In a key hire, Jawbone said today that it had hired Mindy Mount, a top corporate VP at Microsoft, as its president.

The move by the San Francisco-based maker of wireless, music and wearable devices is part of what has been a major upgrading of its management and board. Recently, Jawbone added Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and Rob Wiesenthal of Warner Music as directors.

Jawbone has also recently done a big acquisition — purchasing BodyMedia, a wearable health and fitness company, for $100 million. The move comes just a couple months after it bought data and digital-design companies Massive Health and Visere.

All this expansion requires tight organizational efforts and Mount has a lot of financial and operational experience, having held several key jobs at the software giant. She was most recently corporate VP and CFO at Microsoft’s Online Services Division, which includes Bing, MSN and Microsoft Advertising. Before that she held a similar job at the Entertainment and Devices Division, which has the Xbox, Zune and Windows Phone units.

Previous to that, Mount ran AOL’s U.K. unit, worked in strategy at Time Warner and also was an exec at Morgan Stanley. She has an MBA from the Harvard Graduate School of Business and an undergraduate degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

In an interview today, Mount said that what attracted her to Jawbone was the challenge of scaling the fast-growth company, which is helmed by CEO and co-founder Hosain Rahman.

“Right out of the block, I’ll be spending time on business operations, since the scale and scope and complexity of Jawbone has really increased,” she said. “What really attracted me to the role is that it is a really meaty one … It’s a company with great products, where I can come in and have real impact, because consumer electronics companies really have to execute.”

Jawbone products include Jawbone wireless headsets, Jambox speakers and the Up personal fitness wristbands. The company has raised a lot of funding, totaling about $210 million from such venture firms as Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital, as well as Deutsche Telekom, investor Yuri Milner and others.

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.

“Recommendations are an ancient thing; it’s different than reviews,” Stoll said in a recent interview at the headquarters of his startup, Luvocracy. “It’s part of the way we think. It’s someone you know and trust saying: ‘Go get that.’”

Luvocracy CEO Nathan Stoll

For his grandmother, selling cosmetics door to door was never about the money, Stoll said. It was about the satisfaction of knowing that her recommendations worked.

Even though there are lots of websites for finding pretty pictures of products people like — Pinterest, Wanelo, Houzz, Fancy, OpenSky — Stoll thinks he has arrived at a new angle on social shopping.

The invite-only site, which Stoll created with Beauty.com co-founder Roger Barnett, aims to create a marketplace around recommendations. It “closes the loop” on social recommendations by making everything on the site directly purchasable, Stoll said. New items are personally vetted by a team of “shopping assistants.”

Here’s how it works: A Luvocracy member recommends a product. Then shopping assistants find the best price and availability for the product and publish it on the site. Other users, who are following the person or the category, find the product and buy it. The original recommender gets a cut.

Eighteen-month-old Luvocracy is actually more established than you might think. Stoll previously co-founded the social search service Aardvark, whose acquisition by Google brought him back for a short second stint there, after he was an early employee who worked on products like Google News.

Today, Luvocracy employs some 25 people in downtown San Francisco. It has been written up in fashion magazines. It hired Christine Martinez — one of the most popular Pinterest users, with 5.5 million followers — to recruit a community of early users. It raised venture capital funding. (Stoll wouldn’t disclose the details, but sources said Bing Gordon from Kleiner Perkins led the company’s Series A round and sits on its board.)

Still, most companies that do social shopping and recommendations can tend to be kind of gross. They pollute your Twitter feed with junky celebrity endorsements, and take way too much advantage of whatever Facebook permissions you give them.

While Luvocracy doesn’t seem to be up to those usual tricks, the site is not shy about the social stuff. For instance, the default setting is that any time someone visits the page for a product you recommend, you immediately receive email asking you to elaborate on why you love it.

Christine Martinez’s recommendation of pencils with quotes from the movie “Mean Girls” has been one of the more popular Luvocracy items to date.

But the key features are ensuring that everything is buyable, and rewarding people for the value they create, said Stoll. “What we’re trying to build isn’t just a shopping site; it’s an economy,” he said, just a little grandly.

Luvocracy is not set up as a get-rich-quick scheme, but rather a way for people to feel their taste is validated, Stoll noted.

Active “tastemakers” who are chosen by Luvocracy can expect to earn up to 10 percent of purchases. Everyday users can earn up to 4 percent.

Martinez added that she likes that active Luvocracy users get to create a sort of static living store of everything they’ve ever recommended. She also argued that recommendations also tend to be high-quality, because Luvocracy users can choose from any product that’s sold on the Internet, rather than just a set catalog based on affiliate relationships.

