I always like to listen to the dulcet tones of Yahoo CFO Ken Goldman, especially when he talks about what’s next for Yahoo.

That’s because the last time he appeared at an investor conference, the Boston-accented exec zeroed into the need for the Silicon Valley Internet giant to aim at a younger demographic.

Soon enough, Yahoo had scooped up one of the Internet’s most obvious youth plays, Tumblr, for $1.1 billion in cash.

That’s why I tuned in tonight to listen to a replay of his appearance at a tech investor conference held by Bank of America/Merrill Lynch yesterday in San Francisco, where Goldman did not disappoint in delivering some interesting tea leaves to read.

And what struck me most were his words around the continued interest Yahoo has in mobile, including possible acquisitions.

While he again talked in general about how Yahoo was no longer the M&A anathema it had been before the arrival of CEO Marissa Mayer — “companies did not necessarily want to be acquired by Yahoo” — he firmly noted that “now when find something interesting, we actually go and address it and acquire it, rather than thinking about it.”

Goldman added that Yahoo would continue to do acquisitions, “to help basically accelerate our progress … and continue to see the velocity of products in the mobile space.”

Of most interest is “localization of the space,” especially in providing search and content to consumers.

Hey, Dennis Crowley of Foursquare, that sounds like you! Indeed, the famous local New York-based check-in service and its telegenic founder Crowley have always been a favorite of Mayer, including an interest in buying the company when she was an exec at Google, which never came to pass, for various reasons.

(In a coincidence, the founder of the famous local check-in company happened be in San Francisco yesterday, checking in last night at the Tempest Bar near Foursquare’s offices.)

As many worried about its prospects of late — its user base last year was only 30 million, although it powers location information for big sites like Instagram — Foursquare recently did a $41 million financing with help from the powerful Silver Lake private equity firm, which valued the company at $600 million. Other current investors who also participated in the transaction, which also included convertible debt, were Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Spark Capital.

While that seems to have staved off sales talk around Foursquare, it’s certainly within the realm of possibility that Yahoo would be contemplating a company just like it, as it continues to actively survey the landscape. That’s especially true given that Foursquare’s laudable but exhausting efforts to monetize need some serious turbocharging that Yahoo could certainly provide.

Much like Tumblr, Foursquare has struggled to realize its business aims — in its case, to make money from selling mobile advertising using its rich local search and robust user location information. (The company had about $2 million of revenue last year, according to a number of reports.)

Foursquare has certainly been inventive in its efforts, including a terrific “Game of Cones” campaign that somehow mashed up HBO’s hit cable show with ice cream (Winter is coming in summer, perhaps?).

While it’s just my humble opinion for now, advertising, search and content combined, of course, is directly in Yahoo’s wheelhouse, as well as Mayer’s.

Back to Goldman: “We’re not afraid to make any decisions,” he said, noting that Yahoo has a regular routine of reviewing a number of deals. “It comes back to what’s our strategy and focus and what do we need to accelerate our progress … we have to see a fit.”

In other tidbits, Goldman noted that Yahoo was working more “collaboratively” with its Chinese bank — oops, investment — Alibaba Group, which is preparing to go public at the end of this year, or early next year.

The huge pile of money Yahoo has made off its initial $1 billion investment by co-founder Jerry Yang has been what has given current management its comfy cushion to remake the company, and has also goosed its stock.

Regarding Alibaba’s IPO, after which Yahoo will be getting another multibillion-dollar slug of dough, Goldman added that “there are mechanisms in place to ensure it is a fair process to all parties.”

He noted, too, that he had joined the board of Yahoo’s other Asian investment, in Yahoo Japan, and would be at its next meeting. Yahoo has previously contemplated selling that asset, too, but has seemed to have tabled that effort under Goldman and Mayer.

You can listen to Goldman’s talk at the investor conference in its entirety here.

