Viddy will return $18 million of the $30 million raised in its series B round one year ago, leaving the company with $11 million in the bank. Lead investors in the most recent round were NEA, Khosla Ventures and Goldman Sachs, all of which will receive much of their money back.

“Viddy raised a substantial amount of capital last year, during different market conditions,” said JJ Aguhob, Viddy president, in a statement to AllThingsD. “A year later, Viddy is a leaner, product-focused organization that is steadily growing its audience and will soon be releasing new products. Our late-stage investors have been very supportive, but it just makes good business sense to return capital we do not need and have a clean balance sheet in the process.”

The market conditions Aguhob speaks of, I’d estimate, involve Facebook’s proclivity to giveth and taketh away. Viddy, along with other social video startups like Socialcam, rose to prominence last summer on the back of Facebook, when the social giant was delivering massive amounts of traffic to social video apps. Alas, after wide reports of Socialcam spamming users and general distaste for its viral reach, Facebook turned off the traffic funnel to social video apps, leaving companies like Viddy and Socialcam in the lurch.

So essentially, Viddy raised tons of money when traffic was rich and scaling, hiring and expanding resources rapidly made sense. Now, in its post-Facebook-aided future, Viddy is downsizing — both in bank balance and in team size. (The company laid off a third of its staff in February.)

As a result of the recapitalization, NEA partner Peter Sonsini will leave Viddy’s board of directors. “We remain shareholders and strong supporters of the company,” Sonsini said in a statement. “We came to an agreement that works for all parties, resulting in Viddy being a well-funded early stage company with a balance sheet that reflects its size and needs.”

Jason Rapp, managing director at L.A.-based Science Inc., will join Viddy’s board as chairman in the wake of Sonsini’s departure. Brian O’Malley of Battery Ventures and entrepreneur Sky Dayton remain on the board.

Including the recent departure of biz dev chief Chris Ovitz, Viddy’s remaining headcount is at about 16, down from around 30.

The company announced today that Prashant Gandhi, a senior director at Cisco who led development of its own SDN efforts, will join Big Switch as vice president of product management, starting today.

It’s an important hire for Big Switch because there are few people who have as much history in the world of traditional enterprise networking who also have as much history working on efforts to remake it with software. Gandhi worked on some of Cisco’s most important mainstream switching products, like the Cisco Nexus 7000. But he also worked on Cisco’s Nexus 1000v virtual switch and its Cisco One software controller.

His move is occurring at a crucial moment. In recent weeks Cisco has been talking a lot about its interest in contributing to the OpenDaylight project, an open-source SDN consortium. Cisco has contributed code from the CiscoOne product to the project, and Gandhi would have been intimately familiar with the substance of its effort. BigSwitch is a member of OpenDaylight, too.

Big Switch, on the other hand, hails directly out of OpenFlow, another open-source networking project that was born at Stanford University.

I talked with Jason Matlof, Big Switch’s marketing VP, who described Gandhi’s move as a big vote in favor of Big Switch’s approach over Cisco’s. “No one is better qualified to make a judgement on Cisco’s contribution to OpenDaylight versus ours. He has worked on Cisco’s contribution and he is voting with his feet to come to Big Switch.”

Big Switch, you’ll recall, came out of stealth mode last year, backed by $37 million in combined funding from investors including Redpoint Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Index Ventures and Goldman Sachs. Its plan is basically to turn networks into a software platform around which companies can build their own applications.

And yes, SDN technology is still new, and most of the battles now are about building foundations for future business that lie years down the road. Indeed, companies like Cisco, Hewlett-Packard and Juniper still sell a great deal of old-school non-SDN networking gear, though HP in particular has been going to a lot of trouble to call attention to its shift in favor of SDN-ready gear.

Gandhi is a Cisco veteran, having joined that company first in 1999 in a technical marketing role that lasted six years. He then went on to start Rohati Networks, which Cisco snapped up during an acquisition spurt in 2009.

Big Switch didn’t make Gandhi available for an interview, but in a statement announcing his hiring, he alluded to Rohati and called Big Switch a “unique opportunity:”

“Since the successful completion of the integration of Rohati technologies within Cisco’s Data Center Group, I have been searching for a unique opportunity in the rapidly forming software-defined networking market. … Big Switch Networks is the leader in SDN with the best team, the best technology and the best customer traction, so the choice was clear. Customers are very eager to bring commercial-grade SDN solutions into their networks, and I look forward to helping this market move quickly to maturity.”

Zynga CIO Debra Chrapaty, who has also done high-ranking stints at other big companies such as Cisco and Microsoft, has been named CEO of enterprise cloud storage company Nirvanix.

She replaces Dru Borden, who will remain at the San Diego-based company as SVP of planning and development and who will also remain a director. Chrapaty will also remain executive chairwoman of the board of Nirvanix, which has investments from Khosla Ventures and Intel Capital.

Chrapaty has most recently been CIO of Zynga, but was also SVP of Cisco’s collaboration software unit and was a corporate VP at Microsoft. She was also president and COO of E*Trade Technologies.

In an email to me, Chrapaty wrote: “I had a great run at Zynga, wish the company and the team the best. But this is a really unique opportunity to leverage a company that is at the center of unstoppable trends (to cloud which hasn’t really affected Fortune 1000 storage yet) and a company that already has some great existing people and customers and investors you have known for decades.”

Zynga has seen a number of high-level departures and top management reorgs in recent months, as it seeks to turn around its recent rocky performance.

