’t know about these services, and they are still trying to call the airline, or fumble through some airline Web site, or surf hotel Web sites. They are terrible, and you don’t have to suffer.”

It has been relatively quiet there in the Utah desert ever since, which is odd, because it had been such a chatty company, throwing parties to kill old outdated identities, holding complicated math contests to guess its new name, things like that.

Now it’s about to get noisy again. Effective today, you’re going to start hearing a lot more from Domo and from its employees, and not because its new product is ready. Not quite. (James tells me the company will be talking about it this summer.)

No, starting today, all employees — everyone in the company — will be required as a condition of employment to get seriously engaged on social media in all its various forms in order to make Domo part of the wider conversations taking place on Twitter and Facebook and Foursquare and Pinterest and the rest. It’s called the #Domosocial experiment, and will last eight weeks. James puts it thusly in a post on the company blog:

“The program is designed to get everyone here engaged with and learning from consumer and social technologies. The goal is to help us develop a better product, understand the viral nature of web offerings more effectively, assist in getting the Domo brand out there, enable better customer conversations and see what impact it all has on our business.”

Part of the intent, James told me, is a matter of geography and culture. Being based in Utah, Domo employees are probably better than their equal numbers at other Utah start-ups when it comes to being facile with the ebb and flow of the daily global conversation that takes place on all the social spaces. But they’re probably not as familiar with it all as their rivals in Silicon Valley.

James has seen this sort of thing before. He started Omniture in Utah in 1996 and by 2009 sold it to Adobe for $1.8 billion. “With Domo, I wanted to ensure that we are every bit as adept at understanding and leveraging social as any other bleeding-edge startup,” he wrote.

But on top of that, he’s turning the effort into a live case study to see just how much of a difference it makes in Domo’s business prospects, if any. The company will track important metrics and share them with the world. “We’ll track how things change week after week. The good, the bad and the ugly, it’s all going to be public,” he told me.

Though not about everything. There’s a list of “don’ts.” Don’t tweet about deals in the pipeline, don’t debate with or quarrel with the boss on Facebook. Don’t post about meetings or leak financial information.

What do employees stand to benefit? The best among them will be getting cash rewards for their performance, extra days off, that sort of thing.

What does he expect? He’s been exploring social media pretty seriously for the last six months, and occasionally now gets stopped in the local mall by people who recognize him. “You start having influence in ways you didn’t before,” James told me. He learned with a 10-page article he shared on Twitter, where he has about 12,000 followers, that he experienced a 15 percent click-through rate. “The influence will increase dramatically,” he told me. Also, Domo’s development team will have their eyes opened to the finer points of what works and what doesn’t with social features that are under development at Domo. “We don’t want to re-invent what Facebook and Twitter did, but if you’re not intimately familiar with how those things work, then how can you learn from their mistakes?”

But there’s no denying the attraction of services like Amazon Web Services or Joyent or Rackspace, where you can spin up and configure a new virtual machine within minutes of figuring out that you need it. So, many companies seek to approximate the experience they would get from a public cloud provider on their own internal infrastructure.

It turns out that a start-up I had never heard of before this week is the most widely deployed platform for running these “private clouds,” and it’s not a bad business. Eucalyptus Systems essentially enables the same functionality on your own servers that you would expect from a cloud provider.

Eucalyptus said today that it has raised a $30 million Series C round of venture capital funding led by Institutional Venture Partners. Steve Harrick, general partner at IVP, will join the Eucalyptus board. Existing investors, including Benchmark Capital, BV Capital and New Enterprise Associates, are also in on the round. The funding brings Eucalyptus’ total capital raised to north of $50 million.

The company has an impressive roster of customers: Sony, Intercontinental Hotels, Raytheon, and the athletic-apparel group Puma. There are also several government customers, including the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, NASA, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Department of Defense.

In March, Eucalyptus signed a deal with Amazon to allow customers of both to migrate their workloads between the private and public environments. The point here is to give companies the flexibility they need to run their computing workloads in a mixed environment, or move them back and forth as needed. They could also operate them in tandem.

Key to this is a provision of the deal with Amazon that gives Eucalyptus access to Amazon’s APIs. What that means is that you can run processes on your own servers that are fully compatible with Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3), or its Elastic Compute cloud, known as EC2. “We’ve removed all the hurdles that might have been in the way of moving workloads,” Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos told me. The company has similar deals in place with Wipro Infotech in India and CETC32 in China.