I’ve ordered one thing from Luvocracy so far: A clothes-cleaning gadget recommended by a friend who was also trying the service. At first, I was disappointed to see that the Luvocracy checkout process slapped on an $8 shipping charge. Plus, no product showed up at my door for at least week. Then I got an email apologizing that the product was backordered. I was ready to blow Luvocracy off as a prelaunch startup that needed to work out the kinks, badly.

But then it got much better. A follow-up email arrived saying Luvocracy had found the same gadget in stock in Japan. This version had Japanese text on the packaging, but a shopping assistant had checked to make sure it was compatible in the U.S. And I would get a significant savings from the Japanese store — nearly half off. So Luvocracy was sending me a refund.

I don’t have my purchase in hand yet, but I gotta admit that’s not a bad first experience.

Sources familiar with the negotiations tell AllThingsD that HP CEO Meg Whitman wants out of the $47 million, 15-year naming rights deal, which is scheduled to end in 2016. The move is part of a global reevaluation by HP of its marketing efforts and sponsorships. The change could be announced as early as this summer, in time for the 2013-14 hockey season.

Software giant SAP is said to be interested in taking over the naming rights. Its founder, former co-CEO and chairman of its supervisory board, Hasso Plattner, is the majority owner of the Sharks. Plattner, who ranks at No. 122 on the Forbes magazine list of global billionaires, with a net worth of $8.9 billion, recently bought out two other co-owners, the longtime Kleiner Perkins venture capitalist Kevin Compton, and former VeriSign CEO Stratton Sclavos. Following that deal, Plattner’s stake in the team is said to be in the neighborhood of 90 percent.

HP spokesman Michael Thacker declined to comment, as did SAP spokesman James Dever.

A change in the arena’s naming rights would have to be approved by the San Jose city council. Michelle McGurk, a spokeswoman for San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed, had no immediate comment. Update, 4:50 PM PDT: I just received a statement from McGurk. See it below.

Scott Emmert, a spokesman for the San Jose Sharks, didn’t immediately return messages seeking a comment.

According to people familiar with the discussions, Plattner raised the issue of HP’s naming rights with Whitman directly during a routine meeting. HP is a significant SAP customer. Asked if HP intended to hold on to its naming rights through 2016 as the current agreement states, Whitman said, “Frankly, I’d like to get out of it.”

HP inherited the naming rights from Compaq, the computer company it acquired in 2002 for $25 billion. At the time, San Jose’s arena was known as The Compaq Center at San Jose. It has been known as the HP Pavilion at San Jose since late 2002. The rights are said to cost HP about $3.1 million a year.

As annual expenditures go, $3.1 million is pocket change for HP. While it doesn’t disclose marketing expenditures directly, those expenses fall under the “selling, general and administrative” (SG&A) line item on HP’s income statement, which in fiscal 2012 was $13.5 billion.

Still, since Whitman took over as CEO in 2011, marketing functions that had previously been run by HP’s disparate business units — the PC unit, the printer unit and so on — have been centralized under Chief Marketing Officer Marty Homlish.

Over the years, HP has become involved with hundreds, if not thousands, of events and programs that it sponsors as a way of raising the visibility of the HP brand. Those programs and sponsorships are now in the process of being systematically reevaluated, and many are being canceled outright.

The HP Pavilion name was given to the arena to align with the company’s main PC brand, known as Pavilion. But with personal computer sales in rapid decline, attaching the brand name to a sporting facility is no longer seen as an effective use of marketing dollars, people familiar with HP’s thinking say. Money saved from canceled marketing efforts is being redirected into either new marketing efforts or into HP’s research and development budget.

HP will still have access to the arena and to San Jose Sharks games. Sources say the company intends to hold on to a single luxury box it owns to entertain customers. Oddly enough, the naming rights for the luxury suites belong to another tech company: They’re currently known as Citrix Suites.

Informally known as the Shark Tank, the arena seats 17,562 for hockey games, and more than 19,000 for concerts. It hosts as many as 190 events a year, including the SAP Open, a men’s tennis tournament. It was briefly the home court of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors during a period when the Oakland Coliseum was under reconstruction.

Update: Here’s the statement I just got from Michelle McGurk, a spokeswoman for San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed:

“We’ve enjoyed a long and productive partnership with both the Sharks and HP, and we greatly appreciate their long-standing and valuable commitment to our community.

“The current agreement is scheduled to end in 2016, so we would be starting a process in the coming year or so to explore contract alternatives in the normal course of business.

“Because the Arena is an outstanding facility and Silicon Valley a unique location, we’re optimistic that we will be able to end up in position of mutual benefit for everyone, without speculating on any specific outcome.”