After it announced layoffs of 520 employees and lowered its guidance to Wall Street, Zynga’s stock dropped precipitously yesterday, down 12 percent, to dip below $3 a share.

The decline put the market value of the company at just $2.34 billion, well below the once much-hyped hopes for the San Francisco-based online gaming company that has seen nothing but troubled times since its IPO. In fact, since its late 2011 public offering, Zynga shares are down close to 70 percent.

But perhaps more interesting is that, with $1.6 billion in cash and marketable securities, investors now consider the company to be worth just below $750 million.

In other words, about $350 million less than Yahoo just paid for the blogging platform Tumblr, which has substantively less revenue than Zynga.

That small valuation puts the company in an interesting position, as it seeks to move its business more quickly into the mobile space, as its Web-based business has fallen off more dramatically than expected. Simply put, mobile monetizes less robustly than Zynga’s Web offerings.

The slowness in moving its casual social games to fast-growing new devices, such as tablets and smartphones, has been at the heart of Zynga’s current troubles, forcing management to cut its staff by 18 percent in order to rationalize costs.

ZNGA data by YCharts

That has meant the slashing of its staff of more than 3,000 — which grew quickly via a series of acquisitions made in recent years — and closing offices in New York and Los Angeles to save money.

What happens next will be the subject of much speculation, given its declining worth, including whether Zynga might consider going private or if some other company might contemplate acquiring it.

Most sources close to the company think it is unlikely that its big owners, including venture firm Kleiner Perkins, will want to conduct any kind of dramatic transaction, given Zynga’s currently prone state. Said one person close to the situation, its eventual state will depend on how well the company manages to turn itself around.

Here’s the tough-to-write blog post that Zynga CEO Mark Pincus just put up and also sent to the San Francisco gaming giant’s staff. The company just announced layoffs of 18 percent of the company and also lowered its second-quarter guidance.

In it, Pincus, the founder of what was once a rocket ship of a startup in Silicon Valley, appropriately began on a somber note:

“Today is a hard day for Zynga and an emotional one for every employee of our company … None of us ever expected to face a day like today, especially when so much of our culture has been about growth.”

Indeed, the fall has been fast and hard for Zynga, as it struggles to cope with a massive consumer migration to mobile that happened faster than its management — or, to be fair, anyone in the Internet business — could cope with. Until now, its fast growth has been based on its Web business and flagship franchises such as FarmVille.

But, as several sources noted and Pincus addressed in this note, Zynga must now get smaller again to get larger, doing little things really well rather than a lot of things at scale.

“The scale that served us so well in building and delivering the leading social gaming service on the Web is now making it hard to successfully lead across mobile and multiplatform, which is where social games are going to be played,” he wrote.

Zynga had made smaller cuts of five percent last fall, but the fall-off of its Web business — especially on the Facebook platform — was faster than anticipated, sources said.

That business has, as one person close to the situation noted, been “brittle,” and it broke more easily than expected.

That is not to say there has not been some promise, in games such as Running With Friends and even at its flagship FarmVille, which is still a strong title. And Zynga now has 65 million mobile users.

Pincus had been signaling more changes to come of late, trying to keep the company cash-flow positive, as he sought to rationalize costs.

In the company’s last earnings call, he stressed that 2013 would be “transitional” for Zynga and has rejiggered its top management to better focus the efforts on mobile.

Sources said that severance benefits will extend for several months and include some acceleration of stock options.

Still, it is not a pretty day for Pincus, or for the staff of Zynga, showing a lot of hard-charging entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley the very steep downside of being a public company CEO in a tough and fast-changing environment.

Here’s the full Pincus post and memo:

To our Zynga Community,

Today is a hard day for Zynga and an emotional one for every employee of our company. We are saying painful goodbyes to about 18% of our Zynga brothers and sisters. The impact of these layoffs will be felt across every group in the company.