Zynga said that Chrapaty, who was hired from Cisco in 2011, will be replaced by Zynga exec Dorion Carroll.

“We thank Debra for her leadership and contributions to Zynga over the past years and wish her luck in her future endeavors,” said Zynga COO David Ko in a statement. “As one of our Zynga Fellows, Dorion has provided direction, leadership and management across numerous technology and products teams at Zynga over the past three years as well as being one of our most senior technology leaders.”

In a world where large companies are always looking for ways to keep costs under control and boost what flows to the top and bottom lines of a P&L statement, it’s a fair question to ask, especially when there’s an hourly workforce involved, whether it’s in retail, a call center or a customer support situation.

Hourly employees make up about 60 percent of the workforce in the U.S. These are often high-turnover jobs, where management is difficult and the results uneven. But the fact that it’s so big makes it a prime target for the kind of predictive analytics that are becoming so fashionable these days.

That’s exactly what Evolv does, and today it announced it had landed a $15 million Series D round of venture capital funding led by VantagePoint Capital Partners. Previous investors GGV Capital, LightSpeed Venture Partners and Khosla Ventures also participated in the round.

Evolv uses big-data techniques to predict whether or not an employee is likely to be a successful, effective and efficient employee. Among other things, it tracks which training techniques work and which don’t, charts overall performance of the workforce and creates profiles of employees who perform well and those who don’t.

In the end, it’s about keeping employees working for the company over a long period of time, shrinking that turnover rate. After all, it’s expensive to bring on new employees and train them. On that front, Evolv has some stats to brag about: Its customers, on average, see the tenure of their hourly employees increase by about 15 percent. And its 19 customers, with a combined workforce of about 750,000, see an average improvement of $10 million to the profit and loss statement. Xerox is one customer that has been publicly named so far.

It’s not as though other companies haven’t sought to tackle this problem with software. Evolv CEO Max Simkoff told me that when Evolv wins a deal, it’s usually displacing on-premise software from the likes of SAP, Oracle, IBM, Microsoft or SAS. Collectively those five control more than half of the market for performance management and analytics tools.

“The first generation of these apps are cumbersome and clunky to use,” Simkoff said. “A lot of them focused on creating really big, complex reporting engines. We set out to build an insight engine. Companies don’t want reports. They wan’t conclusions.”

As part of the investment, Bill Harding, a managing director at VantagePoint, will join Evolv’s board.

Fliesler is leaving the entrepreneurial world for the cushy VC life at the relatively young age of 28. That’s because, as he put it, “I do growth.” He wants to work closely with young startups, rather than fill a role at an already large company.

At Square, “I was spending a lot of time being a manager and not as much time at the white board,” Fliesler said. And rather than repeat (hopefully) that pattern with other fast-growing companies, he chose what he called “a terminal path” of being a VC for the rest of his life.

Fliesler has had a rapid-fire career. From an early gig in real estate investments, he joined Max Levchin’s Slide in 2007, where he led partnerships, platform relationships, payments and various products. When Slide was acquired by Google, he was director of product.

Then he followed former Slide executive Keith Rabois to Square, where Rabois was COO until he left after allegations of personal misconduct (that’s the other Square guy who became a VC — Rabois is now joining Khosla Ventures). Fliesler attested that the departures were unrelated, and that Square has a strong remaining executive team. Former Square director of products Megan Quinn is also now a VC at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

At Matrix, Fliesler said, he doesn’t intend to specialize in any particular category — Slide was a social product, Square was business-to-business — but rather intends to find young companies he likes and thinks he can help.

As I previously reported was likely, former Square COO Keith Rabois will be joining Khosla Ventures as a venture capitalist.

The well-known entrepreneur left the prominent San Francisco-based payments company in the midst of unproven allegations of personal misconduct a month ago.

Rabois, who will start in March, has a lot of informal investing experience as a longtime angel, and is on many public boards, such as Yelp and Xoom, but for the most part, he has played the No. 2 to a string of high-profile entrepreneurs, including Peter Thiel at PayPal, Max Levchin at Slide and, most recently, Jack Dorsey at Square.

And, in fact, Rabois was considering another job like that, deciding between Khosla and a top job at Airbnb, the San Francisco online rentals startup.

But he chose Khosla, he said in a blog post, because he has long wanted to formalize his interest in investing.

Wrote Rabois: “I moved to Silicon Valley in 2000, joining a bunch of misfits who had some provocative ideas about how the world should work. Three years later, I started investing to enable other driven people to chase their dreams. I quickly discovered that the more companies I invested in, the more brilliant and inspirational new people I could encourage. As a result, for twelve years I harboured dreams of becoming a VC who did this every day for a long time.”

The choice of two very attractive alternatives is in stark contrast to the more tense situation for Rabois just a month ago, after accusations of sexual harassment arose related to a relationship he had with a Square employee.

Rabois has denied the allegations aimed at him and at the San Francisco payments company, which have not yet turned into a lawsuit, and has thus far been backed by Square. Rabois called the accusations by the employee “fiction” and a “shakedown.”

That said, due to the controversy around the serious workplace issue, he stepped down from his job as COO.

Square founder and CEO Jack Dorsey endorsed the move in a statement:

“I couldn’t be more excited to see two of the top entrepreneurs I know, join forces at Khosla Ventures to support and coach the next generation of entrepreneurs the world over,” Dorsey said.