That’s making companies with new approaches to security pretty popular among venture capital and private equity investors. Today, one new firm, Endgame Systems, announced that it has landed a $23 million Series B investment led by Paladin Capital. Previous investors include Bessemer Venture Partners, Columbia Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers and TechOperators. Retired Lt. Gen. Kenneth A. Minihan, a managing director at Paladin and a former director of the super-secret National Security Agency, will join Endgame’s board.

Started in 2008, Endgame specializes in what it describes as providing real-time command-and-control capabilities, including analytics, visualization and knowledge discovery, all intended to enhance computer security efforts.

CEO Nathaniel Fick put it this way: “As Internet-connected devices become more pervasive in our lives, the barriers to entry are falling for malicious actors to have impact thanks to commoditized and easy-to-access tools,” he said. “The only way to be successful at cyber operations in a changing environment like that is to ingest massive amounts of data, analyze it in real-time and act.”

Endgame has been expanding in recent months. Fick joined as CEO late last year. Niloofar Howe joined as chief strategy officer. Matt Georgy, a former computer security officer with the Department of Defense and the Air Force before that, joined as CTO. Its chairman is Christopher Darby, the CEO of In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

The round brings Endgame’s total capital raised to $52 million, following a $29 million investment by Bessemer in 2010.

Sitting in front of a spectacular view of San Francisco at his home this afternoon, former Square COO Keith Rabois looks spent.

He is just recovering from a bout of pneumonia, which would be bad enough, but it’s clear from his tense and unusually — for him — disheveled appearance that the sexual harassment claim made by a current male employee at the San Francisco payments startup has taken its toll on the typically hard-charging exec who is not known for suffering fools.

But, now, given a judgement he made to continue in a personal and physical relationship with that unnamed junior staffer after he was hired at Square, Rabois feels both foolish and also angry.

“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. “As we looked at it, it was going to become a distraction that was going to hurt the company.”

It appears as if he wanted to stay — he shrugs when directly asked about it, though he will not say so explicitly. But, Rabois finally agreed with Square’s top management, including CEO and founder Jack Dorsey, that is was better that he leave.

“It was very clear once this outrageous demand was made, instead of building great products, it would be all about that,” he said.

That said, after an internal investigation, the company is backing him in the expected filing of a lawsuit from the employee, who has threatened a panoply of explosive allegations against him and the company that Rabois said again are a “fiction.”

He declined to show me any texts or emails between the two, but did recount the relationship in a blog post on Tumblr earlier today.

Richard Curiale, outside counsel for Square and also Rabois, said that the company had been approached about two weeks ago by New York lawyer Steven Berger, claiming the company knew of and did nothing to stop sexual harassment by Rabois and demanding a multi-million dollar settlement.

Curiale said he found no evidence in his investigation so far of anything except a “welcome” relationship that ended. He had even agreed to make Rabois available for a deposition with Berger, but the offer was refused.

I have an email into Berger for comment, which has thus far been unanswered. But Square has said it will fight any lawsuit filed and is currently supporting Rabois.

“I have not as yet found any conduct that is illegal and therefore there is no adverse relationship between Keith and Square,” said Curiale. “We don’t pay for claims that have no merit to them, because it amounts to extortion.”

Perhaps so, but it also amounts to a very juicy story — the second such major blowup in Silicon Valley in a year. The other — now a lawsuit alleging gender discrimination and retaliation, and a countersuit — between the well-known venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins, and former partner Ellen Pao, is ongoing.

The particulars of the Rabois situation, per his side of the story, which he claims is supported by much evidence, is of a social and physical relationship with a man he met several years ago.

While he would not call their relationship dating, it was close and personal, including taking this man out with him to social events.

The problem came when he recommended this man for a job at Square and he was hired. The company was much smaller then, about 30 people, but as it grew Rabois insists he had no direct oversight of the employee and also did not treat him differently from others he managed at the company.

Rabois claims he gave him advice, as he did other employees, but neither helped or hindered the man in his efforts to advance.

The man and Rabois were still seeing each other socially until December, when the relationship cooled.

And then came the lawsuit threat two weeks ago, which Rabois said “stunned” him.

Square says that it was not aware of the personal relationship until the threat of the lawsuit; the employee has never made any complaints about Rabois to management.

Spokesman Ricardo Reyes said that “what we have here at most is bad judgement and we will defend ourselves.”

In this Rabois agrees, as he fields emails of support from his wide range of friends and colleagues in tech, where he is well known as an entrepreneur and angel investor.

“I have several good ideas of what I want to do next,” he said.

“Something Ventured: Risk, Reward, and the Original Venture Capitalists” is a documentary that celebrates — pretty much without a lot of criticism — the very first venture capitalists who were behind the tech giants launching companies like Apple, Intel, Cisco, Atari and Genentech.

