He doesn’t ordinarily give interviews, so when I got the chance to sit down with him at Fenwick’s headquarters in Mountain View recently, I jumped at it. Not long after we spoke, Fenwick announced that Davidson would be stepping aside at the end of the year and handing the chairmanship over to Richard Dickson.

My first question was to ask Davidson to sum up what he does, as he sees it.

AllThingsD: Gordy, I think I have a pretty good idea what you do all day, but tell me, from your perspective, what is it that you do?

Davidson: I’m a general Silicon Valley lawyer. One day I may be at a Cisco board meeting, as I will be tomorrow. The other may be meeting with two kids out of Stanford with a business plan. Those literally happened on the same day a few years ago, and I said to myself that I find them both equally exhilirating. It’s part of the cycle of Silicon Valley. I worked at a startup company before I was a lawyer, so I’ve been there. I worked for a company that was started in an industrial garage out by the San Jose airport. Everyone was there in the big room, and it was fun. We’ve had a great run. About a year after I joined Fenwick, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak walked in and started Apple Computer. And everything has flowed from there. The work has involved startup companies, venture capital, intellectual property, technology licensing, IPOs, mergers and acquisitions. It runs the gamut, which is what makes it interesting. We’ve seen five complete business cycles since then.

And given that, where do you think the business cycle is now?

Well, the stock market is about as high as it has ever been, so it’s an up cycle. There’s a lot of activity. As a firm, we set revenue records in each of the last three years. I’m not sure why the stock market is up. It’s a little mysterious. But you can see other indicators of economic activity. You can measure it with traffic on Highway 101, and in job creation in Silicon Valley. Real estate prices are up, and foreclosures are down. I don’t think it’s a bubble, but then I’ll knock on wood when I say that. Nor do I see it as particulary robust. It’s not affecting all industries. But certainly technology is strong right now, with notable exceptions. Some companies are having trouble.

And there have certainly been a lot of IPOs in recent memory. Which ones have you been involved in?

We did Workday and ServiceNow. We did Fusion-io from the underwriting side. We did Vocera and Silver Spring Networks. Those are a few.

Many, if not all of those, if memory serves, took advantage of the JOBS Act when they initially filed to go public. Do you think that’s been helpful to companies?

The companies certainly like it. Companies are vulnerable to competitive sniping when they file, if they don’t get out on the fastest possible schedule. Competitors are ruthless. They point out to customers that the balance sheet may be running down, and start asking why the company in question can’t get out sooner, and sowing doubt by asking them if they really want to take a product from a company running out of money. And so the JOBS Act has largely solved that problem. I don’t think it’s as revolutionary as the authors thought it would be. The only useful provision of it has been the confidential submission rules for when a company first files to go public. Not many companies that we’ve worked with have wanted to take advantage of the provision that allows them to file only two years of financial data as opposed to three. If you want to be taken seriously, why not be audited for the third year? And the companies that are coming public now are companies of substance. They’re not just raising $10 million or $20 million. They’re raising $75 million or $100 million. At that rate, you probably ought to audit three years.

I’ve been talking to some startup companies at various stages, and they tell me that, in a lot of cases, the venture capital firms are coming to them and not the other way around. It’s almost like the VCs are shoving checks down founders’ throats a bit. Is there perhaps too much money in the system?

Well, there’s been a big shakeout in firms versus a few years ago, so there’s less money overall. Venture funds have been cut in half, and the amount of funds raised is coming down. But the hot companies are just getting money thrown at them. There are companies like GitHub, which is a client of mine. There’s a startup company that was under the radar, and they had a number of venture capitalists chasing them, until they finally went with Peter Levine at Andreessen Horowitz. Marc Andreessen once said that there are really only 15 VC deals in Silicon Valley every year that really matter, and I think directionally speaking that’s true. And there is a bipolar distribution among the venture funds. There are probably only 15 that are successful, and the rest just aren’t as successful. It isn’t like 1999, when there was too much money chasing too few deals. Now there’s a lot of money chasing a lot of really good deals.

Do you think there is something different with the way that companies are conceived that makes them better now than before?

Well the Internet has changed everything. The infrastructure has changed everything. It doesn’t take much to start a company; with all the open source software and cloud services out there, you don’t really have to do all that much research and development. The tools are there. You can get to the product you are trying to develop quickly. So the time to market is much shorter. So companies can get up and running fast, and build up their scale fast. Think of Twitter, Facebook, Airbnb, Square, and how fast they’re growing.

As an attorney, your job is to advise companies on pitfalls they may avoid. What’s the classic thing that you tell companies to avoid over and over again? There must be a million of them.

There are a million of them. One thing is to try and rein in their exhuberance. For example, when VC money is being thrown at them, it’s not always about the highest bidder that is the best source of capital. There’s a story I like to tell about Intuit. Scott Cook funded Intuit by kiting his credit cards for a long time, and almost went bankrupt twice. Finally, when it started to get traction, they went for venture capital, not to fund the company, but to pay off their debt. So they got five offers from five funds, and Scott asked me which one to take. He wouldn’t tell who made the higher or lower offers, but there was about a 50 percent difference in the valuation between the lower ones and the higher ones. I immediately connected the dots and told him to accept the lower offers. He couldn’t believe it, and he asked why. I said that the lower bidders brought with them John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins and Burt McMurtry of TVI. I said they would make more difference to the ultimate valuation of Intuit. He later remembered that advice, and acknowledged that it was right.

@levie: Tim Cook says he doesn’t think Google Glass will work. *John Doerr speeds away angrily in his Segway*
 
@johndoerr: @levie – I have 2 Segways – and Glass – outside. Want to ride?