Here’s the official press release from Khosla:

Keith Rabois Joins the Khosla Ventures Team

Angel investor, Internet Entrepreneur and Hands-On Advisor
Brings His Experience to Khosla’s Broad Portfolio of Companies

MENLO PARK, Calif., February 26, 2013 — Khosla Ventures, a venture assistance firm that focuses on sustainability and technology startups, announced today that Keith Rabois, a former PayPal, LinkedIn and Slide executive, will join the firm. Most recently Keith was chief operating officer at Square, a Khosla Ventures portfolio company, where he oversaw all aspects of business operations, including marketing, communications, business development, distribution, human resources and risk management.

While serving in executive roles, he has also developed a distinguished track record angel investing in technology companies, such as YouTube, Yammer, Airbnb, LinkedIn (NYSE: LNKD), Quora, Palantir, and Eventbrite.

He will begin his new role at Khosla in March 2013.

“I love Khosla Ventures’ vision and passion for assisting the next generation of entrepreneurs,” said Keith Rabois. “The Khosla team encourages entrepreneurs to be bold. And the team’s legendary work ethic ensures that entrepreneurs will receive the best possible assistance.”

“We are thrilled to have Keith join us as he has shown himself to be a great investor, but even more importantly he’s a true advisor. Our extensive conversations with entrepreneurs repeatedly elicited comments like, ‘he asks the toughest questions’, ‘he pushes me the most and makes me think’, ‘he is always there when I need help’, ‘he is the most valuable among all my board members and advisors’, ‘he can imagine the future’,” said Vinod Khosla, founding partner of Khosla Ventures. “Our belief in bringing the best venture assistance to our companies is why we’re very excited about the newest addition to the Khosla Ventures team. He truly has earned the right to advise companies.”

Jack Dorsey, the CEO and founder of Square added, “I couldn’t be more excited to see two of the top entrepreneurs I know, join forces at Khosla Ventures to support and coach the next generation of entrepreneurs the world over.”

Keith currently holds board roles at Xoom (NASDAQ: XOOM), since June 2003, and Yelp (NYSE: YELP), since September 2005.

Keith Rabois, the former Square COO who left the company in the midst of unproven allegations of personal misconduct, is weighing an offer to join Silicon Valley venture firm Khosla Ventures, according to sources close to the situation, and is currently leaning toward accepting the job there.

But, that could change. In an interesting twist, the longtime entrepreneur and investor has also been in discussions with Airbnb CEO and co-founder Brian Chesky to become COO or president there.

Both the VC and the startup have been doing reference checks on Rabois, news of which has gotten out in the ever-chatty Silicon Valley scene. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier today that Rabois had been in talks with the San Francisco-based online housing rentals company.

But sources with knowledge of the situation said that Rabois — who has played the No. 2 to a string of high-profile entrepreneurs, including Peter Thiel at PayPal, Max Levchin at Slide and, most recently, Jack Dorsey at Square — seems “99 percent” ready to move into a more formal investing role.

Of course, there is still that one percent chance he might not, underscored by the eternal lure of the hot startup for serial entrepreneurs like Rabois. That said, he has also been an active angel investors for many years, with a wide-ranging portfolio, and is on many boards, including Yelp’s.

The choice of two very attractive alternatives is in stark contrast to the more tense situation for Rabois just a month ago, after accusations of sexual harassment arose related to a relationship he had with a Square employee.

Rabois has denied the allegations aimed at him and at the San Francisco payments company, which have not yet turned into a lawsuit, and has thus far been backed by Square. Rabois called the accusations by the employee “fiction” and a “shakedown.”

That said, due to the controversy around the serious workplace issue, he stepped down from his job as COO.

“At the end of the day, this is personally embarrassing to me, because when anyone’s life is exposed to a public forum, it creates quite a damaging situation,” said Rabois at the time in an interview with me. “As we looked at it, it was going to become a distraction that was going to hurt the company.”

The venture arm of the world’s biggest chip company joins other investors — including Goldman Sachs, Index Ventures, Khosla Ventures and Redpoint Ventures — and brings the total amount of capital raised to $45 million.

Remember, software-defined networking (SDN) aims to do to networking gear what virtualization companies like VMware have done to servers. In the same way that one server can be virtualized into many, all with different configurations, the point of SDN is to make networks as easy to spin up, configure and expand as virtual servers in the cloud, all of it done via software. VMware, for its part, is in the game via its purchase last year of Nicira, the first SDN company I ever heard of.

The idea is considered a metaphysical threat to established networking companies, specifically Cisco Systems; analysts, specifically J.P. Morgan’s Rod Hall, have worried that Cisco isn’t ready to meet the threat.

I had a quick chat with Guido Appenzeller (that’s him in the photo above, at the left of president and co-founder Kyle Forster), and he said that Intel, which does make some specialized networking chips, sees some alignment of interest with Big Switch in the future of SDN.

As I noted before, Big Switch’s approach has a lot of industry support. Its partners include Juniper Networks, Citrix, F5, Dell, Microsoft and Palo Alto Networks.

Toney is one of the many Zynga employees who have left the games company over the past few months. In October, he stepped down after working there for three years, most of that time as the general manager of Zynga Poker.

“It’s hard to imagine being at a big company now, like Zynga, now that I’m at a small company,” said Toney, after only five weeks on the job. “But that’s why I chose to leave. I wanted to join a company I could lead, and take it to the next level.”

LearnStreet was founded a little over a year ago by Vinod Khosla, a venture capitalist who saw an opportunity to create an easy way to create online courses. Other education companies have also sprouted up around it, including Codecademy, Khan Academy and Coursera.