That was July. Wednesday, Domo will announce that it has raised another batch of money, and is bringing in a new investor. The company has closed a $20 million round led by Institutional Venture Partners.

IVP, which had invested in Omniture and so has a history with James, is joining an all-star cast of investors including Benchmark Capital; Andreessen Horowitz; Ron Conway and David Lee of SV Angel; and Hummer Winblad, plus a bunch of personal investments. The round — which is being described as an A-1 round, brings Domo’s total capital raised to date to $63 million.

IVP general partner Todd Chaffee said Domo is an example of a dynamic management team going after a high-growth market. “We know Josh has the experience to build Domo into a disruptive and dominant player in a growing $10 billion market,” he said in a statement. Aside from Omniture, IVP has backed HomeAway, MySQL, Twitter and Zynga.

James wouldn’t tell me the implied valuation, but he did concede that it’s upward of “a couple hundred million.” And if that’s not surprising enough, what’s equally surprising is one possible use for the money: Acquisitions. Well, maybe.

“Let’s just suppose, and this is 100 percent supposition,” he told me over the phone Tuesday, “that we want to buy someone. We’ve thought about it. We’ve had potential targets cross the email threads. It’s not the right time to do that stuff just yet. But it’s nice to know we have the flexibility when the time comes.”

So where’s Domo, the business intelligence software-as-service play he was building? It’s running as a demonstration with a few early customers, he says. And he’ll have more to say about it publicly in about three to four months.

“We have a few thousand people who say they want to see a demo, and we’re working through that list,” James says. “The feedback has been more positive and at a higher rate than I would have thought possible. I think we’re going to have to figure out how to do a lot of installations all at once.”

That’s what we call a good problem to have.

Klout CEO Joe Fernandez said Kleiner Perkins lead the round, with Chi-Hua Chien joining the Klout board. KP partner Bing Gordon is also staying on the board. Fernandez wouldn’t comment on the price or valuation but called it a “strong round.”

Sources said the funding closed back in November and valued the company at about $200 million.

Other backers who participated included Institutional Venture Partners, Venrock, Greycroft Partners and ff Venture Capital.

Klout’s main product is a scoring system that measures people’s influence and reach on sites like Twitter, Facebook and Google+ — something that social media marketing types pay a lot of attention to. The concept of Klout scores has been somewhat controversial, but that seems natural for a system that quantifies a person’s worth.

Klout’s mission, said Fernandez, is “to empower every person by unlocking their influence.” He said Klout now handles 10 billion API calls per month, up from 100 million per month in January 2010.

Klout last raised $8.5 million a year ago. Its current business model is Klout Perks, where marketers can target influential people with free stuff. Fernandez said Perks are going well, with 300,000 people having received them last year, but “there’s a lot more we can evolve to.”

Earlier this morning, Zynga announced it would price its stock between $8.50 and $10 a share when it goes public later this month.

That’s at the high end of the range that values the four-year-old company at as much as $7 billion. But that’s much lower than than what some investors paid as recently as February, according to documents filed with the Securities & Exchange Commission.

In fact, some of its investors are already underwater.

One of those investors is Morgan Stanley, which is also one of the company’s underwriters in its IPO. In February, 11 mutual funds associated with Morgan Stanley purchased 5.3 million shares at $14 apiece for a total of $75 million. Four other investors, which were unnamed, also contributed to the round totaling $490 million, according to the document.

At $14 a share, the company’s value in February totaled nearly $10 billion, or roughly 43 percent greater than today’s high-end of the range.

Zynga justified the higher stock price back in February, stating that the U.S. economy had improved and that the public markets were being receptive to Internet stocks, including generous valuations for privately held companies such as Facebook and Groupon.

Furthermore, in March, the company used that valuation as a guide to purchase shares back from five of its early investors and its CEO Mark Pincus at $13.96 a share.

While the market conditions have likely changed since then, it’s important to note that things are still in flux. If the company drums up enough demand for the 115 million shares being sold over the next two weeks, the price could move even higher.

As Kara Swisher previously reported, Pincus will not sell any shares in the offering, and no other executives at Zynga have plans to sell stock, either.

But a number of the company’s early investors will be cashing in. Institutional Venture Partners, Avalon Ventures and Foundry Venture Capital will sell 2.5 million shares apiece for up to $25 million each. Union Square Ventures will sell 2.2 million for roughly $22 million.  Google and Silver Lake Partners will also both sell 1.7 million shares for a proceed of $17 million each.