– Twitter conversation between John Doerr and Aaron Levie after Tim Cook said onstage at D11 that Google Glass’s form factor will limit broad success

In a bipartisan vote reached on Thursday evening, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved a bill that aims to radically overhaul much of current U.S. immigration policy, which could ultimately increase the number of highly skilled tech industry workers allowed visas to work inside of the U.S.

The bill, which passed through the committee by a vote of 13 to five, is now headed to the floor for debate, where it is expected to be deliberated upon through the summer.

It is, in particular, the first small victory for FWD.us, the political action group formed by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and supported by a cadre of such tech industry luminaries as LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman and famed venture capitalist John Doerr.

To be sure, Zuckerberg’s group is far from the only lobbyist group aiming for immigration policy reform in Washington, nor should it be solely credited for swaying the final decision. But in Silicon Valley at the moment, it is perhaps the most visible.

“With its 13-5 vote to support comprehensive immigration reform, the Senate Judiciary Committee has taken another crucial step forward to growing a knowledge economy,” Joe Green, FWD.us founder and president, said in a statement to AllThingsD. “This comprehensive bipartisan legislation contains the key principles we support, and its passage is another important step in the right direction.”

“It’s clear that the momentum continues to build in favor of commonsense immigration legislation — and FWD.us will continue to advocate for comprehensive, bipartisan reform that will attract innovators, build prosperous neighborhoods with strong families and good jobs, and ensure the U.S. continues to lead the world in the growth of the knowledge economy,” Green said.

Facebook did not respond to a request for comment.

In a grand mission statement published on the editorial page of the Washington Post when FWD.us launched, Zuckerberg reasoned that the need for his group was to create change in areas like education, long-term economic issues and, most of all, immigration issues.

“We have a strange immigration policy for a nation of immigrants,” Zuckerberg wrote in the Post article. “And it’s a policy unfit for today’s world.”

Since launching the group in April, FWD.us has spent its money lobbying aggressively for immigration reform in particular, backing lawmakers who have expressed support for changes in the current legislation.

Though not all of FWD.us’s supporters were comfortable with the group’s lobbying tactics. After it came out earlier this month that FWD.us had bankrolled ads for immigration-reform-friendly legislators who also supported controversial environmental policies like Arctic oil drilling and the building of the Keystone XL pipeline, FWD.us lost two high-profile supporters; Tesla CEO and green energy proponent Elon Musk withdrew support, along with Yammer founder David Sacks.

The immigration policy changes FWD.us is pushing for in particular would ultimately benefit many high-tech companies who want better access to recruiting foreign engineering talent, much of which is currently restricted by the number of H1-B visas granted to foreign workers on an annual basis.

“This is about jobs. Period,” Michael Beckerman, president and CEO of the Internet Association, told AllThingsD in a statement. “A highly skilled workforce helps Internet companies grow here at home and hire more Americans. For each worker an Internet company hires under an H1-B visa program, they are able to bring on as many as 12 American workers. … This is a win for the knowledge economy and we look forward to this process moving forward.”

The legislation was held up in the Senate Judiciary Committee until Sen. Patrick Leahy (D., Vt.) and Sen. Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.) agreed with dissenting members of the committee to hold off on adding an amendment to the bill which would have allowed certain provisions for gay couples.

Sen. Leahy told the New York Times that he withheld his amendment “with a heavy heart.”

The efforts of Sen. Orrin Hatch (R., Uah) in particular were instrumental in including a last-minute amendment that would benefit the tech industry. His amendment, which the Times said was agreed upon late in the deliberations, would increase the minimum number of high-tech H1-B visas allowed annually.

The office of Sen. Hatch did not immediately respond to a telephone request for comment.

“Thanks to the leadership of Chairman Leahy and a bipartisan group of eight Senators, the legislation that passed the Judiciary Committee with a strong bipartisan vote is largely consistent with the principles of commonsense reform I have proposed and meets the challenge of fixing our broken immigration system,” President Barack Obama said in a statement issued on Tuesday evening.

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.

It’s essentially a celebrity VC endorsement for the wearable computing device, which is supposed to be publicly available later this year.

The promise of venture capital investment could serve as validation for a product that, even before launching, seems to be alienating many people who are worried about the privacy, distraction and dorkiness implications of a computer that lives on your face.

The trio founding the collective are: Andreessen Horowitz’s Marc Andreessen — famous for creating the Web browser and now a leading VC — Kleiner Perkins’ John Doerr — investor in Andreessen’s Netscape and Google — and Google Ventures head Bill Maris.

Speaking at a press conference today, Doerr said he was eager for developers to get their hands on Glass. “More than any other platform I’ve seen before, I can’t imagine what they are going to do with this.”

Andreessen added that he thought Glass had much more potential to be a platform than any other wearable computing product on the market, and that it could potentially be as pervasive as the mobile phone is today.

Doerr, Maris and Andreessen said they would “share deal flow” for seed-stage investments in Glass applications, meaning when they see young startups in the space they will clue each other in.

This is not a dedicated fund, like Kleiner Perkins’ iFund for iOS apps, but a sort of united front and commitment to Glass as an interesting platform for development.

Given that Glass is such a strange and potentially controversial — but also potentially really cool — device, Google is going all-out to try to ensure a smooth launch.

So far, the company has hyped the device with skydiving stunts, had models wear prototypes on the fashion runway, promised developers early access and conducted a social media campaign using the hashtag #ifihadglass that made the opportunity to buy a $1,500 device a publicly coveted prize.

People who signed up to to buy the “Explorer Edition” of Glass are supposed to start receiving their own devices later this month, according to product director Steve Lee.

This latest step can be seen as another of these pre-launch strategies, which are actually pretty smart. Getting Google Ventures (the venture capital firm in which Google is the sole investor) and a couple of famous VCs to tempt developers with money is another effort to make Glass cool, and ensure it sticks around for a while.

But Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins are already the two firms that most frequently co-invest in startups with Google Ventures, so this is more of a stunt than a stretch.