LearnStreet claims to teach someone the basics of three programing languages (JavaScript, Python and Ruby) with no development background needed.

Toney said it reminds him of his college years, when he bought himself an HTML programming book and taught himself how to make websites (despite the fact that he was studying business). LearnStreet is the online version of buying a book, and can be used by a student studying computer science, or by a teenager or adult looking for job skills.

While Toney’s most recent experience is based in gaming, he said there’s a number of overlaps between Zynga and the new company.

First, running the Poker division is like “having your own startup,” he said. As the general manager, he was in charge of managing an entire team and budget.  The other similarity is that he plans on LearnStreet having a freemium business model, where customers get some of the course work for free and then pay for additional help — sort of like free-to-play games.

“What we’ve done and discovered is we are beginning to pick up on pain points and friction points, where people are willing to pull out their credit card and pay for additional help,” Toney said.

So far, the company has raised $1 million from Khosla Ventures; now, with Toney on board, he said it plans to raise additional funding soon.

Prior to Zynga, Toney held positions at Nike and eBay. At Nike, he was the Global General Manager for Nike.com, working on the company’s e-commerce strategy; at eBay, he was director and general manager of the company’s collectibles business.

The companies haven’t disclosed terms, but my understanding is that GoMiso’s investors, who include Khosla Ventures, Google Ventures and Hearst Interactive Media, won’t see all of the $5.5 million they put into the company.

And this isn’t an “acqhire,” because Dijit hasn’t said they’re bringing any of the Miso team on board. They will, however, make GoMiso founder Somrat Niyogi an adviser.

While they’re not shutting Miso down, Dijit seems primarily interested in the service’s IP and technology, not its user base. In other words: Dijit seems to view Miso’s check-in service as a feature, not a company.

My hunch is we’re going to see that thinking play out elsewhere, and that the services that get the most check-in activity will be the services that get the most activity, period.

Twitter, most prominently, has worked very hard to align itself with TV networks and TV watchers. But there are probably more people talking about TV on Facebook at any given time than anywhere else. That’s the kind of thing that happens when you have a billion users.

Keith Teare

Just.me has been in development for two years now, and starting today it will be released in small batches to the thousands of people who have signed up to try the beta. But because anyone who receives a Just.me message from someone using the product can download the app (for iPhone now and Android in the coming months), the beta process will be mostly out of the company’s control.

Well-connected Just.me founder Keith Teare previously helped found companies like TechCrunch and RealNames, and he has raised $2.75 million for Just.me from Khosla Ventures, Google Ventures, True Ventures, Betaworks, SV Angel, CrunchFund and others.

The basic notion of Just.me is that users can send photos and messages to whomever they choose: 1) only themselves, 2) address book recipients, or 3) lots of people via Twitter or Facebook or the public Just.me feed.

Instead of creating its own centralized social network, Just.me is riding on top of users’ existing phone address book and email contacts.

“We think the center of gravity about choice in sharing is moving to the individual,” Teare explained today. “It’s not about the individual as an isolated atom; it’s about the center of gravity being an individual and their phone, not a cloud and a service.”

Just.me, of course, is indeed a service that connects all these messages, but it doesn’t necessarily control their end points. In a way, it’s kind of like the original Circles concept of Google+, but without a whole additional new social network that users have to manually configure.

My take? This could perhaps be a radical re-imagining of how we communicate, but it will also be just another ambitious app that many people will ignore and be totally fine without.

Teare cautioned that because Just.me includes so many features, “there will inevitably be bugs” during beta testing.

One thing Teare thinks he does have figured out is how Just.me will make money. Users will be able to choose to add participating brands to their contacts, in order to be alerted to various offers. So it’s sort of like a Twitter follow, except brands and users will be able to more directly communicate back and forth. Teare’s team has filed for a patent on this idea.

Late last year, it landed a significant round of venture capital funding, a $25 million Series C led by Sequoia Capital. Prior investors Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, Khosla Ventures and Floodgate all participated, too. The round nudged Okta’s total capital raised to north of $52 million.

The funding announcement was accompanied by a larger vision statement about what Okta aims to achieve. In that statement, CEO Todd McKinnon argued that “identity is central to how work gets done in a business,” meaning that Okta aims to be a lot more than the company that makes it easy to manage account credentials.

I recently had a chance to catch up with McKinnon in New York to talk about what he meant by that, and to flesh out what he sees happening at Okta in the coming year.

AllThingsD: You’ve just landed a big C round investment, but it coincided with the publication of a big vision statement. What is the vision statement all about?

McKinnon: I think people misunderstand a lot of things about our company. The first thing they think is that we’re just for cloud stuff. And CIOs and other people thinking about building the next generation of their IT environment don’t want two identity systems. They don’t want the old that barely worked, and the new one that doesn’t talk to the old one. They want one. And we’re positioned to build that. We’re trying to be more aggressive at communicating that.

Initially, everyone understood the identity layer to be a simple manner of managing all the credentials for using cloud services. Now you’re reaching into more on-premise products. How much of a pivot is that for you?

The vision has always been about a single identity layer for everything. The reality is that we started as a little cloud company; the most receptive buyers were companies doing a lot of cloud stuff. So that was how we communicated about ourselves to the marketplace. And now the product has matured to a point where we can really communicate about the vision, about a unified way of managing identity.

Give me some sense of momentum. Funding is certainly an indirect indicator, but what else is going on?