Google was originally not listed as an investor when Zynga filed documents with the SEC to go public, but it showed up in subsequent filings. Google, which was rumored to have invested as much as $100 million in Zynga, has an interest in social gaming because of its Google+ network. Following the offering, it will continue to own 21 million shares, or about 3.8 percent of the company.

One notable shareholder that won’t be selling shares is venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, an early investor in the company. Its partner Bing Gordon, who personally owns a 10.7 percent stake in the company, also does not plan to sell any shares.

According to sources close to the situation, neither CEO Mark Pincus nor one of its principal venture shareholders, Kleiner Perkins, will be selling any shares in its upcoming initial public offering.

While big investors often divest stock in IPOs, not all do. It is a carefully watched number by investors, who are always wary of insiders who unload a lot of shares in an offering.

But such activity by the fast-growing San Francisco online gaming company will be watched carefully since Pincus has recently been painted in a number of press reports as the greedy Mr. Potter of Silicon Valley.

Among the allegations is that he runs a poisonously tough culture that tracks its employees’ output and performance via elaborate data models that require extraordinary amounts of work, along with nefarious list-making of who’s naughty and who’s not.

That big-brother behavior has reportedly included taking away high-ranking jobs and the sweet stock options that go along with them from those execs found wanting.

While there is no doubt Pincus is a hard-charging personality, his defenders note that it’s due to a belief that life at Zynga is a meritocracy and that his practices are not any more heavy-handed than those at other firms.

Indeed, Pincus has a lot of competition in the tough-guy tech CEO category from longtime legends such as Microsoft’s Bill Gates, who set the gold standard for mean, as well as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and now Google CEO Larry Page.

Pincus does not even rate in this pantheon, which is more typical of tech companies than anyone would care to admit or, to be fair, care to care about. With big benefits, vast wealth and much latitude, many in tech don’t mind the grueling work schedules.

After all, it’s not exactly ditch-digging, now is it?

In any case, sources said the coverage has hit Zynga staff hard, as well as Pincus, who has not responded due to the IPO’s quiet period. That’s in contrast to Groupon, the daily-deals site whose own rough process was rife with highly negative stories about the company’s prospects.

While those media accounts were more aimed at the business itself and less personal, Groupon CEO Andrew Mason vociferously defended the company in a controversial letter that was then leaked and published (to me and by me!).

Pincus will doubtlessly have a lot to say to investors who ask about the company’s culture and its possible negative impact on attrition, as some stories have charged.

His decision not to sell, sources said, was inspired by Zynga investor and close friend Reid Hoffman, who has sold very little of the stock of LinkedIn, where he serves as chairman.

The action all begins next week, according to multiple reports, when Zynga takes its show on the road in preparation for an IPO that is expected to value the company at $15 to $20 billion and will take place before the new year.

It will debut under the ZNGA ticker on the Nasdaq market.

While some have been worried about Zynga’s future growth, its past performance has been a lot stronger than other Internet offerings. In the first nine months of the year, the company posted $828.9 million in revenue, double the amount from a year ago, with net income of $30.7 million.

Pincus’s holding onto shares will be seen as a plus, of course, although he has sold a large amount of stock in Zynga’s history.

According to its S-1 filing:

“From our inception in October 2007 to date, Mr. Pincus, our Chief Executive Officer, Chief Product Officer and the Chairman of our Board of Directors, has purchased an aggregate of 149,197,328 shares of our common stock. To date, Mr. Pincus has sold an aggregate of 43,629,310 shares of our common stock at prices ranging from $0.42 to $13.96.”

Pincus now holds 91.4 million of Class B shares, 16 percent of the total, as well as 20.5 million of Class C shares, 38 percent of that group. Kleiner holds 65.2 million shares, or 11.2 percent, of Class B shares.

Other big Zynga owners, who might or might not sell at the IPO, include Institutional Venture Partners, Union Square Ventures, Foundry Venture Capital and Avalon Ventures.

The investment is a Series F, with prior investors Institutional Venture Partners, InterWest Partners, Mayfield Fund and Storm Ventures also participating. Neeraj Agrawal, a Battery Ventures general partner, will join Marketo’s board of directors.

Marketo CEO Phil Fernandez told me that he hadn’t been on the hunt for more funds. But recently he and his board decided to open the door to investors just a crack, and suddenly had many venture capitalists knocking. “The opportunities we’re seeing are just huge, and we decided to take an investment and grow the company,” Fernandez told me yesterday. “I’ve had a continuous stream of investors over the last year.”