So what applications are the Glass Collective VCs excited to invest in?

• Andreessen said he’d like to see apps for paramedics, and a live zombie game.
• Google co-founder Sergey Brin said he’d like to use Glass as a viewfinder for his fancy SLR camera, and to stream GoPro action-sports cameras.
• Maris said he’d like scientists in wet labs to be able to conduct hands-free experiments with Glass, and for paralyzed people to be able to more easily text. He also said he enjoyed an early timelapse app that people at Google built.
• Doerr said developers should read David Gelernter’s “Mirror Worlds” to find inspiration, and that he wanted to see Glass used in healthcare and education.
• Asked whether the Glass Collective would be willing to invest in facial recognition applications for Glass, given the privacy issues, Maris didn’t say no.

The social gaming company announced the appointment of John Doerr — longtime, well-respected Silicon Valley venture capitalist and general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers — to Zynga’s board of directors.

“John has been a supporter of Zynga since our early days, and truly understands our core values and mission,” said Mark Pincus, CEO and founder of Zynga, in a statement. “John has worked with some of the most well-known companies in the world at every stage imaginable and his experience helping teams innovate at scale will be a tremendous asset for our leadership team.”

Indeed he has. Doerr is acclaimed as a Valley VC with a solid track record of spotting great companies early on, including Google, Amazon, Netscape and Intuit (though to be sure, in recent years Kleiner and Doerr have come under scrutiny for being late or missing the boat on investing in the next wave of Web giants). Doerr continues to hold board seats at a number of companies, again including Google, as well as Coursera and social magazine startup Flipboard.

Zynga has had a rough year (to put it mildly). After a long string of high-level departures — including execs like former CFO Dave Wehner and former COO John Schappert — it endured a tanking share price and an overall waning sense of Wall Street confidence.

Zynga has rallied in recent months, however, aiming to turn the company around with a number of long-term bets. Zynga just recently launched its first foray into real-money gaming this week in the U.K., with plans to eventually bring the online gambling games to the U.S. and on Facebook and mobile devices. And Zynga has made it abundantly clear that while the majority of its revenue still comes from Facebook-based games, Zynga wants to transition off of reliance upon Facebook’s platform, building a fuller network of social-game-playing customers across its own Zynga network. That includes, of course, a large push into mobile — just like the rest of the industry is doing.

So Doerr’s addition is likely another step in this direction, welcoming aboard a tech industry mainstay with years of experience to offer.

“What’s exciting is this is still day zero — just the beginning — of social gaming’s potential,” Doerr said in a release. “I’m excited about working with Mark and the Zynga team in its next chapters of growth.”

Doerr joins Zynga’s eight other board members, including fellow Kleiner partner Bing Gordon, Jeffrey Katzenberg, LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, Stanley J. Meresman, Sunil Paul, Ellen F. Siminoff, Owen Van Natta and Zynga CEO Mark Pincus.

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner John Doerr has joined the board of Flipboard, the mobile-based social media magazine, as an adviser.

“John has been a long-time supporter and adviser to Flipboard and it is fantastic to have him on the board,” a Flipboard spokesperson told AllThingsD. “We feel very fortunate to be working with him and everyone at KP.”

Doerr’s move into an advisory role at Flipboard, first noted by Owen Thomas at Business Insider, is a natural one, as Doerr has had an existing relationship with Flipboard CEO Mike McCue over the years. McCue founded and subsequently sold Paper Software to Netscape in 1996, where he went on to work on and evolve the Netscape browser with Doerr again acting as adviser. McCue also founded TellMe, backed again by Doerr and Kleiner’s funds.

Another Kleiner partner, Eric Feng, recently joined Flipboard as the startup’s new CTO.

McCue was a board seat holder at Twitter before he was asked to leave over what the microblogging site saw as eventual conflicts of interest. Doerr often showed up to Twitter board meetings in an advisory role, but never held an official seat.

The news also comes in the wake of the departure of former Kleiner partner Ellen Pao, who was terminated from the investment firm for “performance issues.” (Pao also happens to be suing the firm, alleging long-standing sexual harassment issues.)

But now that Facebook Inc., Zynga Inc. and Groupon Inc. have fizzled in their first year on the stock market –even though they were considered on the cutting edge of some of those tech trends — the hype over “SoLoMo” has subsided.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

The case is now a matter of “they said, she said,” with two entirely divergent accounts of the same events. Both Pao and Kleiner Perkins have their reputations at stake.

Pao had said the firm turned a blind eye to sexual harassment of her by another partner, and that Kleiner Perkins’ team systematically discriminated against her and other female employees.

Kleiner Perkins’ two main points today are that Pao’s history is of “performance flaws” and that she displayed a “failure to complain.”

The firm alleged in its response:

• Pao’s relationship with former partner Ajit Nazre was consensual.
• She had not brought up complaints about discrimination or harassment over the past five years until engaging legal representation late last year.
• Pao had bad performance reviews.
• An outside investigator did a thorough investigation of Kleiner Perkins’ treatment of women earlier this year and found Pao’s claims to have no merit.

Kleiner Perkins’ complaints about Pao’s performance are detailed at length. Clearly, if Pao wasn’t liked at Kleiner Perkins before, she is now persona non grata.

The filing said Pao’s performance reviews over the years said she was “not viewed as a good team player” and was “territorial,” she had “consistent flaws in her performance,” and she was told to “speak up more effectively” and “take more risks,” and to “focus on interpersonal and ‘EQ’ skills.”

Further, Kleiner Perkins says Pao had recently contractually agreed to arbitration and non-disparagement, so she broke that agreement by filing the lawsuit. Thus, the firm says Pao has “unclean hands.”

A hearing is set for July 10.