Starting in January, “Something Ventured” is being aired on public television stations nationwide.

The film — which premiered at SXSW last year — focuses on the key VCs, including investor Arthur Rock, Kleiner Perkins’ Tom Perkins, Sequoia Capital’s Don Valentine and New Enterprise Associate’s Dick Kramlich. It’s full of great stories from them and others, such as remembering the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs’s proclivity to not worry too much about showering.

And there are some tasty quotes, too:

Perkins: “I don’t know how to write a business plan. I can only tell you how we read them. We start at the back, and if the numbers are big, we look at the front to see what kind of business it is.”

Rock: “Steve Jobs is a national treasure. He is so visionary, and so bright. I had to fire him, though.”

Valentine: “I’m not interested in entrepreneurs who will do it our way. I’m not interested in entrepreneurs who think there’s a dress code. I’m interested in entrepreneurs who have a vision of doing something consequential –preferably that becomes big.”

And from Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, where Jobs once worked: “They (Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak) offered a third of Apple Computer for $50,000, and I said, ‘Gee, I don’t think so.’ I could have owned a third of Apple Computer for $50,000. Big mistake.”

Indeed.

Here’s the trailer.

Short-term, that means ads that run on phones are much cheaper than ads that run on PCs — often by as much as 80 percent.

That’s a well-documented challenge for the likes of Facebook and Zynga and even Google; the problem is just as real, if less-publicized, for other Web publishers.

If you are an Internet optimist, you have a ready answer for this problem: Advertisers will eventually catch up to their audience. If people are spending lots of time on their phones, marketers will follow the eyeballs.

That’s the gist of the argument Kleiner Perkins’ Mary Meeker made at our D10 conference earlier this year, when she unveiled her annual Internet Trends report.

Meeker updated her slides for a new presentation last night, but the key ad chart remains unchanged — she figures that between the desktop and mobile Web, there’s at least $20 billion in ad spending ready to move away from old media:

That’s a popular argument in the Internet world, for obvious reasons. But here’s the counter-argument, via a note Bernstein Research’s Todd Juenger published last month. The title spells it out quite clearly: “The Share of Time Versus Share of Ad Spend Fallacy.”

Juenger’s argument boils down to this: Yes, lots of people are spending lots of time on the Web, and now on their phones. But that doesn’t increase marketers’ desire to spend more money there — it just creates more advertising inventory, which might actually end up decreasing the total amount spent on those ads.

The money paragraph, such as it is:

We could actually make the argument that, because usage of Internet (especially mobile) continues to quickly grow, Internet ad spending (on an absolute level) should actually fall. If marketers are mainly are concerned with delivering a certain number of impressions, rather than a certain amount of spend, then everything else being equal, it would cost less to deliver the same number impressions next year than it did this year. Because in that scenario, supply is growing but demand is not. Or, perhaps marketers would look at the falling CPM’s and determine their preferred course might be to spend the same amount on Internet as last year, which would deliver X% more impressions. Getting, in that case, a lot more impressions for the same amount of dollars. The only way Internet ad spend grows is if marketers determine they want a lot more Internet impressions, causing them to spend more absolute dollars, at a lower/higher CPM (depending on which grows faster, demand or supply).

The easiest way to shrug off Juenger’s argument is to say that mobile Web ads are so nascent right now that no one has any idea what the market will look like, except that it has to get bigger, period. That’s probably right.

But we’ve seen plenty of evidence of Juenger’s argument in the desktop Web world. People keep spending more time there, but publishers have to keep slashing their rates to attract ad dollars. If the same scenario plays out on mobile, that gap might remain there for a long time.

(Photo courtesy of Shutterstock/Dominik Michalek)

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.

On Tuesday, Pao disclosed on Quora that she had been asked to leave Kleiner Perkins.

The VC firm responded that Pao had not been fired, but is instead “transitioning” out of her job.

What does that actually mean? What’s happening is that Kleiner Perkins asked Pao to cease her duties but is keeping her on payroll at the moment, according to her attorney, Alan Exelrod of Rudy, Exelrod, Zieff & Lowe.

“On Monday, Ellen was told to clean out her office that day, not come back to the office, turn in her computer, have no access to documents, and essentially stop doing work because her job would be ending in the future,” he said. “She had 30 days to transition off corporate boards.”

Exelrod said that Pao is still on the KP payroll, but refused to disclose what date she was given for her last paycheck. “She’s looking for work,” he said. “The essence of what they told her is, ‘Don’t come back, you’re not working here any more, you’re gone.’”

Update: Kleiner sent a new statement that responds to Exelrod’s comments.