We have, in the last year, added 140 enterprise customers, which brings us to more than 200. We’ve added 300,000 end users. Those are paid enterprise-user seats, which means there’s real money behind them, and that has brought our total user footprint to 500,000.

The obvious thing that people start wondering about a company like yours is when you might be ripe for acquisition, or if you’re going to go the distance. I can think of a handful of cloud and software companies, like Salesforce.com or Oracle or IBM, that could be logical buyers. What are your thoughts about this?

We’re building the identity layer for the next generation of corporate IT. Everyone is going to want to do something like this. You saw Saleforce’s announcement that they want to do this, too. This is clearly something strategic. The value of our product comes from it being in the hands of a neutral party. Our customers want Switzerland; they don’t want someone like, say, a Salesforce.com or a Google, because it would be beholden to their own apps.

I’m reminded that David Sacks, the CEO at Yammer, used to say something similar about being Switzerland when asked about being acquired. Look what happened there: Yammer is now part of Microsoft. Couldn’t the same thing happen to you? And what would it mean if it did?

It’s different for us. If you never connected Yammer to anything, it could be valuable. If any one of our integration partners, say, Jive or Box, or any one of those companies cuts us off, the value of the product goes down. So it’s different in that regard. The Yammer platform is still valuable with no integrations. Our platform is not. So I think that’s a big difference. It gets back to the funding. We’re venture-backed. At the end of the day, I have a responsibility to my shareholders, and we have to build enough momentum in the company to have the outcome of not being acquired, to be superior in the minds of my shareholders than the outcome of being acquired. Clearly at Yammer, they couldn’t do that.

Now you jumped ahead to my next question. Salesforce’s Marc Benioff announced a plan to create a competitor to Okta, and we talked about it at the time. How far, to the extent that you’re aware, has that effort come along? Are you worried about it?

Anytime a big company announces they want to compete with you, you should be worried. They said they’re going to build a product, and that’s definitely going to be a competitive threat. The reality is that Salesforce is doing a lot of things, and they’re spread very thinly. I don’t think they’re going to make the kind of investment necessary.

What will you do with the money?

The big thing is to build out the product. Right now, it’s robust, scalable, used by tons of customers live. But there’s a lot of work to do on it. We have 2,000 connectors to different applications and services, but there’s more than 2,000 of those. We need 20,000 connectors and then we need 50,000. We need to really expand that number and connect to everything. Every device, every application, every platform. So we’re going to use the money to build the product in that way. If a customer has an application that’s built by some regional provider, with maybe 50 customers in some niche business, to a customer in a certain vertical, that application is very important. They don’t want to have some kind of one-off situation where they can sign in to everything they use, but not this one thing. And it’s not economical for us to go out and build the connector ourselves. So we need to have a platform where someone can go and build the connector themselves and share it with anyone who might need it. The thing about our platform, because it’s based in the cloud, is that it can be maintained and supported over time. There’s also some exciting things we can do with helping companies collaborate with each other. So if two companies are using Okta, they can connect their systems across firewalls more easily. That’s the identity network we’ve been talking about.

In yet another instance of a Silicon Valley venture firm bringing in big government guns to class up the place, Khosla Ventures said that it had signed the international consulting firm run by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to “bring global and domestic insight to Khosla’s portfolio companies, helping them achieve their strategic goals in industries such as technology, energy, security and healthcare.”

In other words, strategery plus!

That will presumably be provided by Rice and her partners at RiceHadleyGates, which has offices in Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C., in an undisclosed financial arrangement with Khosla. RiceHadleyGates also includes former National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and former State Department official Anja Manuel.

In an interview yesterday, Manuel said that the goal was to help in areas that VCs might not be as familiar with, from Internet freedom laws in India to the challenges of moving into emerging markets.

“There are a lot of policy issues that entrepreneurs will be facing and we will try to be helpful as they sort through them,” she said. “We love working with innovative companies and want to make their global experience better.”

Khosla partner Samir Kaul said the firm was still figuring out how they will work together, but that Rice’s team would serve as “strategic advisers on an as needed basis.”

“What [RiceHadleyGates] does fits in very well with a lot of our themes as investors in energy and security, for example,” said Kaul. “We want to offer the companies we invest in as much help as possible and this is a real win in that regard.”

It’s certainly a high-profile move, although Khosla has done this before, signing former British Prime Minister Tony Blair on as a strategic adviser in 2010.

In addition, Andreessen Horowitz brought in former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, as well as former D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty, to lend its portfolio companies additional expertise.

Rice’s firm certainly has a lot of that, especially related to thorny international issues. Rice, who was once the provost at Stanford University, was also the National Security Adviser in the administration of former President George W. Bush, before moving to the State Department.

Since then, there have been other moves around virtual (software-defined) networks. Oracle nabbed Xsigo Systems, another virtual networking player. A start-up called Plumgrid landed $10.7 million in funding. Then, networking giant Cisco Systems — which notably reports quarterly earnings today — started insisting that, after a couple of decades of selling gear for networks that are fundamentally defined by their hardware, it has considerable expertise in software-defined networking, too. We’ll see.

Anyway, there’s now a new player to keep track of, and its name is Big Switch Networks. It comes out of stealth mode today, and it is also launching a general-release product with an army of partners and $37 million in combined funding from investors including Redpoint Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Index Ventures and Goldman Sachs.