In the lead-up to the official filing, which was due today, Kleiner Perkins’ John Doerr — who first hired Pao as his chief of staff seven years ago — had publicly described her allegations as false and without merit. He and others at the firm have repeatedly asserted that their track record of hiring women outshines the competition.

Pao first filed suit on May 10, though word didn’t get out widely until May 22. Since then, Pao has continued to work at Kleiner Perkins, though it’s obviously been awkward.

In the lawsuit, Pao said former partner Nazre harassed her starting in 2006, the year after she joined the firm.

Pao said she did briefly “succumb” to Nazre, but after breaking things off with him, multiple Kleiner Perkins partners and an outside human resources consultant allegedly ignored Pao’s complaints about repeated harassment and retaliation, and rejected her requests to transfer away from Nazre over a period of years.

And further, she said that the venture firm discriminated against her and other women by promoting them less, compensating them less, restricting their number of investments, excluding them from meetings and failing to adequately support them internally and externally.

Embed via TechCrunch:

Pao v Kleiner Perkins

… our firm does not discriminate on the basis of gender.

– KPCB Partner John Doerr, on the company’s blog

This is something top VCs John Doerr and Mike Moritz have done personally, but AH is making a point of pledging as a firm.

As Ben Horowitz put it during a phone interview this morning, “When we started the firm three years ago, neither Marc nor I had a lot of fancy hobbies to do like playing polo, so we weren’t sure what we were going to do with the money if we were really successful anyways.”

Now, he said, “I think we’re getting a little more confident that we’ll return something and make some money.” AH said yesterday that it has returned $288 million of the first $300 million it raised from limited partners for its first fund.

Marc Andreessen added that he hoped other VC firms would join, as sort of a rehabilitation of venture capital’s public image. “Investing has become polarizing, which is kind of crazy given we think we’re in a field that actually adds to the positive,” he said.

To kick off the pledge, the six partners and their own partners have given a combined $1 million to six Silicon Valley non-profits, including the Ecumenical Hunger Program (Jeff and Karen Jordan) and the Shelter Network (Scott and Pamela Weiss).

See also: Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen Talks About Giving 2.0.

Coursera co-founders Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller

Stanford computer science professors Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng are on leave to launch Coursera, which will offer university classes for free online, in partnership with top schools.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Coursera is backed with $16 million in funding led by John Doerr at Kleiner Perkins and Scott Sandell at NEA. It has no immediate plans to charge for courses or to make money in other ways.

Compared to Udacity, a similar start-up from former Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun that’s creating its own classes, Coursera helps support its university partners in creating their own courses, which are listed under each school’s brand.

Some might doubt that universities would want to share their prized content for free online with a start-up, but Coursera has already signed up Princeton, Stanford, the University of Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania as partners, with a set of classes launching April 23.

Coursera evolved, in part, out of the hugely popular Stanford classes that Ng and Thrun taught last fall on machine learning and artificial intelligence, respectively. Ng’s course had 104,000 people enrolled, with at least 46,000 completing at least one homework assignment. Of those, 23,000 completed a “substantial” amount of the class, and 13,000 received a “statement of accomplishment,” Ng said. He’ll be offering that class again, starting next week.

Koller and Ng are particularly committed to developing pedagogy for this new medium, and have built their own course software and student forums. They describe their philosophy as similar to that of Salman Khan and the Khan Academy, where students are encouraged to take the time to master material at their own pace.

Coursera students help other students — in the fall, the median response time to a question asked on the class forum was 22 minutes — and the system will also learn from the students.

For instance, 2,000 of the 20,000 or so students in Ng’s online class had the exact same wrong solution on one problem set, he said. That’s an opportunity to recognize what’s happening, and to teach those students in that moment.

Koller and Ng have also conceived of an ambitious plan to grade humanities classes with thousands of students enrolled.

Coursera’s content is naturally heavy on computer science — where problem sets are fairly straightforward to grade — but it will also offer poetry, sociology, and medical courses. These classes will be graded crowdsourcing style, with peer assessment and review. Figuring out how to grade masses of assignments on a subjective scale is a machine learning problem, Ng said.

Another ambitious venture-backed college-level online education start-up I recently covered is the Minerva Project, which is planning to launch its own mostly virtual elite university.

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner Aileen Lee is founding a new seed fund — still unnamed — that is focused on backing and helping develop early-stage start-ups.

Lee, who has been at the famed Silicon Valley venture firm for a dozen years, will remain a partner at Kleiner Perkins, although her full focus will be on the fund. While she declined in an interview this morning to say what the size of the new fund will be, most such efforts range from $10 million to $70 million.

Along with Kleiner, there will be several other unnamed investors and strategic partners, said Lee, who is in a quiet period of fundraising and could not give more details. It will be separate from Kleiner.

“I read a book that said you should make a big change every seven years, and this was an area of investing that I really have wanted to be in,” said Lee, who at Kleiner has backed companies such as One King’s Lane, Rent the Runway and Dollar Shave Club. “I really have become very interested at working with and helping entrepreneurs at the early stages of their growth.”

KP’s John Doerr said that while some VC firms are creating their own high-profile seed funds, he and Lee felt it was important for such an investment vehicle to be independent to be effective and also to work with other seed efforts that have exploded on the tech scene.

“But we wanted to invest in it, so it’s the best of both worlds,” he said. “It’s really important that start-ups at that stage get the kind of attention Aileen can give them.”

According to her bio on KP’s Web site, Lee worked at the Gap before her VC life, as well as Odwalla and the North Face. The MIT and Harvard Business School grad also worked at Morgan Stanley in technology mergers and acquisitions.

On some level of journalism, I guess anything could happen.

At least that’s according to a recent article by Business Insider’s Henry Blodget about an alleged “mole” at Twitter who was allegedly spying for Google, specifically about an exec the microblogging service was trying to poach from the Silicon Valley search giant.

