Here’s the summary of what Tremor executives will be telling investors:

• Last year they lost $16.4 million on revenue of $105.2 million; the previous year, they lost $21 million on revenue of $90.3 million.
• During that same time period, gross margins improved from 35.2 percent to 41.7 percent.
• Its ads run on more than 500 websites and mobile apps.
• Big backers include Canaan Partners, which owns more than 19 percent of the company, as well as W Capital, Masthead Venture Partners, Meritech Capital, DFJ and General Catalyst.
• Tremor wants to raise at least $86 million, and plans to trade on the NYSE as TRMR.

Video industry officials expect that rival video ad nets YuMe and Adapt.tv may also go public this year; all of them will be looking to compete in a space dominated by Google’s YouTube, along with smaller players like Hulu.

mama_mia/Shutterstock

Today marks a year since Facebook’s rough-and-tumble IPO.

Since that disappointing day, Facebook has gone to great lengths to assure Wall Street that yes, it will one day be the social ad spinning, money-making machine that Wall Street hopes it will be.

The biggest potential, Facebook maintains, lies in what executives consider “long-term investments,” products with grand ambitions to change the way we interact with Facebook — if not the world — on a regular basis.

Therein lies the problem. Meaningful change won’t happen soon.

Consider Facebook Home, the mobile project years in the making that aims to shift the way we interact with our mobile devices, anchoring users within the Facebook experience. The potential for success with Home, if widely adopted, could be big. More time spent inside of Facebook’s products means more ads served by default — especially when Facebook finally brings ads to Cover Feed, one of the key features of Home.

And yet by many measures, Home has stumbled hard directly out of the gate. More than half of its user reviews on Google Play are scathing. And as of last week, just over one million people had installed the product, a trifling amount compared to the 1.1 billion users on Facebook’s network.

What Facebook really wants from Home is to catch on overseas. Create a mobile-focused product to capture developing world markets — where the phone is a person’s primary computing device — and you’ve got potential to spur growth. Home, however, runs only on certain higher-end Android devices, hardware that won’t be ubiquitous or cheap in developing countries for at least a few years.

Home isn’t the only long-term bet. Look at Graph Search, Facebook’s search product rolled out earlier this year. Almost immediately came calls saying “watch out Google!” from the public. Perhaps Google’s stranglehold on the search market could be upset by a social form of discovery.

But Graph Search is possibly in an even more nascent phase than Facebook Home; Graph Search has only been rolled out to a select amount of users, and Facebook has oodles of work to do if it wants to curb the way people make Web search queries and focus them on people, places and things inside of the Facebook network.

Granted, Facebook has made serious moves in the past year to spur profitability further, releasing a slew of new ad products, revamping its gaming platform partner ecosystem and pushing, however slowly, into online retail with Facebook Gifts. It has consistently hit its numbers in the company’s quarterly earnings calls. And as the Wall Street Journal’s Evelyn Rusli wrote, the company made significant internal shifts over the past year that have made more teams responsible for Facebook’s revenue.

And still, the needle hardly moves on Facebook’s stock ticker; it closed at around $26 per share on Friday, well below the $38 it opened at one year ago. For all of Facebook’s long-term posturing, the Street remains cautious.

“We don’t build services to make money,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in his company’s S-1 prospectus before Facebook’s Nasdaq debut. “We make money to build better services.”

Hopefully, for the sake of the shareholders, Facebook can do both.

iStockphoto | dny59

Marketo, a cloud-based marketing software company, debuted on the Nasdaq today under the ticker symbol MKTO at $13 a share and closed at $23.10. Its biggest shareholder is venture capital firm InterWest Partners, whose 33.3 percent stake was worth $302 million pre-sale and is now worth north of $565 million.

Tableau Software started trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol DATA. Its shares were priced yesterday at $31 and closed today $50.75. Its biggest shareholder is New Enterprise Associates, which invested a combined $29 million in three rounds between 2004 and 2010 for about 37 percent of the company.

It sold two million shares at $31 in the offering, but still has 17.6 million shares remaining, making its combined gain on Tableau, by my math, worth $955.2 million. On paper that amounts to a one-day gain of 3,194 percent.

Now are you convinced the IPO market is back?

The bigger of today’s two is Tableau Software, which specializes in data visualization. Yesterday, the company announced that the shares priced at $31, raising north of $254 million in the process.