Agrawal, in particular, had been interested in investing since early this year, and persistently kept in touch, Fernandez said. When the opportunity came, he jumped.

The investment, Fernandez says, gives Marketo a $70 million war chest that he intends to use to bulk up his team. “It gives us some working room to make some investments, to do some international expansion.” When I talked to him yesterday, he called from London, and said the new money will help fuel expansions into Latin America and Asia.

So what does Marketo do? It helps companies find and track sales leads and prospects using social media, the Web and in-person contacts at events like trade shows, in order to identify customers who are ready to buy — or, as Fernandez says, “the hottest of the bunch.” There’s also a set of analytics tools that helps companies sift through the many threads of data related to making sales and keeping customers. “It helps companies to understand how and why they’re growing, and then how to accelerate that growth.”

So far, Marketo has 1,500 customers, including eBay unit PayPal; McKesson, a $112 billion (2010 sales) health IT concern; and Rackspace, the Web- and cloud-services hosting provider. Those customers are hungry for more new products and services, Fernandez says, so more products are on the way. “We have three products, and a fourth cooking away in the oven,” he says.

Sales were in the ballpark of $14.5 million in 2010, and Fernandez says he’s on track to more than double that this year, which implies sales in the mid-$30 million range, all of it recurring revenue. He says he thinks he can grow it by 100 percent again into 2012.

Also: Acquisitions. Fernandez wouldn’t name any targets — who would? — but he did say he’s got some names in mind. “There’s an awful lot of innovative little companies out there that have a great product, but maybe didn’t build the same successful channel that we did,” he says. “So there’s a good chance to quickly monetize some products that we would acquire. We’re hot on the trail.”

Finally, Fernandez says Marketo is starting to mull an IPO. He’s not in any rush, and hasn’t hired any bankers yet. “We’re pretty aware that if we keep growing the way we have, we’ll be in a place where we can go public if the markets are open, so, we’re thinking about it.”

The shell company has grown through acquisition, picking up eight sites in the past two years, including RetailMeNot.com and Deals.com in the U.S., and VoucherCodes.co.uk in the U.K. In all, the company claims to attract 100 million unique visitors a year, most of whom are seeking discounts on anything from a gallon of milk to a pair of shoes.

This year, WhaleShark expects to be profitable on revenues exceeding $70 million.

The company’s CEO, Cotter Cunningham, told AllThingsD in an interview that the company is a classic roll-up. Its first $150 million in capital was spent on acquisitions, and that’s how it intends to spend its next $150 million.

Investors in the round include J.P. Morgan Asset Management and Institutional Venture Partners. Existing investors include Austin Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Adams Street Partners and Google Ventures.

To date, the company has raised nearly $300 million in two rounds.

“We are actively pursuing a number of acquisitions, and it will take us another year to spend the money,” Cunningham said.

The coupon-clipping business, while ancient, has gotten its sexy back in recent months, thanks to the success of Groupon and the consumer’s general shift in thinking to look for deals online rather than in the Sunday newspaper. VCs have recognized this behavior change and have gravitated to it like a teenager to Justin Bieber.

CouponCabin.com of Whiting, Ind., raised $54 million, Coupons.com secured $230 million in two megarounds, and CouponTrade.com has secured a more modest $2.4 million in capital. I’m sure there are many more that I’m forgetting.

Cunningham says a number of things are driving the trend, and while Groupon’s popularity has helped, WhaleShark is not a daily deals site.

“Groupon went out and created a whole new market with a big sales force,” he said. “They’ve done an amazing job of creating a new market focused on an interesting aspect of the coupon that didn’t exist two or three years ago. Our focus is more on taking the existing couponing model and moving it online.”

Essentially, it’s the newspaper circular that WhaleShark is going after. ”I’m a huge fan of newspapers, but yes, ultimately that’s what we are doing,” Cunningham ’fessed up.

Today, it has aggregated about half a million coupons, from 130,000 merchants, on its site. Many of them are uploaded by consumers, who received a free shipping code in an email from the Gap or Old Navy. Customers have self-reported to WhaleShark that they save about $20 on average per transaction.

The business won’t require even half the sales staff of Groupon. Today, WhaleShark has about 100 people at its Austin headquarters, and 40 people in the U.K. Cunningham anticipates adding 50 to 75 employees in Austin, and doubling numbers abroad.