Yesterday, I talked with CEO and founder Guido Appenzeller (that’s him in the photo above, at the left of president and co-founder Kyle Forster) about what Big Switch plans to do. Essentially, it is software-defined networking writ larger than other players have sought to do. Specifically, Appenzeller says, Nicira aims to bring make networks programmable in software, but really only the data center. It is what he calls a “narrow stovepipe approach” that doesn’t take into account the larger opportunity. “It’s a single application without any open architecture support for other vendors, and there’s no support for anything other than the virtual switch that they have built. They’ve done a good job with what they’ve built, but customers want a platform; they want an open architecture that supports multiple vendors and devices, and which supports the deployment of many applications.”

Appenzeller has a strong background in OpenFlow, an open standard that allows software to determine how data is handled on a network. He was on the team at Stanford University’s Clean Slate Lab, and he led the research team that developed the OpenFlow standard.

The basic idea behind SDN is that networking environments should be as programmable as other parts of the IT infrastructure. Networks have grown incredibly complex to manage and, more often than not, when more flexibility or capacity is needed, the answer is to buy more hardware. The more you can customize a network in software, the less hardware you have to buy. SDN is also a departure from the way networking gear has generally been run before: Up to now, they have not been open for programmers to tinker with.

Big Switch’s approach has a lot of industry support. Its numerous partners include some pretty big names: Juniper Networks, Citrix, F5, Dell, Microsoft and Palo Alto Networks are but a few. One key name is not among them: Cisco Systems.

While Cisco does support OpenFlow, it has been slow to get serious about it, Appenzeller says. “Cisco has been timid in the SDN space. It has announced OpenFlow support on some of its switches, but right now it doesn’t have the API support to configure existing functionality on the switch, not to create new applications that run on it.”

Yet Big Switch doesn’t see Cisco as a competitor: It doesn’t sell routers and switches. “We would wholeheartedly embrace Cisco if and when it supports a data-abstraction layer like OpenFlow, but right now it doesn’t,” says Big Switch marketing VP Jason Matlof.

To be sure, Cisco has been trying to get ahead of the marketplace chatter around SDN for awhile. For one thing, it poured $100 million into an SDN-focused start-up called Insieme Networks. But it has argued that OpenFlow is just one approach to SDN. It has offered its own API kit, called the Cisco One Platform Kit, to work with Cisco gear.

It’s too soon to tell if SDN technology represents a fundamental competitive threat to Cisco, which has for so long thrived by selling proprietary networking gear. In a research note to clients dated Nov. 9, analyst Paul Silverstein of UBS Credit Suisse called SDN technology a “long term competitive threat to Cisco in the data center switching market,” and noted that data center switching amounts to about 10 percent of Cisco’s sales. Silverstein also noted that a large number of companies had partnered with Big Switch. He went on to write that, in the eyes of some industry sources he consulted, Cisco’s SDN approach is looking “increasingly cogent.”

Brian Marshall, an analyst with ISI, said in a short note today that, while SDN is promising, the threat to Cisco and established players is still off on the horizon. “Big Switch and Nicira have emerged as the early leaders in SDN with commercially viable solutions. We believe SDN momentum is solid and will create a longer-term headwind to traditional networking vendors, but do not expect a significant impact to financial models over the next 12-18 months.”

Whatever threat it may or may not represent to established players like Cisco, it’s clear that Big Switch sees the network as having reached a point similar to where smartphones were in, say, early 2007, when the iPhone and Android burst onto the scene and made creating smartphone apps so easy. “The point is to make networking a peer of the open computing environment, just like computing, just like the mobile world,” Matlof said. “Look back five years at what you could and couldn’t do with a smartphone, and what you can do now.”

A similar transformation is coming to networks that will make them a lot more flexible and customizable, and will allow companies to build their own custom applications to manage their networks in ways not possible before. “Those companies that are committed to open architectures will be our partners,” Appenzeller says. “Those that aren’t, won’t.”

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is considering joining the board of Jawbone, the high-profile wireless gadget maker whose products include the Jambox speaker and the Up personal fitness wristband, according to sources close to the situation.

Mayer has been talking to the San Francisco-based company about becoming a director since before she become the top exec at the Silicon Valley Internet giant.

While the discussions of her becoming a director are in the late stages, sources cautioned it was not yet a done deal and that it still might not happen for a number of reasons.

That said, the move is an interesting one for Mayer and Jawbone.

The former Google exec is well known for her product chops and also her deep interest in tony aesthetics and high-level design — qualities that Jawbone is well known for.

And the addition of Mayer to the board of Jawbone would add someone with experience in scaling businesses from small to large as well as deeper technical expertise.

Mayer has been an active angel investor in start-ups and currently is on the board of Walmart Stores and is also on board of several cultural institutions in San Francisco and New York.

Jawbone has raised about $210 million in funding from such venture firms as Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital, as well as Deutsche Telekom, investor Yuri Milner and others.

One interesting note: Mayer and Jawbone CEO and founder Hosain Rahman attended Stanford University at the same time and have remained close friends since then.

Jawbone declined to comment and Mayer never calls me back, although I am still waiting by the phone — wearing my denim Jawbone Icon HD wireless headset, natch — in the vain hope that she might.

The company, which over the summer landed an impressive $20 million Series A round of venture capital funding from Index Ventures and Khosla Ventures, has started to ratchet up its hiring. Sometime today, it will announce that it has hired Michael Knappe, an early pioneer in the voice-over-Internet-protocol industry and a founding member of the VoIP Forum Industry Consortium. Knappe’s title will be director of engineering.