In a decidedly splashy, hello-traffic, ALL-CAPs headline–THE SEARCH FOR THE “TWITTER MOLE”: All Eyes On John Doerr“–Blodget pointed his J’accuse finger at the legendary venture capitalist as the culprit.

Based on…

Well, based on nothing, it appears, except rank speculation and what appears to be no attempt to get Doerr to comment.

And, while it’s not my cup of tea, whatev, I suppose.

Except when I read down to the bottom and landed on this gem:

We have talked to several sources familiar with aspects of the situation. Thus far, we have not been able to confirm either assertion.

First, no one has even confirmed that Google was tipped off in advance of Twitter’s poaching effort, much less by a Twitter mole.

This doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

And later still:

So we haven’t been able to confirm the “high-level mole at Twitter” story. And we think there’s a good explanation for why there might not be a mole at all.

Secondly, we have talked to no one who has any evidence other than the logic above that, even if there is a Google mole at Twitter, the mole is John Doerr. One insider we spoke to, in fact, dismissed the idea out of hand.

Say what?

It’s kind of like thinking that a sparkly Civil War-era vampire falling in love with a moody chick in the Pacific Northwest and flying through the pines all day and mooning over their cruel fate was real.

Okay, that was a Hollywood movie called “Twilight,” but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen!

Thus, Doerr–a tough customer to be sure, capable of all kinds of sharp-elbowed behavior–is guilty until proven innocent?

Or just not guilty at all, but let’s just say he might be anyway, without a shred of evidence, because it could have happened!

(Courtroom confession: It was All Things Digital‘s Liz Gannes, who did it on the blog with scoop on the Twitter talent raid effort of Sundar Pichai!)

Speaking of evidence, less than a week later, Javert–oops, I mean, Blodget–was back in another kangaroo court performance with another terrifically loud headline:

“The Guy Who Says He Owns 50% Of Facebook Just Filed A Boatload Of New Evidence–And It’s Breathtaking.”

Breathtaking, I guess, if you are in that fantasy teenaged girl mode, but deeply suspect if you are anyone with a modicum of journalistic responsibility.

It is perfectly fine for Blodget to dredge up the copious emails from a man named Paul Ceglia–who alleges he possesses a contract that he struck with Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg at the time of its creation–and analyze them.

And it is certainly notable that a credible law firm, DLA Piper, has taken on the case for Ceglia and it does seems unlikely that it would have done so without doing some level of due diligence.

In fact, in an interview with Am Law Daily, DLA partner Robert Brownlie, international co-chair of the firm’s securities litigation, said: “At first I shrugged it off as incredible. I would not have gotten involved and DLA would not have gotten involved if we had any doubts about the facts or evidence in the case.”

That was, of course, countered by Facebook’s lawyer Orin Snyder at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, who said in a statement that the Ceglia allegations were part of “a fraudulent lawsuit brought by a convicted felon.”

By the way, in fancy-lawyer parlance, that translates to a liar-liar-pants-on-fire defense.

So, microwave the popcorn and get ready for the drama, because no question, it is clearly going to be juicy all around with a whole lot of social networking poking!

In fact, such a case is tailor-made for Blodget, who has always been a very gifted writer with a nose for sharp-edged analysis.

It’s too bad, then, that he did not hone his knife to such an edge when it comes to Ceglia, giving him much too much credibility based on what could be fake emails, especially since they come from a man with a history of fraud.

History, in fact, that Ceglia is depending on in this case, since Zuckerberg most definitely has one in regards to partnerships gone bad.

Thus, Zuckerberg has been sneaky before, ergo he’s sneaky here.

That’s no surprise as a legal tactic, of course, and I threw in the “ergo,” since I too want to play Perry Mason in a blog.

But. More to the point, while Facebook was certainly hard-nosed in dealing with both protracted and high-profile legal challenges from the Winklevoss twins and also Eduardo Severin, I don’t think I have ever seen the company explicitly say evidence was completely fabricated, as it is alleging Ceglia’s emails are.

As I said, I have no idea if they are or they’re not, but I do know this: While those emails are certainly bombshell in nature, they are designed to be so precisely because it is a lawsuit in which the principal is trying to shame Facebook into settling.

None of that seems to concern Blodget, who concludes at the end of the post:

“In short, to us at least, the emails don’t read ‘fake.’”

In short, to me at least, that’s for fake-email experts and the courts to decide.

The real fact of the matter is, who knows? I certainly don’t, although I do know it’s terrifically easy to file a lawsuit and claim just about anything you like.

And the same seems to be true–more and more these days and not for the good–for blogs too.

As for me, I need to get back to my goal of proving that sparkly vampires do exist.

Yesterday, the Obama administration dribbled out the news that it was going to nominate current Commerce Secretary Gary Locke as the next ambassador to China.

If approved, Locke will surely have his hands full on a wide range of issues, many of them impacting the tech sector, including piracy, privacy and government-sponsored censorship.

Perhaps more interestingly, the move leaves open a post–which the Obama administration actually had a hard time filling initially–that could get a true turbocharge if it were filled by an exec from the fast-growing digital arena.

It’s not a bad idea, since tech is probably now the most critical business arena in the U.S. and one of the only markets in which this country innovates and excels at.

While the Commerce Department has a huge and disparate domain, from international trade to the census to promoting American businesses, its digital footprint has been much less profound than the industry’s increasing importance to the U.S. economy.

After all, despite some interesting international efforts, most of the current crop of tech stars are U.S. born and bred and leading the way in digital innovation.

In fact, every big trend right now in value creation are all coming out of tech.

Gaming? Zynga.

Social networking? Facebook and Twitter.

Retail? Groupon.

Mobile? Google and Apple.

So, why not pick a business person from the area to lead the government agency dedicated to business?

But that’s where it gets dicey.

One more obvious candidate would be outgoing Google CEO–and Obama favorite–Eric Schmidt.