Kleiner’s actions were not retaliatory. The firm informed Ellen Pao that it would be separating her employment as the result of longstanding, documented performance issues and not because of the litigation or because she is a woman. The firm was also generous and fair in its offer to help her transition her career in ways that are inconsistent with retaliatory conduct. They were willing to keep her on the payroll as an employee for 6 months and to vest in venture funds, and then pay her severance, all without asking her to release her pending legal claims which is entirely inconsistent with an intent to retaliate. Her lawyer may believe he has additional legal claims based on retaliation. Their view seems to be that even existing performance problems prohibit an employer from taking action once an employee has sued. We believe otherwise.

So it seems that Kleiner Perkins and Pao essentially agree on what’s happening, but differ on what to call it. What really matters, though, is how this affects the lawsuit.

“We view this as retaliation for her raising these issues and filing the lawsuit, and because she’s a woman and the circumstances of the situation,” Exelrod said.

Kleiner Perkins had previously said that Pao’s performance was the reason she had not been promoted at the firm, rather than discrimination.

“She’s performed well there for many years, and anything they say about her performance is just a pretext for their retaliatory and discriminatory motives,” Exelrod said.

The case is currently headed to an appeals court, so Kleiner Perkins can argue again that it should be arbitrated instead of litigated. Exelrod said he and Pao will file a charge of discrimination with the State of California Department of Fair Employment and Housing, and that once that arbitration issue is resolved, they plan to add the issue of termination to the existing lawsuit.

Here is Kleiner Perkins’ full statement from the wee hours this morning:

Ms. Pao’s Quora post is misleading. She remains an employee of the firm. Because of long standing issues having no relationship or bearing on the litigation, Kleiner approached Ms. Pao to facilitate her transition, over an extended period of time, out of the firm. The proposed terms, that did not require Ms. Pao to waive any legal rights or claims, are generous, fair and intended to support Ms. Pao in a successful career transition.

In an update to a previous answer she had left on Q&A site Quora, Pao wrote, “I have been terminated from my job at KPCB. On Monday afternoon, senior management told me to clean out my office, leave, and not come back.”

Reached this evening, a Kleiner Perkins spokeswoman said she had no comment, but promised to get an answer about Pao’s employment status at the firm as soon as possible.

Update. Kleiner Perkins provided a comment:

Ms. Pao’s Quora post is misleading.  She remains an employee of the firm.  Because of long standing issues having no relationship or bearing on the litigation, Kleiner approached Ms. Pao to facilitate her transition, over an extended period of time, out of the firm.  The proposed terms, that did not require Ms. Pao to waive any legal rights or claims, are generous, fair and intended to support Ms. Pao in a successful career transition.

Pao also replied to a Facebook message with a “no comment” and referral to her lawyer.

The Quora update came through at 10:49 p.m. PT on Monday, and is attached to Pao’s verified account. Previously, Pao had posted that she continued to work at Kleiner Perkins as the legal case progressed.

That was an awkward arrangement for all involved, but one where any further negative action toward Pao would reflect poorly on the venture firm. And that’s what appears to have happened now, at least according to Pao.

This latest update was appended to a Quora entry, for which the question is “Did Ellen Pao quit KPCB after the lawsuit?” and Pao’s full answer is:

No, and I don’t plan to quit.

Update: I have been terminated from my job at KPCB. On Monday afternoon, senior management told me to clean out my office, leave, and not come back.

Thank you, Quora community, for your support.

Pao had said in her lawsuit that she suffered from harassment at the firm by multiple partners, that the firm did not address her complaints about the matter, and that she was shut out of promotions and other opportunities because of her gender. Kleiner Perkins replied that Pao’s own performance kept her from advancing at the firm and that her claims had no merit.

The latest action in the case was a judge denying Kleiner’s repeated efforts to send the case to arbitration.

Photo credit: Ben Baker

This is how Sean Parker — the famous and sometimes infamous entrepreneur whose legendary credits include Napster, Facebook and Spotify — described how his newest high-profile venture, Airtime, is going so far:

“Running a start-up is like eating glass. You just start to like the taste of your own blood.”

If that sounds very painful and a bit twisted (as well as vintage Parker), as it turns out, it’s a pretty accurate description of the state of the situation at the much-touted, heavily funded next-generation communications platform.

Along with executive turmoil — including the upcoming stepping back of tech lead Eric Feng and Shawn Fanning, Parker’s Napster co-founder, who was the CEO and driving force behind Airtime while Parker was focused on Spotify last year — there has also been a very weak launch in getting Airtime off the ground.

Since it debuted in June with more than $33 million in funding, the site has only 10,000 monthly active users so far.