The company will be listing on the New York Stock Exchange with the ticker symbol DATA. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are running the deal. Credit Suisse, J.P. Morgan, UBS Investment Bank, BMO Capital Markets and JMP Securities are also underwriting.

Tableau’s biggest shareholder is the venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates, which led two investment rounds for a combined $15 million, the last being a $10 million series B in 2008 in a deal led by Forest Baskett. NEA’s stake amounted to about 37 percent before the sale, worth more than $607 million at the share offering price.

Founder and chief scientist Pat Hanrahan has about 18 percent of the company, worth about $295 million at the offering price. His co-founders — Christian Chabot, chairman and CEO, and Christopher Stolte, chief development officer — have about 15 percent each, with both stakes worth north of $235 million. Meritech Capital Partners has a stake amounting to about 6.5 percent, worth more than $102 million at the offering price.

The other one going today is Marketo, the cloud-based marketing software company. Market price yesterday was at $13 a share, raising almost $79 million. It will trade on the Nasdaq under the symbol MKTO.

Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse are leading the offering. UBS, Canaccord Genuity, Raymond James and JMP Securities are also underwriting.

Marketo’s biggest shareholder is InterWest Partners, which prior to the sale had a 33.3 percent stake worth more than $302 million. Storm Ventures has a stake of a little more than 17 percent, worth $66 million. Battery Ventures, which led a $50 million Series F in 2011, has a 7 percent stake, worth about $28 million.

Following a slowdown in technology IPOs after Facebook’s offering last May, companies including microblogging service Twitter Inc., peer-to-peer lending site Lending Club Corp. and software-tools startup Atlassian are among those preparing to go public, said executives and people familiar with the matter.

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On the eve of Facebook’s IPO anniversary Saturday, how the Menlo Park, Calif., company tackles revenue is one of the biggest challenges in its short life as a public company. After eight years of focusing on user growth, Facebook has pushed revenue up its priority list and restructured its business so that many of its best minds are now thinking about driving sales.

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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.

The move follows months of back-and-forth between the exchange operator and the Securities and Exchange Commission over technical errors that plagued Facebook’s public offering on the Nasdaq Stock Market almost a year ago.

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In an announcement set to be made later today, Somaini, whose title will be VP and chief trust officer, is one of three high-profile hires at Box that will be announced later today. The other two are Niall Wall, who will be SVP and head of business development, and Jeff Mannie, who will be VP, controller and chief accounting officer. Wall will take over for Karen Appleton, who has been promoted to senior VP in charge of global alliances.

What does the new title — chief trust officer — mean? “Two things,” Somaini told me in a brief conversation yesterday. “Really driving a trust strategy for the company around the products and services we provide and how that relates to internal functions of how we perform. Second, we have to make sure there’s a tight integration with our customer to base to really understand their needs. And it’s not only that we’re able to respond to their pain points, but that we’re able to predict them.”

He should have a pretty good appreciation for their pain points. Before creating the CISO job at Yahoo, he held the same title at security software giant Symantec. Before that, he was director of information security at VeriSign and an adviser to Palo Alto Networks. He also writes a widely read blog on computer security.

Wall is also a Symantec alum. Most recently, he was VP and general manager of the Norton Data Services business unit. Before Symantec, he worked at Oracle and Digital Equipment Corp., now a part of Hewlett-Packard. At Box, he’ll be overseeing the company’s efforts to create partnerships and strategic alliances.

Mannie hails from PayPal, the payments unit at online sales giant eBay. He’ll be in charge of external financial reporting, policies and controls. He’s probably going to be busy as Box heads toward its long-talked-about initial public offering next year.

Box has been aggressively raising money, and in January quietly increased its funding to $150 million from a previous $125 million in a round led by private equity firm General Atlantic, at a valuation of about $1.2 billion. CEO Aaron Levie, the 27-year-old wunderkind who started the company in a dorm room at the University of Southern California in 2005, has said on the record that Box will likely go public in 2014, and it has started hiring more execs with time at publicly held companies on their resumes.

The expanded round brought Box’s total capital raised to $312 million. Other investors include Salesforce.com, SAP Ventures, New Enterprise Associates and Bessemer Venture Partners.

The closing share price was $17.81, after pricing yesterday at $14 a share. Deutsche Bank and Piper Jaffray acted as lead book-running managers for the offering. Needham & Co., JMP Securities and William Blair & Co. are acting as co-managers.