The company earns a commission from about 10 percent of the offers it distributes on the site. Additionally, it hopes to support the sites through advertising as it attracts a large audience.

[Photo credit: sdc2027.]

The anecdote appears in a new profile of Dropbox in the latest issue of Forbes, which also disclosed that the service is on track to hit $240 million in sales this year, even though the vast majority of its users pay nothing to use it.

But the meat of the story comes further in: Dropbox just closed a massive $250 million Series B round of funding, at an implied valuation of $4 billion, from Benchmark Capital, Goldman Sachs, Greylock Partners, Institutional Venture Partners, RIT Capital Partners and Valiant Capital Partners. Early investors Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners, and Hadi and Ali Partovi also participated in the round, bringing Dropbox’s total funding to date to $257.2 million. Houston’s stake, Forbes says, amounts to 15 percent of the equity, which would be worth about $600 million.

Houston may yet live to regret turning Jobs down. The Apple CEO proposed another meeting that never happened, then managed to single out Dropbox for disparagement as part of his iCloud keynote in June. That got the attention of Houston, who quickly fired off a memo to his team that included a list of once-hot companies that later crashed: MySpace, Netscape, Palm and Yahoo. Apple — which once viewed Dropbox as the sort of “strategic asset” for which it keeps its $70 billion war chest stuffed — is now the competition.

That’s the valuation sources say the company earned in its most recent $54 million financing round. New investor Insight Venture Partners put money into the company, along with earlier investors Institutional Venture Partners, Bay Partners and GGV Capital, which led the round.

None of the money will go to employees or early investors, says Buddy Media CEO Mike Lazerow; instead it will be used to fuel expansion in Europe and to double the size of the company’s staff. The New York-based company has now raised more than $90 million, including a $28 million round last fall.

Buddy Media’s services aren’t exclusively for Facebook — advertisers can use them for Twitter as well, and as Google expands its social efforts, there will likely be room for Buddy there, too. But it is primarily in the Facebook business, via software it sells to brands which helps them navigate through the social network, which usually includes purchasing ads from Facebook, too.

That linkage (note that Kevin Colleran, Facebook’s original ad guy, is now on Buddy’s advisory board) means that many assume Facebook will one day end up buying Buddy. But I asked Lazerow about that last spring, and he said he had no interest in the idea– as it turns out, he was likely deep into the fund-raising process at that point.

And he says he still has no intention of selling anytime soon: “We feel like we can be a very large independent business, so why not scale the business today and build it up?”

Very long press release:

Buddy Media Announces $54M in Series D Funding From Leading Late-Stage Investors

Social Media Management Software Company Secures Growth Capital to Fuel Continued Rapid Expansion

New York, NY – August 15, 2011 – Buddy Media, the social media management software of choice for eight of the world’s top 10 global advertisers, today announced that it has raised $54 million in Series D funding from a group of leading late-stage investors.

The capital will be used to more than double its product, sales and support staff in the next year as well as fund additional global offices and acquisitions.

Current Buddy Media investors GGV Capital, Institutional Venture Partners and Bay Partners, as well as new investor Insight Venture Partners participated in the round. GGV partner, Jeff Richards, led the round and has joined the Buddy Media Board of Directors.

The investors each bring a wealth of knowledge and proven success to Buddy Media. GGV’s portfolio includes household names such as Pandora, SuccessFactors and Alibaba Group. Institutional Venture Partners has funded 300 companies since its inception, including Twitter and Zynga in the social space. Insight Venture Partners has been recognized by Red Herring Magazine as one of the Top Ten venture investors globally. And Bay Partners has had over 250 successful exits (IPOs or $250M+ acquisitions) over 35 years and have been investing around open social graph APIs since 2007.

“Buddy Media is at the center of the largest two-way communications revolution that the world has ever seen,” said Michael Lazerow, CEO and Founder, Buddy Media. “Our new funding ensures we have the resources necessary to accelerate the growth of our large, fast-growing software business. I am truly ecstatic to be working with such an amazing group of investors, and believe it’s a testament to our success thus far.”

The latest investment comes on the heels of massive growth and expansion for Buddy Media, including the following milestones:

· The company has added close to 200 new customers in 2011, including some of the world’s most recognizable global brands, retailers and media companies such as Ford Motor Company, Hanes, ESPN, Hearst Corporation, and Virgin Mobile USA.

· The company’s revenue has more than doubled since the end of 2010.