Michael Knappe

Over that time, he was deeply involved in the VoIP Industry Forum, one of those industry-standards-setting efforts that is so often helpful in making a new technology mainstream. By the time of its peak in 1997, companies as varied as Microsoft, Intel and Cisco were all participating members, and now VoIP is indeed mainstream.

The company is certainly moving along. FuzeBox powers 60,000 hours of audio conferences every month, but more impressively, it handles 78,000 online meetings everyday. Its customers include Amazon, CBS, Thomson Reuters and Verizon Wireless — which also resells FuzeBox to its business customers.

The company’s first product is built for lettuce crops. Blue River analyzed nearly one million photographs of lettuce to learn how to recognize the plant. Its prototype device has both a camera and a killing mechanism three inches behind. So when the camera recognizes a plant that’s not supposed to be in a lettuce field, a mechanical knife cuts it out or herbicide sprays down. The idea is that it’s very precise, so it’s cost-effective and minimizes the use of herbicides.

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Blue River has just raised $3.1 million in Series A funding led by Khosla Ventures, which also invested in other agriculture tech start-ups such as The Climate Corporation.

Other Blue River backers include Steve Blank and Ulu Ventures.

Mojgan Khalili

Another prominent venture firm has stepped up in the marketing arena and hired well-regarded former Yahoo communications exec Mojgan Khalili as an operating partner.

In an interview yesterday, Vinod Khosla said that the move was part of the Silicon Valley firm’s motto of “venture assistance.”

Like many top VCs these days, Khosla said that helping build the start-ups it invests in is a key part of its offering. It already has partners specializing in recruiting and finance.

“We are building an operating organization and communications is an important part of that to help the companies we invest in,” said Khosla. “Obviously, other firms are using this function to promote themselves, but as a fund we don’t need more publicity.”

Khosla noted that Khalili’s job would be almost entirely focused on helping start-ups. But the latter part of that quote was referencing the boom in comms hiring by prominent VC firms — such as Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital — some of which are getting a lot of press attention, too.

Khosla acknowledged the importance of good marketing — even some entrepreneurs, such as Square’s Jack Dorsey, are PR naturals.

“He is someone who does press well,” he said. “But 90 percent of start-ups need help to do this function, which is increasingly critical.”

Khalili is a longtime comms exec, who most recently headed product issues at Yahoo, working with top execs there.

“Working with great partners at Khosla Ventures and assisting awesome companies in so many different industries like, tech, big data, health, food and energy makes this opportunity perfect,” she said. “I am really excited to dig in.”

On-the-job personal productivity start-up tenXer has raised $3 million in a Series B round, which it said it will use to accelerate growth outside its software industry market.

The San Francisco company, which was founded by longtime entrepreneur Jeff Ma, makes tools to allow a user or perhaps a company, track performance and progress using a number of different metrics. The presumable goal is to use social and gaming elements, along with this activity data, to help you do your job 10 times better.

Get it with the tenXer name now?

The new funding is led by True Ventures, and its partner, Puneet Agarwal, will join tenXer’s board of directors.

Radar Partners and Khosla Ventures, as well as angel investors, participated in the new round, for what the company describes as a “human capital management platform.”

Currently aimed at tracking the work of software engineers, tenXer integrates current tools such as GitHub, Pivotal Tracker and Jira.

Here’s a video interview with Ma — who gained fame for his gambling prowess as part of the MIT blackjack team, and also was one of the co-founders of Citizen Sports, which was bought by Yahoo in 2010 — about the new round, and also about where tenXer is headed next:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120828/jeff-ma-talks-about-tenxer-raising-3-million-more-to-help-you-judge-yourself-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120823/small-business-finance-platform-on-deck-raises-100-million/ http://allthingsd.com/20120823/small-business-finance-platform-on-deck-raises-100-million/#comments Thu, 23 Aug 2012 16:36:10 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=244372
It’s an election year, which means that as the political campaigns get under way in earnest after Labor Day and the party conventions begin, we’ll be hearing a lot about small business and Main Street and the relative state of their economic health.

Intuition and the general state of the economy would tell you that small businesses are still challenged, some would say by over-active government policy; others would say by a lack of access to capital. Small businesses have, in recent years, had a hard time getting banks to finance loans, mainly because banks look at small business loans as more akin to personal loans, and thus consider the owner’s personal credit information rather than the state of the business itself.

Last year, I wrote bit about a start-up intending to change that. On Deck Capital created a technology platform aimed at making it easier for lending banks to gather the data they need to properly vet a loan candidate, and for helping that business make payments.

On Deck today announced that it has raised nearly $100 million in new funding. The funding is being led by Goldman Sachs and Fortress Credit Corp., which have committed an $80 million debt facility. Meanwhile, SF Capital and Lighthouse Capital Partners have put in $17 million in venture debt loans. The capital is giving On Deck more capacity to make loans, and demand has been healthy. The company delivered more than $100 million in loan volume over the last 10 months.

Prior investors include SAP Capital, Contour Venture Partners in New York, First Round Capital, Khosla Ventures, RRE Ventures and Village Ventures.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120823/small-business-finance-platform-on-deck-raises-100-million/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120730/oracle-acquires-virtual-networking-concern-xsigo-systems/ http://allthingsd.com/20120730/oracle-acquires-virtual-networking-concern-xsigo-systems/#comments Mon, 30 Jul 2012 13:08:32 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=235362 If you needed any further validation that virtualized networks are totally going to be the next big thing, look no further than Oracle’s acquisition of Xsigo Systems, announced this morning. Xsigo is a small company, so the financial terms aren’t being disclosed.