Rally’s venture capital investors include Meritech Capital Partners, Greylock Partners, Mobius Venture Capital, Boulder Ventures, Vista Ventures and Mohr Davidow Ventures.

I think this constitutes the first tech IPO launch of the second quarter of the year. Others that have filed offerings recently include Marketo, the cloud-based marketing software company, and Tableau, the data visualization company. Violin Memory is also said to be readying an offering in May, though the date keeps inexplicably slipping. It raised some extra capital in February.

And speaking of IPOs, I saw some data from Silicon Valley law firm Fenwick and West showing that the pace of tech IPOs has been slowing down since a recent peak in the first quarter of 2012. Meanwhile, IPOs in the Life Sciences industry were on a slow rise as of the end of 2012. (You can get the full survey here.)

As recent tech IPOs go, a 27 percent pop is relatively small. The biggest opening day rise in the last two years was that of LinkedIn, which rose more than 109 percent on its first day of trading, followed closely by Splunk, which rose 108 percent. Workday, the cloud-based human resources software company, rounded out the top five companies in the study, rising 74 percent.

Some tech companies decline on their first day. Among those during 2011 and 2012 were Lifelock, which fell 7 percent, E2open which fell 9 percent and the adult site FriendFinder Networks, which fell more than 21 percent.

Rally had raised a fair amount of venture capital funding, including a $20 million round led by Meritech Capital Partners, and $16 million from Greylock Partners before that. Last year it acquired a partner called Agile Advantage.

Agile software development is a way of working that allows for relatively short cycles, and improving on an application as you go. The idea is to keep the development work as close to business objectives as possible. Rally specializes in building cloud-based tools for managing development cycles and collaboration.

Rally’s customers include Oracle, eBay, BMC Software and Intel in the tech space; Disney and McGraw-Hill in the media segment; and McKesson, a big name in the health care world. The company’s S-1 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission says it has nearly 169,000 paid seats in use. It reported sales of $57 million in the year ended Jan. 31, and a net loss of $10.8 million.

Deutsche Bank and Piper Jaffray are acting as lead book-running managers for the offering. Needham & Co., JMP Securities, and William Blair & Co. are acting as co-managers.

Here’s a transcript of a quick chat I had with the startup’s CEO this morning, while he was en route to some Silicon Valley meetings. (Don’t worry! No law-breaking here: “Uber is driving,” Crowley assured me.)

Peter Kafka: It seemed like this funding round took a lot longer than you wanted. Do you think you could have done the deal quicker prior to the Facebook IPO?

Dennis Crowley: I don’t know. There’s a lot variables at play here. I don’t want to point to any one particular factor.

The thing that’s important is — hey, we just raised $41 million to do the things we want to do. That’s the thing that we’re psyched about.

I just sent this email out to the team. It’s like “Hey, there’s not a lot of companies that get to play in this space. And guess what? We get to be one of those companies.” That’s a really big, motivating thing for myself, and I think for everyone else.

Union Square’s Fred Wilson explained why a debt deal made sense for you guys. But you can also read between the lines and conclude that if you guys were able to get the valuation you wanted, you would have done a traditional equity deal. Is that a fair assessment?

Some of the things we were hearing from people was that we’re a difficult company to value. Because, you know, we’re rolling out new stuff every single month. And it’s not like we’re just putting a new coat of paint on the app. We’re rolling out new merchant tools, we roll out credit card specials. We’re in this space where we’re reinventing mobile, local, deals with merchants; we’re doing it very quickly.

You look at what we’re doing, and you can see that this is going to be incredibly transformative. And we have some people who say, “you guys are still small, but we can see how you’re going to do it.” And given those circumstances, the way we structured the deal was the best way to do it for a company of our stage and our size.

I understand your messaging about transforming from a check-in tool to a search app. But why are you always talking about becoming a location layer for the Internet? What does that actually mean, and who’s supposed to care about that? Should users care?

We’ve had our share of people who look at the check-in data and kind of pooh-pooh it. “How interesting is it that you know that this random person went to a coffee shop?” That’s why, in a lot of talks that I’ve been doing, I start out by showing this heat-map data-visualization video:

Foursquare check-ins show the pulse of New York City and Tokyo from Foursquare on Vimeo.