To Parker, it’s all just part of the always-tumultuous birth of any notable start-up.

“We are iterating on our approach,” he insisted in an interview at Airtime’s office in San Francisco on Friday. “Airtime is finally getting around to some of the bigger ideas that got me interested in this project in the first place.”

As usual for Parker, Airtime is a significant idea, which he is now describing as a next-generation Skype that will be “transforming communications.”

It will include a plethora of innovations to come that will further make it clear that big things are on the road ahead.

“Now is the most toxic time ever in Silicon Valley,” explained Parker, because people start companies without conviction about their ideas, just to get bought by Facebook or someone else.

Not him, apparently.

But first there are the many bumps, especially the worrisome changes in leadership at Airtime.

First, there is Feng, who will be leaving the company soon, marking a quick exit for the high-profile “acqhire” who was formerly the founding CTO of Hulu and a partner at powerful venture firm Kleiner Perkins.

After Airtime bought Feng’s start-up Erly in March, Parker and Feng fired members of the existing Airtime product team, ripped out the technology that had been built over the past two years — which apparently broke under the strain of just 100 concurrent users — and rebuilt the site in time for the June launch.

Eric Feng

Parker, Feng and Airtime investors maintain that Feng’s role at Airtime was always set up to be temporary, to help Airtime through its initial public launch. The Erly acquisition was “frontloaded,” they say, so that the rewards for being bought came upfront rather than after years at the new gig. And for his part, Feng has not yet left Airtime, and said he is not sure what he is doing next.

But there are concerns from inside and outside the company that because the Airtime product team is essentially Feng’s Erly team (which, in turn, was essentially Feng’s Hulu team), it’s unclear whether they will leave with him or stay with Parker.

In addition, long-time Parker associate Fanning no longer has a day-to-day role at the company, although he is still on the board.

It’s a problem, because in the past Parker has had a pattern of working alongside a visionary entrepreneur — be it Fanning at Napster, Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook, or Daniel Ek at Spotify — and at Airtime he now has no such partner.

Parker agreed that his strength throughout his various projects, from Napster until now, has been around product direction, execution and recognizing growth opportunities — and less about steady leadership and operations.

And whether Airtime has Parker’s full attention is also up in the air — he is still on six company boards and has a role as a venture investor at Founders Fund, among many other commitments.

Of Airtime’s investors, Kleiner Perkins board member Bing Gordon is most heavily involved, often spending a day at the company per week.

All that said, this mishegas is business as usual for Parker.

“Start-up teams are always in flux, so, like all start-ups, we’re always talking to candidates for various key roles,” he said. “At this point, nothing definitive has been decided.”

A scene from the wacky Airtime launch event

Parker’s wealth and celebrity don’t make running Airtime any easier. When the start-up came to life as Parker’s next act — at a fancy launch event in New York headlined by stars such as Jim Carrey and Olivia Munn — expectations were immediately high.

By the way, Parker disputed the widespread characterization of the event as a ridiculous expense and an embarrassing mishap for a start-up.

The launch was successful, Parker said, because it was widely picked up in the popular press and drove a huge spike in users that helped test the Airtime infrastructure.

And with a straight face, he actually described the New York launch as a “lean scrappy event,” saying many people worked on it for equity and that it was orders of magnitude cheaper than a party he put on for Spotify.

“It did drive traffic — so it worked,” he said, even though growth soon leveled off.

Of the initial product, which connects strangers for live video chats based on their interests, Parker said, “One-to-one is never viral.”

Along with that, Parker said one major issue is that Airtime has been misunderstood as the second coming of Chatroulette, the hot-then-very-not video hookup service.

He noted that while live video chat with random strangers is indeed one aspect of the service, there are also features for calling up Facebook friends, and plans for multiparty, asynchronous and collaborative conversations.

Parker and engineering lead Andrew Lin showed me the newest feature, set to launch later this week, as a demonstration that Airtime continues to push forward.

The site’s new “Reactions” option will allow users to post Webcam videos of themselves watching Internet videos, which friends can sync up while they are watching the original videos.

Thus, when you’re watching a YouTube video within Airtime, and a cat flushes the toilet or the underdog team scores a touchdown, you can see your friend’s face go “Whaa?” or “Yay!” alongside.

Reactions might be a better fit for Parker’s celebrity connections than Airtime was when it initially launched, he pointed out. Stars probably don’t have much interest in chatting with one stranger at a time, but their fans might want to see a close-up of their faces as they get totally grossed out by some stupid human trick on YouTube.

Sean Parker and Andrew Lin show off new Airtime features

It’s an interesting idea, but one still far from the kind of size and scale that many are still expecting.