You can’t help but look to VMware’s $1.3 billion buyout of Nicira last week to realize that any company with any piece of the network visualization puzzle is probably going to get bought in the coming weeks and months.

Nicira had been a pretty secretive start-up, with a reputation for hiring wicked-smart networking engineers, until it came out of stealth in February and disclosed what it was working on. Suddenly, people looked at their networks and all the expensive gear they’d been buying from Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks, and slapped their heads.

A world where networks are simpler to operate and as flexible to manage as a cloud application in a data center is coming, and the prospect of its implication is something that makes executives at certain kinds of companies start speaking in hushed tones.

Xsigo had been backed by venture capital investments from Kleiner Perkins, Khosla Ventures, Greylock, North Bridge and Advanced Equities.

Oracle shares are trading down in premarket action by 17 cents to $30.60, or about one-half of 1 percent.

Analyst Brian Marshall of ISI just weighed in with some thoughts in a quick note to clients. He notes that Xsigo counts companies like Salesforce.com, Accenture, Verizon, eBay and Qwest as customers, and that it already has a history of working with Oracle.

Oracle, Marshall says, basically wants Xsigo to enhance its engineered systems, the so-called Exa-systems (Exadata, Exalogic and Exalytics) that president Mark Hurd talked about in detail in an interview with AllThingsD last month.

Marshall then goes on to speculate that Oracle may need a stronger offering on the storage and networking front, and wonders out loud if it might step up and try to acquire storage concern NetApp, or networking outfits Brocade, Foundry or Arista to close those gaps and become more of a full-service enterprise IT vendor.

Here’s Oracle’s original announcement:

Oracle Buys Xsigo

Extends Oracle’s Virtualization Capabilities with Leading Software-Defined Networking Technology for Cloud Environments

Redwood Shores, CA – July 30, 2012

News Facts

· Oracle today announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Xsigo Systems, a leading provider of network virtualization technology.

· Xsigo’s software-defined networking technology simplifies cloud infrastructure and operations by allowing customers to dynamically and flexibly connect any server to any network and storage, resulting in increased asset utilization and application performance while reducing cost.

· The company’s products have been deployed at hundreds of enterprise customers including British Telecom, eBay, Softbank and Verizon.

· The combination of Xsigo for network virtualization and Oracle VM for server virtualization is expected to deliver a complete set of virtualization capabilities for cloud environments.

Terms of the agreement were not disclosed. More information on this announcement can be found at oracle.com/xsigo.

Supporting Quotes

· “The proliferation of virtualized servers in the last few years has made the virtualization of the supporting network connections essential,” said John Fowler, Oracle Executive Vice President of Systems. “With Xsigo, customers can reduce the complexity and simplify management of their clouds by delivering compute, storage and network resources that can be dynamically reallocated on-demand.”

· “Customers are focused on reducing costs and improving utilization of their network,” said Lloyd Carney, Xsigo CEO. “Virtualization of these resources allows customers to scale compute and storage for their public and private clouds while matching network capacity as demand dictates.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120730/oracle-acquires-virtual-networking-concern-xsigo-systems/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120712/fuzebox-super-collaboration-in-the-cloud-lands-20m-from-index-and-khosla-ventures/ http://allthingsd.com/20120712/fuzebox-super-collaboration-in-the-cloud-lands-20m-from-index-and-khosla-ventures/#comments Thu, 12 Jul 2012 16:26:25 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=229586 Rare is the occasion that a company I agree to meet with can hold my attention with a product demo for more than half an hour. It happened the other day in a meeting with FuzeBox.

I could tell you that the company does real-time collaboration; meetings, complete with video and the ability to share what’s on the a computer screen; that the technology is both incredibly flexible and incredibly robust; and that the meeting doesn’t crash even if the host loses connectivity (which, oddly enough, happened during the demo). I could tell you that it works on iPhones and iPads.

And yes, you’d probably say you’ve heard all this before. Cisco Systems has WebEx and Citrix has GoToMeeting and, frankly, I spend far too much time attending virtual meetings on those platforms, which haven’t evolved or improved in any meaningful way since, well, since ever.

But you don’t have to believe me: Perhaps you’ll think I’m on to something when I tell you that Index Ventures and Khosla Ventures have just teamed up to make a $20 million Series A investment in FuzeBox. Mike Volpi, a partner at Index, is joining the FuzeBox board of directors.

Jeff Cavins, FuzeBox CEO, kept me interested in the demonstration well past the point at which I usually tell companies to wrap it up. We watched some HD video footage together, and at one point he gave me control of the video — he was in his office in Silicon Valley, and I was in my apartment in New York, so that I could scroll back and forth to different points in the footage, as if we were talking about edits we’d like to make. No herky-jerky waiting for the video to catch up, just smooth scrolling back and forth.

FuzeBox’s secret appears to be the ability to adapt on the fly to the bandwidth conditions of the people using it. You might be on an iPhone, with just a 3G network handy. Or you might be at the office, on the super-fast corporate LAN, or on the Wi-Fi network at home.

Its customers include Amazon, CBS, Verizon Wireless — which also resells FuzeBox to its business customers — and Thomson Reuters. FuzeBox is used to run 78,000 remote meetings per day and has been used in 122 countries.

Basically, if virtual meetings were more like FuzeBox, I wouldn’t hate them nearly as much as I do. That tells me that the established players need to have their worlds rocked by new, cooler, more capable competitors. Watch out, WebEx and GoToMeeting: FuzeBox is coming.

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