I would assume he might welcome such a prominent post, although putting him in place at Commerce would be a tough road.

Issue one and only: The investigations of Google’s aggressive business practices by federal regulators make this an awkward decision for Obama, given Schmidt would be open to a lot of scrutiny going through confirmation.

But there is a long list of others who could be considered to serve, especially if you think well outside the box.

What about former Xerox CEO Anne Mulcahy, who certainly has the management cred?

Or mega-VC John Doerr, who–despite his recent social fever–might finally get to push his beloved clean-tech agenda onto a larger stage?

What about Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who recently showed she could deliver a boffo speech and who might lend some Silicon Valley magic to her former Washington, D.C. rep?

And while Amazon’s Jeff Bezos’ laugh would have a hard time getting Congressional approval, why not consider someone who has profoundly changed the way an entire business sector does business?

In that vein, Reed Hastings of Netflix also fits the bill.

Except these three execs are pretty busy these days. So, what about former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, whose failed bid to be California’s governor as the Republican candidate leaves her without a post.

President Barack Obama had picked a GOP pol as his second choice for Commerce head, in fact, so Whitman or even Cisco CEO John Chambers are not out of the question.

The point is to perhaps move outside the Beltway’s comfort zone and pick a Commerce Secretary who represents the future rather than the past.

The White House is announcing that Otellini will be named to the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt chairs the group, which was created by an executive order in January. Other members are expected to be named in coming weeks.

News of Otellini’s appointment is a highlight of the president’s trip west this week, which kicked off with a meeting Thursday night with tech CEOs that include Apple’s Steve Jobs, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Google’s Eric Schmidt and Cisco’s John Chambers. The meeting was held at the Woodside, Calif., home of John Doerr, the prominent venture capitalist.

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At the president’s right hand, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg; at his left, Apple CEO Steve Jobs. And when Obama looked across the centerpiece, there were the piercing eyes of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. Note that Jobs and Google CEO Eric Schmidt are safely separated, in keeping with the first rule of dinner-party seating–avoid fistfights.

The theme of the evening’s conversation? Said White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, “The president specifically discussed his proposals to invest in research and development and expand incentives for companies to grow and hire.”

[Image credit: Flickr/WhiteHouse]

President Obama will dine with Apple CEO Steve Jobs, Google CEO Eric Schmidt and a handful of other top Silicon Valley executives at a private dinner at the home of venture capitalist John Doerr. The conversation topics of the evening: American innovation, education and clean energy, and quite a few others, I’m sure, given the guest list.

According to a White House official, other attendees include Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, Cisco CEO John Chambers, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, Stanford president John Hennessy, chairman and former CEO of Genentech Art Levinson, and Westley Group’s managing partner and founder Steve Westly. Oddly absent: HP CEO Léo Apotheker. Perhaps, Ellison’s attendance canceled his out….

Yesterday, star venture capitalist John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins forked over $150 million in funding to Twitter.

At at $3.7 billion valuation, that got him a big chunk of the San Francisco microblogging site.

But what it didn’t get him was a seat on the board of Twitter, which many figured he would be given for after handing over so much moolah.

According to sources familiar with the situation, that’s due to Doerr’s being a director on another board: Google.

Several sources who BoomTown spoke to, after breaking news of the massive funding, said that his being on the board of the search giant was seen as too much of a conflict of interest.

A conflict because Google has plans to wade deeply into the social space. And also, of course, because it is the No. 1 potential acquirer of Twitter, as the Silicon Valley company seeks to gather more tools to fight its latest rival, Facebook.

Doerr has very deep ties at Google, having been on its board since mid-1999.

He got that seat, along with Sequoia Capital’s Mike Moritz, after he ponied up a critical $25 million equity round for Google in June of that year.

Interestingly, no other Kleiner partner was named to a Twitter board seat either.

But, some speculate, it might make sense for Mary Meeker–who just joined Kleiner to head up digital investing efforts, after a long-time stint as a Wall Street analyst for Morgan Stanley–to eventually become a Twitter director.

Meeker has, of course, deep IPO and M&A experience.

And, frankly, after adding Flipboard’s Mike McCue and former DoubleClick exec David Rosenblatt yesterday and former Netscape exec Peter Currie recently to its all-boy board band, a woman director might be a good idea to consider.

Other directors at Twitter include Benchmark Capital’s Peter Fenton, Union Square Venture’s Fred Wilson, Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital, Co-founders Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey and CEO Dick Costolo.

I reached out to Doerr for a comment, but he has not yet replied; Twitter declined to comment.

Even more interesting to consider is what Kleiner will invest in next after this mega-funding, given how aggressively many sources said Doerr had pushed to lead the Twitter round.

And, in fact, sources said that Kleiner is looking closely at new funding rounds for both the Spotify music streaming service and Groupon, the social buying start-up that recently decided to turn down a $6 billion acquisition offer from Google and an earlier $3 billion one from Yahoo.

Groupon is now seeking more funds to remain independent and hold onto its lead in the fast-growing local discounting market, sources said.

(Bloomberg also reported on Groupon’s new fundraising efforts, although it was written about after it turned down the Google offer.)

And Spotify, which is hugely popular outside the U.S., is trying to enter this market, but needs more funding to expand and perhaps strike better deals with music labels.

Both are the just the kind of companies Doerr has targeted in what looks like a serious effort to compete with other firms–especially Andreessen Horowitz and Russia’s DST Global.

They have garnered the heat Kleiner used to have, largely by backing more of the top entrepreneurs recently.

Doerr has already put money into social gaming phenom Zynga and also started an sFund for social-focused investments.

Add Twitter to the pile and you can see where this is headed: Except for the board seat, John Doerr will no longer be denied.

Twitter has completed its latest round of funding–$200 million at a $3.7 billion valuation–with Kleiner Perkins as the lead investor, according to sources familiar with the situation.