One check-in on its own isn’t interesting, and maybe 10 isn’t interesting. But you put millions of these things together every day, and you suddenly have this heat map of where people are. You can start to predict where people are going to be, and what was popular two weeks ago, and what might be popular in the future.

So we can do that, and start sharing that, not just with our users, but developers, too. So we’ve got this point-of-interest database, and we’re sharing that with developers like Path, Vine, Flickr. The stuff that we’ve built is powering the location features for the whole next generation of consumer Internet services.

But just to be clear. If you’re a user, you shouldn’t know or care about that data, right?

Well, a lot of consumers don’t know that Foursquare data is powering this stuff. But there’s also an opportunity there, for every time a Vine is tagged with something, every time a photo on Flickr is tagged with location, there’s an opportunity for Foursquare to layer up that data.

We can say, these are all the services that you’re using, these are all the signals that are coming back to us, and this is how we can make your map a little bit different than your friends’ map, because of all the things that we’ve done across all these different properties.

In your post this morning, you thank 33 million people for trying Foursquare. How many people are using it each month?

We’re not disclosing that.

I talked to you a few years ago about monetization, and your plan then was to rely on a self-serve model. Now you’re hiring lots of sales people. Did your thinking change?

It’s a little bit of both. We have sales people making calls, because that’s how you’re going to go get big national retailers. But I don’t think we’re going to go out there and call every single coffee shop in the country.

Even when we were a much smaller team, we had a million merchants that had signed up. A lot of that came from our user community going to places and saying “Hey, I checked in five times. What do I get?” The users have been teaching the merchants about the product.

I believe as the merchants are becoming more aware of it, we can put those self-serve tools in front of them, and we can make the pitch, where we say “Hey, if you spend X amount of dollars with us, we can drive you Y amount of customers, and we can prove that we’re doing it, and we can tell you if they’re good customers or lousy customers.”

Those are really powerful tools, and we’re taking them and expanding beyond the merchants we have talked to on the phone, and making them available to a million merchants that have already signed up.

You started off as a check-in service, now you’re a search tool. How do you get people who used you for check-ins but then stopped to come back? And how do you reach the much larger group of people who have never used you? How do you grow?

Look at what we did yesterday, when we launched Foursquare 6.0. We put out a new version of the app, and people say “Oh, I get this in a way that I didn’t before.”

It’s amazing — you put search front and center, and people are like “Oh, yeah, I can use this to search for stuff.” And when they search, they realize that it’s a lot richer than other apps they’ve been using to solve the same problem.

So it’s not that you flip a switch, and you launch an app, and suddenly it’s there. But if you build something great, that people use, people talk to their friends about, people show their friends. That’s how this stuff grows. That’s how it’s been working for us since the beginning.

So you’ll build it and they will come?

[Laughs] That’s a good way of putting it. Yeah.

Seattle-based Tableau Software Inc. will hope to replicate the success of Splunk Inc. which has jumped 133 percent since its April 2012 debut. Tableau is seeking to raise about $150 million in an IPO that could happen in about a month.

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In its first C-level hire from outside the company, Eventbrite has brought in experienced finance exec Mark Rubash as CFO. The San Francisco-based self-service ticketing platform has hired the former Shutterfly CFO — who also held top finance jobs at eBay and Yahoo — to focus on scaling and expanding its business model and global growth.

And while CEO and co-founder Kevin Hartz declined to say in an interview whether the move was Eventbrite’s first major step toward a possible IPO, he did underscore the need to gird the company’s management for future expansion.

Recently, the company said it had sold $1.5 billion in gross ticket sales since it was founded five years ago, with total tickets sold topping 100 million. Eventbrite said that it had sold $600 million of that in 2012 alone, hawking 36 million tickets in 179 countries for such events as San Francisco’s iconic Bay to Breakers footrace.

That kind of hypergrowth requires some more experienced management, “independent of any public offering process,” said Hartz.

“We had an opportunity to bring in a great operator to help us become a multi-category e-commerce marketplace,” he said. “Mark has deep experience in building marketplaces of buyers and sellers.”

Indeed. At eBay, Rubash had global purview over eBay finance, investor relations, accounting and more, while he ran Yahoo’s global finance for its paid search, display advertising and e-commerce units. He has also worked at PricewaterhouseCoopers, and at companies such as HeartFlow, Rearden Commerce and Critical Path.