· The company has maintained a net promoter score of 75 in 2011.

· Employee headcount has grown from 40 employees in 2009 to almost 200, with continued massive hiring plans for 2011 and beyond.

· The company acquired social commerce and analytics leader Spinback in May 2011 and plans to complete its integration and roll out this month.

· The company opened its European Headquarters in London last month and hired Luca Benini, a senior executive from Comscore, as Managing Director, Europe.

· The company won the TechCrunch “Crunchie” Award for Best Enterprise application in January 2011.

· CEO and Founder Michael Lazerow was named New York Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year in June 2011.

· The company recently hired Dennis Morgan as Chief Financial Officer. While at Yahoo!, Morgan led corporate finance efforts for more than $5 billion in acquisitions and business development deals .

· WPP, the world’s largest communications services group, announced a $5 million investment and global partnership with Buddy Media in October 2010.

Buddy Media’s technology is web-based (SaaS) software that provides companies global scale, secure architecture and straightforward administrative tools to connect with their current and future customers using the power of social media.

“Social media is now embedded in every aspect of the customer journey — from ratings and reviews to ‘like’ buttons to tweets. The opportunity for interactive marketing has evolved from building individual social applications to using social media to enhance a wide variety of marketing channels…” wrote Sean Corcoran in the April 2011 report by Forrester Research Inc., “Embedding Social Media Into The Marketing Mix.”

With the exponential growth of Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites, Buddy Media’s new investors understand that the largest businesses in the world need powerful software to market globally.

“Buddy Media has a proven management team, sustained revenue growth and a massive market opportunity. The company is the market leader in a category that sits at the intersection of social media and software-as-a-service (SaaS), two of the largest and fastest growing markets in the technology industry,” said GGV’s Jeff Richards. “We are very excited to continue to support the company’s rapid expansion in the US and globally. Buddy Media has more than proved itself in terms of building the best team and product in the business. The numbers speak for themselves and I can’t be more excited to work with the entire team.”

“I have known the Buddy Media team for more than two years and have been very impressed with their ability to build innovative products that far surpass those offered by others,” said Insight partner Deven Parekh, who will be a Buddy Media board observer. “And the company has out marketed all others while providing stellar customer service. Buddy Media has what it takes to be a massive business.”

In conjunction with the announcement, Buddy Media has also announced that Kevin Colleran has joined its board of advisors and Michael Kassan has been named special advisor to CEO Michael Lazerow. Colleran previously served as Facebook’s first advertising sales executive, and was the company’s longest tenured employee outside of founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Kassan is an internationally recognized business strategist, and currently serves as Chairman and CEO of Medialink, LLC, the leading advisory and business development firm.

The plan is to raise as much as $1 billion at an implied valuation of $10 billion, though The Wall Street Journal, citing people close to the situation, says the offering could raise as much as $2 billion and value the company at $20 billion. The company didn’t give a price range but said it had 562.5 million shares of Class B common stock as of March 31, plus an additional 20.5 million shares of class C stock.

The big number that everyone is going to focus on is the value of the $43 million compensation package going to executive VP and former Myspace CEO Owen Van Natta. That includes nearly $29 million in options and more than $14 million in stock awards. His base salary is $77,000 a year and he earned a $48,000 bonus is 2010.

Behind Van Natta was Steve Chiang, co-president of games, whose total compensation was north of $28 million, including $25.7 million in stock and a $2.9 million bonus. The bonus included more than $600,000 in a relocation bonus, the filing says.

Another big earner is CFO David Wehner, whose package is worth $18 million, $16 million coming from stock awards and $1.8 million paid in a bonus. Half a million of that was a retention bonus.

So who owns what? Founder and CEO Mark Pincus owns a big piece of the action. The filing shows he owns 91.4 million shares, or about 16 percent, of the Class B stock, and 20.5 million shares of the Class C stock. Both classes of stock are convertible into Class A common shares. Assuming the Journal’s sources are right and Zynga is worth $20 billion, then Pincus’s stake should be worth $3.2 billion on the Class B shares alone. (I’m not sure exactly how the Class C shares work into the calculation, but Pincus is the only one who has any, except for a block of 5.3 million shares that were sold to a bunch of mutual funds let by Morgan Stanley.)

Pincus, incidentally, is not only founder and CEO, but also Zynga’s landlord. The filing shows that the company leases office space he owns and paid him $500,000 in 2009 and $400,000 in 2010. The lease puts the current rent on the office space at $28,000 a month. Zynga also reimbursed Pincus $25,000 in 2009 and $120,000 in 2010 for the use of his personal plane, on occasions where he uses it for business travel.