Sources said the San Francisco microblogging service is also adding two new board members: Flipboard’s Mike McCue and David Rosenblatt, who ran DoubleClick until a bit after it sold to Google.

Twitter recently added former Netscape exec Peter Currie to the board, as BoomTown previously reported.

A Twitter spokesman confirmed the funding and the board appointments, but declined further comment.

The moves are big ones for Twitter, which is moving fast to upgrade its management and business model under CEO Dick Costolo, who just posted a blog (see below) on the new funding and directors, titled “Meaningful Growth (although it was first curiously called, “Stocking Stuffers,” and was much funnier).

But, indeed, a big slug of cash will surely help the start-up’s expansion efforts and essentially declares it is not for sale to bigger companies such as Google (quite yet, that is).

As I reported last week, Kleiner partner John Doerr has been pushing hard to fund Twitter, beating out Russia’s DST Global.

Kleiner is the only new investor in the latest round, which brings its funding total to $360 million since it was founded about five years ago.

The storied Silicon Valley venture firm, which has been aggressively moving into the Web 2.0 space of late, put in $150 million, with the remaining $50 million coming from existing investors.

Past investors include Benchmark Capital, Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital and several other venture firms and angel investors.

Adding Currie, McCue and Rosenblatt are very strong choices for the board. Currie has deep financial and IPO experience, McCue is a well-connected and innovative entrepreneur and Rosenblatt brings much-needed online advertising heft.

As it happens, Costolo will appear at our D@CES event in January, where I am interviewing him and we can talk about all the changes.

(Thank goodness the funding is done, since I was worried about all those awkward pauses.)

Here is new version of Costolo’s blog post on McCue and Rosenblatt (the old one is below it for you to compare and contrast):

Meaningful Growth

In the past 12 months, Twitter users sent an astonishing 25 billion Tweets and we added more than 100 million new registered accounts. In that time, our team has grown from 130 people to more than 350 today. We’re thankful for every Tweet, every account, and every talented employee who has decided to join the Twitter team. This week, we’ve got some big news to share.

As part of a significant new round of funding with investor Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers and existing investors, we’ve added two new members to Twitter’s board of directors. Please join us in welcoming Mike McCue and David Rosenblatt. The experience these new directors bring to Twitter, along with this renewed investment, will help us continue to grow as a company and business.

2010 was one of the most meaningful years since Twitter, Inc. was founded in 2007. We operate on a principle that people are basically good–when you give them a simple way to express this trait, they prove it to you every day. We’re proud of what Twitter users have accomplished, we’re proud of our work, and we’re very proud of our team. Thanks for being a part of this work; it means a lot to us.

Stocking Stuffer

Growth is fun. In the past 12 months, Twitter users sent an astonishing 25 billion Tweets and we added more than 100 million new registered accounts. In that time, our team has grown from 130 people to more than 350 today.

This week, we added two new members to Twitter’s board of directors who have strong experience running technology companies: Mike McCue and David Rosenblatt. Mike was the CEO of Tellme Networks, is currently CEO at Flipboard and also worked for Netscape and Microsoft (which acquired Tellme in 2007). David is the former CEO of DoubleClick and an ex-Google executive.

We also closed a significant new round of funding, with new investor Kleiner Perkins Caulfield Byers leading the round. KPCB brings to Twitter a track record of helping build great companies, ranging from Amazon to Zynga (get it? A to Z? See how we did that?), and a team with expertise in Internet, mobile and social platforms. The additional resources and expertise will be extremely helpful as Twitter continues to grow as a company and business.

Thank you to Twitter users everywhere for making 2010 such a good year.

According to sources close to the situation, the aggressive Russian investment outfit DST Global is out of the running to fund Twitter.

Instead, the prize is almost certainly going to Kleiner Perkins, the legendary Silicon Valley venture firm of Web 1.0 that has been making a big push of late into the Web 2.0 market.

The valuation for the new round–which sources said is well above $150 million–will be from $3.5 billion to $4 billion.

And it is not clear if there are any other smaller investors in this funding, but sources said that was likely.

Sources added that the San Francisco microblogging service will be completing its newest round of funding next week, although Twitter might not even announce it publicly.

The new round will be the first in a year for Twitter.

In the fall of 2009, Twitter raised funding at a $1 billion valuation to help spur its growth to its current size of 325 employees, serving its 175 million users.

Such growth was of interest to DST, which has made giant investments in social networking giant Facebook, social gaming rocket ship Zynga and Groupon, the social buying site that recently ended acquisition talks with Google.

Twitter moving into its next phase of development is an attractive target for many VCs, as it seeks a lucrative way to monetize its popular business.

And, in fact, Kleiner star VC John Doerr has been making a big push to be the big investor in this key next round for Twitter, which also has had regular acquisition interest from both Google and Facebook.

What will be interesting to see is if acquisition interest in Twitter from the pair spikes, given the collapse of Google’s attempt to buy Groupon.

The talks with Twitter began, according to several sources, after Kleiner had considered investing in PostUp–the Twitter search engine and advertising platform start-up from Bill Gross’s Idealab, which was first called TweetUp.

PostUp irked Twitter, and its CEO Dick Costolo was particularly vocal about not allowing third-party ad rivals to create a spammier service.

Sources said it was Bill Campbell, well-known Silicon Valley exec and adviser to multiple companies such as Google, who brought Kleiner and Twitter into discussions.

Campbell’s latest coaching task has been at Twitter.

Kleiner has also recently stepped up its Web 2.0 game with the hiring of high-profile Wall Street analyst Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley.

She has been brought in to help turbocharge the firm’s digital investment portfolio, especially in social, mobile and commerce.

The move has underscored Kleiner’s noisy intent of late to jump into the social Web market.