“It’s a real alignment of what I am passionate about, with a team I really enjoy,” said Rubash. “With the mass of transactions growing on a global basis at Eventbrite, it’s the kind of challenge that is really hard to resist.”

Eventbrite’s investors include Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital, DAG Ventures and Tenaya Capital, with about $80 million in funding raised since 2006.

Now we dip the parsley in the salt water to symbolize the bitter tears of those suckered by the Facebook IPO

– Jacob Harris, via Twitter

The approval of the plan by the Securities and Exchange Commission marks an end to months of uncertainty among brokers over potential relief for losses from the social-networking company’s May 2012 initial public offering.

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While several marketing software developers have had strong IPOs in recent months, Marin is one of just a few IPO-bound marketers focused specifically on advertising technology.

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Image copyright YanLev

I often find myself surrounded by strong, intelligent businesswomen who are more than comfortable with tough negotiations. But the truth is that many women are new to the business world, and negotiating equity is often a mystery for even the most experienced of us. It boils down to the fact that many startup founders think they have more equity than they really do.

As more and more women begin to populate CEO and founder-level positions, and we get closer to income equality between genders, I feel it’s increasingly important that we not only understand our merited assets, but more importantly, we learn how to ink them into our contracts upfront.

With this in mind, here are five guidelines that I feel will help ensure the highest possible stake in your company.

1. Fight for the Title You Deserve

   You may have heard that it’s not a good idea to be hung up on a title during negotiations, but in my experience, titles are important. This is especially true in regards to how you are treated as an employee both internally and externally, and they’re important for your next career move as well.

   Your title costs the company nothing. If your role is going to include getting the company on the map, shoot for C-Level or Founding Partner. It doesn’t matter if it’s not your idea. If you have been hired to a) create demand for a new product, b) define a new product or c) turn an idea into a revenue-generating company (or all of the above), then you are absolutely a founding partner.

   If you don’t go for that top title, you are leaving room for someone else to swoop in and nab it. I can’t tell you how many times this has happened to entrepreneurs I know (men and women).

   You can point out that with a woman on board at a founding level, the company may in fact be in a better position for success. A study released last April shows that companies that have more diverse teams (gender-wise as well as cultural) in their C-Level and executive roles perform notably better financially and on equity returns.

   Once you’ve defined your value in the company and your business card reflects that, confidence to negotiate a higher financial stake in the company will come much more easily.

2. Up the Salary Ante With Raises and Bonuses Tied to Performance

   Many times when negotiating at a startup, particularly prior to Series A, you will be told they can’t pay you at market rate, but that you’ll be given equity to make up for it. That may be true at the time you start, but it shouldn’t remain true throughout your employment.

   Begin negotiating pre-A to get you where you want to be post-A. If you are willing to put skin in the game and take a risk in joining a startup, you should also benefit along the way by virtue of your performance. So one way to get to your market rate is to take a lower base salary, but request additional equity grants upon completion of specific (and clearly defined) objectives throughout your employment. This is a great way to pull in more equity at a later date and also keep you motivated to hit pre-defined milestones. There’s less risk for both of you in this case.

3. Ask for Earlier Vesting Shares and Options

   Vesting arrangements and rights can also be a little tricky to navigate within a startup.

   The industry standard vesting period is four years, with a one-year cliff. The cliff means you are waiting a full year for a percentage of equity to vest (typically 25 percent), and if you leave before one year is up you get zip. Generally after the cliff, you vest on a monthly or quarterly basis for the remaining three years.

   Four-year vesting is not an absolute. Ask for some of your shares to vest earlier, so that you have ownership earlier. I recommend asking for two years post the initial year, meaning after three years your stock is fully vested, rather than four. That ownership is empowering and motivating.

   You should also strive for the ability to “early exercise,” which essentially means you exercise your options prior to vesting. Negotiate a certain percentage of equity to vest early, or start vesting on day one in order to avoid that one-year cliff.

   In my experience, the tax treatment for this is the same as restricted stock, and you’ll only pay on your gains rather than income tax.

4. Don’t Forget About Anti-Dilution Protection

   If you are coming in as a C-level hire, you will be key to any capital raise. Your reputation and experience will be a vital component that VCs will evaluate during their decision to invest. So ask for an anti-dilution clause for, at the very least, the Series A. If you don’t, you’ll be in for an unpleasant surprise post-A. It’s possible to find yourself with only two-thirds (or less) of what you originally thought was your percentage share in the company once you have closed that first round of funding.