Venture Capital firm Kleiner Perkins holds 11 percent, or slightly more than 64 million, of the Class B common shares. That works out to a stake worth $2.2 billion, assuming the $20 billion valuation.

Other venture funds with a piece of Zynga: Institutional Venture Partners, which owns 34.3 million shares, or 6.1 percent of the equity, worth $1.2 billion. Foundry Venture Capital and Avalon Ventures also have 6.1 percent of equity, or another $1.2 billion each. Union Square Ventures has a stake worth 5.5 percent, or $1.1 billion. And Russia’s DST Limited has a stake at 5.8 percent, worth $1.16 billion.

The filing says that Zynga has raised $845 million in three rounds of funding, though the filing makes it look like some rounds were closed in smaller increments. Other funds and individuals known to have invested — but not listed as major shareholders in the filing — include Andreessen Horowitz, the Pilot Group, Tiger Global Management, and Peter Thiel, head of Clarium Capital, according to its Web site.

Reid Hoffman, the former LinkedIn CEO who’s also a Zynga director, has 3.1 million shares, which amounts to less than 1 percent of the equity, though elsewhere in the filing, the value of stock awards as a director is valued at $9.5 million, assuming a grant price of $6.435 per share on the date of the grant.

Related posts

• The Zynga IPO: Who Owns What, Who Makes What
• Zynga Has Raised $845 Million in Capital, But No Mention of Google as an Investor
• The Zynga-Facebook Codependency Becomes More Clear
• Here’s the Zynga S-1 to Play With (Get It?!?)
• Zynga Finally Files for IPO to Raise $1 Billion
• Day 3: Zynga Holds Tech Reporters Hostage in Endless IPO Watch
• What to Expect When You’re Expecting a Zynga IPO (Insider Selling, Natch!)
• A Sneak Peek at Zynga’s IPO: How to Turn Virtual Goods Into Real Money
• Exclusive: Zynga About to File for IPO
• Zynga Full Coverage

Sassy women-focused content site, Sugar Inc., has raised another $15 million in late-stage venture funding from new investor Institutional Venture Partners, as well as its original one, Sequoia Capital.

The San Francisco-based site, which has now raised a total of $46 million, said it would “use the funds for brand extensions, acquisitions, and international growth…”

Sugar, which runs the flagship PopSugar.com site, is in a media space that is both competitive and fast-growing.

Several bigger sites, such as Yahoo, have been interested in acquiring it, but its husband-and-wife co-founders Brian and Lisa Sugar have wanted to remain independent.

In 2009, the company broke off ties with NBC Universal by buying back its shares and got a Series C funding of $16 million from Sequoia.

Sequoia was an earlier venture investor, having put $5 million into the start-up in late 2006.

NBC invested $10 million in 2007. The media giant had been selling online advertising for the site, an arrangement that had previously ended.

Onward and upward, apparently!

Here’s the official press release:

Sugar Inc. Closes Investment from Institutional Venture Partners and Sequoia Capital

San Francisco, CA, April 13, 2011–Sugar Inc., a fast-growing global media company for women, announced today that it has completed a $15 million later-stage round of financing led by Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), one of the premier later-stage venture capital and growth equity firms. The Company’s original and consistent partner Sequoia Capital also participated in the round.

Sugar intends to use the funds for brand extensions, acquisitions, and international growth in pursuit of its goal of becoming the world’s largest media company focusing exclusively on women’s lifestyle. This round brings Sugar’s total funding to $46 million.

Sugar is the online leader in original content, social media, and commerce targeting trendsetting women, with a global audience of more than 20 million. The company has two business segments focusing on original content and commerce with a portfolio of brands including PopSugar.com, ShopStyle.com, PopSugarCity.com, and Fashionologie.com. Sugar has 190 employees and operations in the U.S., Europe, Japan, and Australia.

“On the eve of our five-year anniversary, Lisa and I are proud of the success and rapid growth we have demonstrated to date,” said Brian Sugar, founder and CEO of Sugar. “In the last year we achieved significant milestones, including growing our audience to over 20 million unique visitors per month, driving over $250 million in commerce to our partners, and reaching profitability for the full year. We are excited with the opportunities ahead of us as we continue to pioneer the combination of content and commerce.”