After scoring a late entry into the scene with its investment in the fast-growing social gaming start-up Zynga, Kleiner has made a big marketing push recently to allocate a dedicated $250 million “sFund” to social start-ups.

NetworkEffect’s Liz Gannes first wrote of Kleiner’s interest in Twitter a week ago, followed by a report a day later in TechCrunch about Kleiner’s primacy in the Twitter funding race and Doerr’s fervent effort to land the investment.

None of the players mentioned here has responded to BoomTown’s request for a comment.

BoomTown is showing my age quite a bit today, after I unearthed notes this morning from 11 years ago.

It was for a story I never ended up doing in December of 1999 for The Wall Street Journal–where I was pretty much the only Internet beat reporter for the newspaper in Silicon Valley then–about the possibility that Mary Meeker was considering leaving Morgan Stanley in New York for two hot West coast jobs.

The high-profile Wall Street Internet analyst never made the move back then.

But, at long last, Meeker finally decided today to take one of those offers, joining Kleiner Perkins today as a venture partner in the digital arena.

It’s a much-needed hire by the legendary firm and its most prominent partner, John Doerr, given Meeker’s deep well of experience and the critical need for the still-lagging-behind-hotter-VCs Kleiner to wade more definitively into more current digital trends that she knows well.

For sure, Kleiner dominated Web 1.0 by backing what are now its golden oldies, such as Netscape Communications, Amazon and Google.

But it’s more recent Web 2.0 investments and influence has not been as impressive, especially with regards to its brighter lights and sharper entrepreneurs.

As in: No Facebook. No Foursquare. No Groupon. No Twitter (yet).

To be fair, Kleiner has made some interesting moves–mostly due to its iconoclastic partner Bing Gordon (pictured here)–such as one fund to focus on Apple iPhone and iPad apps and another on social.

And it’s has one big and shiny Web 2.0 bet–which it never fails to point to an awful lot–in gaming phenom Zynga, also courtesy of Gordon.

Bringing on Meeker to add to that now will surely help Kleiner at a critical time, giving it new investment chances, as the digital space shift sharply again.

In an interview with the Journal today, Doerr correctly called the time–a mash-up of social networking, e-commerce and mobile–”a third wave of innovation.”

In a quick interview this morning, Meeker underscored this, noting, “the level of engagement from large companies and the innovation coming from all over Silicon Valley makes this a unique time to invest in and build important companies.”

She said she was attracted to the team at Kleiner to help her move to a new level of expertise and will be spending more significant time in Northern California at her home here.

“This is an opportunity to stretch myself in a great spot at a great time,” said Meeker, noting she was especially interested in the mobile space. “It’s a pretty massive shift going on right now and I wanted to be part of it.”

But a move way back when by Meeker would have been an even bigger deal, since the Web 1.0 was at what turned out to be its peak moment in December of 1999–the ill-fated AOL-Time Warner merger would not be announced for a month, in fact.

And Meeker–who was involved in that deal and most of the other bigs ones, especially the IPOs–was the undisputed “Queen of the Net” from her powerful perch as the top kingmaker on the booming scene.

After working at other firms, she had come to Morgan Stanley as an analyst in 1991, covering PCs, hardware, software and the still nascent Internet scene.

I had met her several years later in a late-night interview in her office in Manhattan, Chinese food included, while I was working on a book on the rising power of AOL.

AOL was one of the many companies she had introduced Wall Street to, and she had become one the key nexuses for all the newly hatched Web players.

For her to leave her job then would have caused reverberations everywhere, since investors far and wide were taking her recommendations on the new companies of the moment, such as Amazon and eBay.

So–while she would later endure negative scrutiny for some of her too bullish cues, after the bursting of the Internet bubble came soon after–nabbing her at the time would be been a very big story.

And who was trying to entice her?

Well, Bill Gross of Idealab for one, offering her the possibility of big IPO stock options (which would turn out to be less than valuable soon after).

Said Gross in an email to me this morning:

Back when we were opening an Idealab office in NY, we wanted to get the best talent in the universe, and that led us right to Mary. She was brilliant and ahead of her time then, as now.

At the time, we talked about working with her to have her insights about industries and companies help us inform the direction our existing companies should take, as well as brainstorm together what new companies to create.

I think Mary was just too happy doing what she was doing, and she went on to have another great 10-year run doing just that!

And the other suitor? That was Doerr of Kleiner Perkins.

A longtime friend and a star venture capitalist whose investments benefited greatly from Meeker’s attention, he had long tried to recruit her.

Fast forward to today, as Doerr seems to have finally sealed the deal.

Meeker’s title at the investment bank has most recently been as its head of global technology research.

At Kleiner Perkins, no surprise, she’ll focus on the firm’s investments in social, mobile and e-commerce, trying to turbocharge its efforts.

Presumably including, as NetworkEffect’s Liz Gannes reported earlier today, Kleiner making a big push to invest in a new badillion-dollar funding round for Twitter.

Meeker’s presence could help there for sure, especially since she has been a big proponent of the microblogging service, as you can see on page 18 of her most recent annual Internet trends report–titled “Ten Questions Internet Execs Should Ask & Answer.”

It’s clear, as you will read below, those are just the kinds of queries Kleiner needs to be making.

Check out her presentation deck for some clues as to where Meeker could focus first as a newly minted VC:

Internet Trends Presentation

Meeker is joining Silicon Valley venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as a partner, said KPCB partner John Doerr. The Menlo Park, Calif., venture firm was one of the prime backers of the early wave of Internet companies such as Netscape Communications, Amazon.com Inc. and, later, Google Inc.

Doerr said Meeker is joining KPCB’s digital practice, where she will invest in start-up technology companies and help current KPCB-backed companies grow. Doerr said KPCB is adding to its digital practice as “a third wave of innovation” combining social networking, mobile and e-commerce creates investment opportunities.

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