   Companies often throw out a share number that sounds appealing, but you really have no way of knowing its true value without some context. Ask for the percentage their number represents out of the total shares outstanding. If they won’t tell you, then it’s not a lot!

   Once your stake in the company is clearly defined, the anti-dilution clause will protect you from getting washed out in every capital raise. It’s not an easy sell, but you can push for it through the first round of funding. You will not get this indefinitely, however.

   If you are joining post-A, ensure your options are on a “fully diluted” cap table, so you know what you are really being offered.

5. Have a Plan for Your Exit Strategy

   As with most phases of the startup life cycle, “the exit,” whether it is yours personally or the exit event of the company, almost never goes as planned. Of course you want (and hope) that everything will be great at your new startup, but the reality is that the startup ecosystem is a landmine for unforeseen events and obstacles. It’s important to protect yourself upfront from events you can’t always predict, like mergers, joint ventures, new management, changes in company direction, the product not working, crazy CEOs and so on.

   You are taking a risk with your career to join a startup, so try and avoid “at will” employment. Establish a minimum term of 6-12 months guaranteed employment or 3-6 months severance.

   If you depart “due to good reason” (for example, an unfavorable change to your job title, compensation or role) before that term is over, you will still get paid your base salary. Also, try to get some percentage of unvested options to vest upon your departure.

   Protect yourself in case you are terminated “without cause,” and negotiate into your contract full or partial acceleration on options as a condition of an early/unforeseen exit.

Keep in mind that it’s likely you won’t get everything you ask for. But if you aim high, you should find yourself in a much better place in terms of equity, incentives and material wealth.

Kathy Leake is co-founder and president of the highly successful intent targeting network, LocalResponse. Kathy comes from a long background in startup entrepreneurship, particularly in the ad tech space (prior to LocalResponse she co-founded Media6Degrees), and as the only woman at the board table for 25+ years, she’s learned a thing or two about tough negotiations and standing up for the title, salary, equity and respect that she deserves.

Messinger joined Twitter in 2011 as vice president of application development in the engineering department, where he has been responsible for making key decisions regarding app design and experience, user growth, and search and relevance issues, among other duties. Previous to this, he spent close to four years at Oracle as vice president of development.

Messinger has been described as a “big picture” guy by some, and will move into working on what future versions of Twitter will look like, but from a very high-level standpoint. That could involve the continued integration of Twitter’s satellite application, Vine, and the soon-to-debut Twitter Music application, which has been in the works for some time.

Twitter CTO Adam Messinger

Messinger’s appointment also comes just months after Twitter appointed employees to two other key executive positions, naming long-time Pixar vet Ali Rowghani as company COO, while sliding former Zynga treasurer Mike Gupta into Twitter’s CFO seat. Rowghani used to hold the CFO position, but many have said that he has long been an influential, respected force inside Twitter, and that his move to COO could be seen as a shift in title to reflect the work he has long been doing already.

Twitter’s willingness to solidify its top brass — while charging headlong into the media and advertising world under the direction of global revenue president Adam Bain — looks more and more like a company gearing up for an initial public offering, which many speculate will occur some time in 2014.

VP of Product and Design Michael Sippey

But as I’ve long maintained, that configuration was far from successful. The design department has been a revolving door of exiting employees for the past six-odd months, and a number of the company’s updates to its application in the past have been clunky, counterintuitive or perhaps not as successful as drivers of growth and engagement as Twitter would have liked. It’s a tacit admission that Design just wasn’t meant to report to engineering.

Instead, Design will now report to product, a switch that essentially elevates Sippey to a much loftier position than before. One could see how the Design department would have dictated what product would look like in the future. But instead, Sippey is now charged with the last word in design decisions; essentially, a product guy driving design forward.

That’s even more important considering Twitter co-founder and design visionary Jack Dorsey is far from being involved in the day-to-day stuff of design. Now removed from Twitter and mostly consumed with Square, it’s a large vote of confidence in Sippey’s ability to lead product.

With the series of new appointments, I’d imagine the chatter over Twitter’s IPO and valuation won’t be settling down any time soon.