Indeed, for some tech watchers, Airtime seems like a replay of Color, another start-up with tons of money and a well-known CEO that launched a social serendipity product that didn’t take off, and has had ongoing leadership instability.

Parker said he strongly disputed the comparison to any company that had changed its original vision — what is often call a “pivot” in Silicon Valley.

That’s not what is going on at Airtime, he stressed. Parker said he’s not pivoting as much as making the inevitably painful journey that all important start-ups must make.

“It’s only 12 weeks from launch,” he noted. “I’ve only been running the company since March.”

According to sources, former top Yahoo exec Hilary Schneider will be named president of LifeLock, which offers theft and fraud protection services to individual consumers and businesses.

The move — which is set to be announced soon, said sources — is an interesting one on a lot of levels.

First, the Tempe, Arizona-based LifeLock has just filed to go public at the end of August on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker “LOCK.” The company — which is backed by Bessemer Venture Partners and Kleiner Perkins — seeks to raise $175 million in its IPO.

Obviously, bringing in Schneider adds an experienced public company exec to the team, which is headed by CEO and Chairman Todd Davis.

Perhaps more interestingly, it that it is a major shift in focus for Schneider — who left Yahoo in 2010 and has since been doing consulting work with TPG Capital on a wide range of digital companies.

She has largely been focused on online advertising in her career and was much recruited for a range of such opportunities after departing Yahoo. Instead, she chose to work at TPG, where she actually helped the powerful private equity firm think through a possible bid for Yahoo at one point.

Schneider left Yahoo after clashing with then-CEO Carol Bartz — Bartz was later fired — over a range of issues at the Silicon Valley Internet giant. Schneider had headed media and advertising sales there for its key U.S. division.

Before Yahoo, Schneider was a top exec at media giant Knight Ridder and, earlier, was CEO of Red Herring Communications and also CEO of Times Mirror Interactive. The Harvard Business School grad started her media career at the Baltimore Sun.

I am awaiting comment from LifeLock on the pending appointment.

The New York City-based company develops products like flexible power plugs and kitchen gadgets that are suggested by its community and refined by contributors and in-house experts. (I have a couple at home, including a bobble toothbrush stand.) It sells the products online and in stores like Target and shares revenue with the contributors.

Quirky has made 200 products in the past three years, and it told the Wall Street Journal it expects $20 million in revenue this year, with more than a hundred contributors making tens of thousands of dollars in royalties.

Quirky fits nicely with the current boom of crowdfunded and start-up hardware, but the company puts much more structure and support around the creation process than open platforms like Kickstarter.

Scott Weiss of Andreessen Horowitz and Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins are joining Quirky’s board of directors.

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.”

Women in tech had a good showing on Forbes magazine’s 2012 “The World’s 100 Most Powerful Women” list, which came out this past week.

Like the higher-profile tally from Fortune, it features the female movers and shakers from a variety of arenas.

No. 1 on the list is German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has certainly had her hands full with the economic crisis in Europe this past year.

But women related to tech also were numerous in the group, so here’s the rundown:

No. 4: Melinda Gates, co-chair, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

No. 10: Sheryl Sandberg, COO, Facebook

No. 15: Virginia Rometty, president and CEO, IBM

No. 17: Ursula Burns, president and CEO, Xerox

No. 18: Meg Whitman, CEO, Hewlett-Packard

No. 21: Marissa Mayer, CEO, Yahoo

No. 25: Susan Wojcicki, SVP, Google

No. 29: Arianna Huffington, editor-in-chief, Huffington Post Media Group, AOL

No. 48: Safra Katz, president and CFO, Oracle

No. 49: Laurene Powell Jobs, founder and chair, Emerson Collective

No. 58: Padmasree Warrior, CTO and chief strategy officer, Cisco

No. 70: Sue Gardner, executive director, WikiMedia Foundation

No. 84: Mary Meeker, general partner, Kleiner Perkins

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.”

But the judge told Kleiner it could bring its motion back on more specific grounds, and set another hearing for July 20.

So the decision was actually a win for Kleiner, which might have now tried to settle the hot-button case if it looked like it would be fought out in court.

Kleiner lawyer Lynne Hermle argued that because Pao signed an arbitration agreement with multiple Kleiner Perkins funds — which are set up as independent managing LLCs, separate from the firm — and the firm also signed two of those agreements, they apply to the dispute.

Pao never signed an arbitration agreement with the firm, only the funds, so linking the two together was crucial.

Judge Harold Kahn ultimately told the firm it could file another motion to arbitrate based on “equitable estoppel and third-party beneficiary,” because the entities are so intertwined.

Initially Kahn disagreed strongly with Hermle, saying that Pao was suing her employer, not the funds — so fund contracts were irrelevant.