“Sugar is led by an outstanding management team that has driven impressive growth in a diverse set of complementary revenue streams,” said Dennis Phelps, General Partner of IVP. “We see an enormous market opportunity and are excited about Sugar’s ability to execute in a world of slower-moving incumbents.”

“Brian and Lisa Sugar are entertaining a new generation of women. They do so around the clock and on hundreds of millions of mobile and web devices. But Sugar Inc. is still at the beginning of what is possible,” said Michael Moritz, General Partner of Sequoia.

Spiceworks has. Over four years, the company has evolved from an an ad-supported network mapping tool to something of a Facebook for IT pros. The social networking part happened more or less by accident. Now Spiceworks, based in Austin, Texas, has a community 1.3 million strong, and adding more than 2,000 new members a day, all of them making technology spending decisions for their small to mid-sized companies. Tech advertisers and vendors are naturally lining up to get in.

And so have the venture capitalists. Last year, Spiceworks landed a $16 million C round led by Institutional Venture Partners, known for funding Twitter and Zynga and Netflix. Other investors include Austin Ventures and Shasta Ventures with total funding at $27 million.

Spiceworks co-founder Jay Hallberg was in New York stopped by our offices in New York and we talked about how Spiceworks got started, where it’s going, and why you may hear IT pros asking each other about their “pepper level.”

NewEnterprise: So Spiceworks has been described to me as a sort of Facebook for the IT professional. How did you get to that point?

Jay Hallberg: When we started we had no idea that was what it was going to become. When we launched in early 2006 the idea was to build an application that would let IT professionals manage their networks. In small and medium companies there’s usually one or two guys managing all the IT issues. It was a free download, ad-supported, and it could catalog everything on a local network, anything with an IP address, PCs printers, storage, servers. The idea was that it was going to be ad supported. It turned out to be a wild success. They started downloading it like mad, and they started telling each other about it. Then they started asking each other questions and comparing notes in the forum we had set up. That was really when the spark took off. It was a lot more than a network application, it was a social application. We’re now adding about 2,000 users a day and to put this in some perspective, there are about 5 million IT pros in the world taking care of the needs of some 200 million employees. We have about a quarter of them in Spiceworks, about 1.3 million. Vendors started approaching us so they could set up pages where they could engage these people where they work, and it was natural to take another step and start selling the product.

But it’s still very much a management tool too?

Yes. We tend to think of it as three things. There’s applications, and so we build out just like Facebook has messaging and photos we build things the IT manager needs to get their job done. A help desk, inventory, monitoring, network maps. Secondly we have the community functionality. And finally we have vendors selling products directly within Spiceworks. The easy example is with printers. The Spiceworks app shows you what printers you have and the status of their ink cartridges. If you know the printer ink status why wouldn’t you help them order the ink when it needs to be replaced? Then you can start crowdsourcing information to compare what you spend on ink versus other companies.

And so far you target mainly people in mid-sized and smaller companies. Why not the bigger ones?

It’s used in some enterprises. But our view is that there are about 15,000 companies with more than 1,000 employees. The people who work at those bigger companies get personal attention from the big IT vendors like CA Technologies, and BMC and IBM. But what about the millions of businesses with fewer than 1,000 employees that don’t get that kind of infrastructure and attention from the big vendors? So we started advertising to those people, and then the vendors came to us and said they wanted to build features into Spiceworks. EMC will build a storage advisor. Intel has paid to build a tool to manage their chips better. Because of the reach we have, now these companies want to take their relationship with us all the way through to purchasing. One thing we’re just rolling out is that we’ll take credit cards, but we’re also creating a request-for-quote feature. So when a user says he needs to buy a few servers he can send that to several vendors. And then he can talk it over with his friends in the community and see if he’s getting a good deal.

You’re growing awfully fast. How do expect to maintain that pace? You’re getting fairly close to penetrating about half of your addressable market.

One reason we’re excited as that we certainly see getting to that 50 percent market because we’re starting to see a tipping point where one IT pro goes to another job and when he starts he looks around says ‘You’re not on Spiceworks?’ and soon everyone at his new job has joined too. For them their pepper level starting to become part of their professional identity.

What’s a pepper level?

So when you join you’re a pinmento. And then you move up as your stature grows to habanero and jalapeno. The highest level is pure Capsaicin, which is the molecule itself. There’s about 25 ways to get points. It’s primarily about making the best contributions, the best answers, helping other people solve problems. It turns IT into a bit of a game.