Groupon’s board gave the 32-year-old chief executive the heave-ho on Thursday, after Mason presided over the controversial and one of the fastest-growing young companies in recent memory. Time will tell whether Mason will be remembered for his antics and for being loosey-goosey with accounting rules, or for building a new marketing category with a company he steered to $5 billion in annual billings and an IPO faster than most companies on the planet.

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Xoom’s shares opened at $21 on the Nasadaq Stock Market, up 31 percent from their $16 offer price. The stock had climbed above $23 in midday trading.

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In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission dated today, Violin disclosed that it is attempting to raise as much as $50 million in new funding from existing investors. The filing is an amendment to a previous one in which it disclosed an $80 million funding round. The round now has an upper limit of $130 million, of which $96.3 million has been raised from 126 investors.

According to an investor approached to participate in the deal, but who asked not to be named, Violin has raised the funding from existing investors at an implied valuation of $850 million. The money, this investor said, would be used to fund operations until Violin completes its planned initial public offering, which now has a target date of early May.

The launch of Violin’s IPO appears to have slid several times. Last April, CEO Don Basile told AllThingsD that the offering would take place no later than Oct. 27 of last year. And as recently as last month, I heard chatter that the IPO would take place during February.

Violin was said to have filed for an IPO under the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, meaning the related filings with the SEC aren’t available to the public.

I called a company spokeswoman and was told the company is not commenting on financial matters.

In Violin’s last funding round, which was itself an extension of a $50 million round raised 11 months ago, GE Asset Management joined as a new investor. Other investors include Toshiba, the Japanese chip and electronics maker, and networking gear player Juniper Networks, as well as Highland Capital and SAP Ventures, the investment arm of German software giant SAP.

Marin, which was founded in 2006 by CEO Christopher Lien, has not reported a profitable year. It had revenue of $42.5 million in the first nine months of 2012, up from $24.7 million for that period in 2011.

The company has raised about $100 million from backers including Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures, Temasek Capital, Focus Ventures and Crosslink Ventures.

San Francisco-based Marin helps advertisers analyze and manage campaigns on Google, Baidu, Bing, Facebook and Yahoo. Customers cited in its filing include ModCloth, PriceGrabber and Razorfish.

Because of the range of data it sees, Marin can do things like provide analysis and forecasting for mobile click-through and conversion rates.

The IPO is being underwritten by Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Wells Fargo and Stiefel.

Pete Flint, CEO of the San Francisco-based online real estate company, told AllThingsD that traffic from mobile had increased 120 percent in the fourth quarter year over year. “Mobile is an enormous opportunity for us,” he said. “At some point in the future, we expect it to generate a majority of our revenue.”

Today, the company’s stock hit a new high, closing at $29 a share, following yesterday’s release of its fourth-quarter results.

In that quarter, the company lost $1.6 million, or six cents a share, on revenue of $20.6 million. Excluding some items, Trulia would have lost three cents. Analysts were expecting the company to lose two cents a share on revenue of $19.1 million.

Flint said the average revenue per advertiser grew in the fourth quarter because of mobile and an overall increase in prices. Trulia agents are buying ads on its apps separate from the Web because that is where they are seeing the best results — and because of that, Trulia is charging more for mobile. ”Consumers are absolutely out-and-about using the apps to browse and to connect with an agent to purchase a property,” he said.

One data point backing this up is that in 82 of the top 100 U.S. cities, he said, there are more leads being sent via mobile devices to real estate professionals than through the website.

In September, Trulia went public, pricing its shares at $17 apiece to raise roughly $85 million. Flint said in hindsight, mobile was also a big factor in the success of the offering.

“As we look back, investor concern last year was for companies to execute on mobile and to have a proven track record, and we are uniquely positioned to execute on mobile,” he said.

Trulia’s closest competitor, Zillow, reported its fourth-quarter results today, and also credited mobile for some of its growth. The Seattle-based company, which makes money from charging real-estate agents subscription fees and from advertising, said in December that more than half of its visits occurred on mobile devices, with that traffic spiking to 60 percent on weekends.

Zillow reported a profit of $500,000, or two cents a share, on revenue of $34.3 million. Analysts were expecting the company to break even on revenue of $31.5 million. The company’s stock surged in after-hours trading, jumping 7 percent, or $2.88 a share, to close at $41.85.

The market values Zillow at roughly $1.3 billion, about double Trulia’s current market cap.