That was in keeping with what Kahn said in a tentative ruling yesterday. He also, as promised, granted two motions to keep sensitive documents such as Kleiner partner agreements sealed.

But Hermle, a partner at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, successfully argued that the managing LLCs are important parties in the case as well.

That’s because the funds where the cash prize lies in venture capital, in shares of profits referred to as “carried interest.”

Pao is seeking damages that include carried interest and promotions that would have given her additional carried interest. And those are forms of compensation and reward that are associated with the funds, not the firm. So including them is clearly in her interest as well.

Outside of court, Hermle described the judge’s decision as “fair,” while Pao lawyer Alan Exelrod declined to comment.

Kleiner later followed up with this statement:

KPCB is encouraged by Judge Kahn’s willingness to hear our arguments on third party beneficiary and equitable estoppel claims.  The firm will file its motions by July 13th to be heard in a supplementary hearing on July 20th.   KPCB continues to believe it has strong arguments and precedent to move the matter to arbitration.  Ms. Pao, like other partners, signed a variety of standard agreements requiring, among other things, that all disputes be resolved through arbitration.  We expect arbitration to be a more efficient and speedier dispute resolution process than trying a matter before a jury years down the line in the San Francisco Superior Court.

What to expect in court tomorrow at 9:30 am PT? Well, Judge Harold Kahn has already said he’s inclined to rule with Pao, in Kleiner’s effort to get her to take her gender-discrimination legal claims against the firm into arbitration rather than via a court battle.

The early initial defeat spells a potentially longer battle ahead, thus raising the bigger question of whether Kleiner might settle before it has to go to court.

While the Kleiner-Pao case has given rise to titillating gossip as well as heavier discussions about gender discrimination in tech, tomorrow’s hearing won’t bring all the mess out.

Rather, the discussion is about whether Kleiner — which has vigorously protested and tried to discredit Pao’s claims — can compel Pao to arbitrate out of court due to employment agreements.

Kleiner is also seeking to keep its partnership agreements private, which the court has allowed so far.

That’s important, since understanding what the firm pays its partners would give great insight into what it might owe Pao if she wins her case.

Pao says that due to her previously voiced concerns about gender discrimination and retaliation, she went back and forth with Kleiner over “non-disparagement” clauses in her contracts. Ultimately, though, she signed the contracts, so she could receive “carried interest,” or a share of the profits.

But even so, those contracts were for management of Kleiner’s various venture funds, not the firm itself, she says. And standard arbitration rules were not attached or provided.

Kleiner tried to dismiss those arguments. “A deal’s a deal” was both the opening and closing line of its recent court filing about Pao’s employment and arbitration agreements.

Kleiner and Pao will present these arguments in court tomorrow, even though Kahn has already made a tentative ruling. If Kahn, as is likely, rules against Kleiner Perkins again, the firm could appeal.

But if Kahn’s ruling is upheld, the legal action could head to court, unless Pao drops it or Kleiner settles.

It’s not clear just how much that would cost.

A settlement could mean a smaller amount, or much more than that — perhaps up to $10 million or more — based in part on what Pao might have earned over the past five years if she had been more actively promoted and compensated at the firm.

More importantly, perhaps, is what a settlement might cost Kleiner in reputation. Some of the allegations have already been made public, in two very different accounts of the past five years.

Pao tells a history of ignored harassment and systematic discrimination, with some very embarrassing details, while Kleiner says Pao was an underperforming employee who failed to bring up her complaints until very recently, when they were invalidated by an outside investigator.

Kleiner partners — including its most famous VC, John Doerr — appear particularly angry that Pao has dragged the company through the mud, with her lawsuit naming names of partners who allegedly shunned her, or worse, came on to her.

That seems to be why the firm has so far taken a black-and-white approach to the case — almost to a fault, considering the issue of gender inequality in venture is a real one in tech.

Though perhaps unrelated, in the time since Pao sued, Kleiner has also made a couple of high-profile hires of women — Stephanie Tilenius of Google and Megan Quinn of Square. It has also touted its marginally better gender ratio compared to other VC firms, which is true.

For her part, Pao says all the scrutiny is not her fault, with her lawyers responding in a recent filing:

“Ms. Pao did not write this Complaint to engender media attention and did not alert the media about the existence of the lawsuit and has not spoken to the media on or off the record about the lawsuit.”

That may be, but the media will surely be covering the case in full force if it goes to trial.

And a court battle would bring out more evidence, testimony and public scrutiny — all things Kleiner has reacted allergically to so far.

So, if Judge Kahn rules against arbitration again, at this point, the additional damage of a settlement could actually be negligible.