None of us ever expected to face a day like today, especially when so much of our culture has been about growth. But I think we all know this is necessary to move forward. The scale that served us so well in building and delivering the leading social gaming service on the Web is now making it hard to successfully lead across mobile and multiplatform, which is where social games are going to be played.

These moves, while hard to face today, represent a proactive commitment to our mission of connecting the world through games. Mobile and touch screens are revolutionizing gaming. Our opportunity is to make mobile gaming truly social by offering people new, fun ways to meet, play and connect. By reducing our cost structure today we will offer our teams the runway they need to take risks and develop these breakthrough new social experiences.

Because we’re making these moves proactively and from a position of financial strength, we can take care of laid off employees. We’re offering generous severance packages that reflect our appreciation for all of their work and we hope this will provide a foundation as they pursue their next professional steps.

Although these are hard decisions, I’m confident that our strategy of building leading franchises and supporting them with the largest network is the right one for the long term. I’m encouraged by our recent progress. Running With Friends is a great example of the quality player experience we can deliver, already receiving an average 4.5 app star rating from 22,000 players in less than one month after launching. Our FarmVille franchise teams continue to innovate and deliver ground breaking new social experiences like County Fair which, despite only being available on the web, is engaging 39 million monthly players.

I want to thank every one of you for the spirit, creativity and energy that you’ve invested in Zynga. You’ve reintroduced a generation of people to gaming and through these games offered them new ways to connect with their families, make new friends and even sometimes find love.

Everyone will be affected by these changes and I’m sure there will be many follow up questions to this email. If you have specific questions relating to your project or team, please talk to your manager. For any other feedback or thoughts feel free to email me directly.

Mark

Zynga is laying off 18 percent of its workforce — which represents 520 employees — in a bid to reduce costs and more drastically restructure its troubled business toward mobile, according to sources close to the situation.

The move today will affect every part of the San Francisco social gaming company and cut $80 million in staff expenses. Zynga currently has about 2,900 workers.

But the action will also include the closing of its offices in New York, Los Angeles and Dallas, as well as the slashing of other major infrastructure costs, adding to a total reduction that is likely to be much larger.

Zynga continues to have big offices in San Francisco; Beijing, China; and Bangalore, India, as well as several small units across the U.S. (such as Seattle and San Diego).

Sources said that severance benefits will extend for several months and include some acceleration of stock options.

(Update: Zynga has halted trading on the Nasdaq stock market pending news.)

(Second update: Zynga confirmed layoffs and cost cuts, noting they will complete them by August.)

The reason? Mobile — a business Zynga must conquer, despite its currently smaller prospects for monetization compared to its Web business.

After a rocky IPO and trying to cope with rapid changes in its core businesses, Zynga now must refocus the company’s flagship franchises and network on the shift to mobile and a narrowing of focus at the company.

In other parlance, this is a “right-sizing” of Zynga to reflect a more somber reality that these mobile businesses are not as large as its Web-based one that rode the startup to glory on the explosive growth of social networks, primarily Facebook.

Sources said the reason for the more substantive cuts now, after earlier ones last fall, is because the decline of its Web business has been more drastic than anticipated, while the rise of its mobile business has been slower than needed. That’s been especially true on Facebook, which was once one of Zynga’s key money-making partners.

It has resulted in a perfect storm of trouble for Zynga, which has struggled with its business since its public offering, as investors have scrutinized the longevity of the hits-based online gaming business. Despite the continued strength of some of its big properties, such as FarmVille, the life cycle of most casual games has been short.

Zynga has tried to fix the situation by moving to the faster-growing mobile space. In addition, CEO and founder Mark Pincus has tried to solidify its top management, as well as bring in more board help, to strengthen efforts to revive the company.

Zynga has already been on the cost-cutting path, closing less successful games and other more ambitious products that had enjoyed less than expected traction. For example, the company has “sunsetted” 18 games in recent months, as it has deployed more resources and development to mobile efforts.

According to sources close to the situation, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is working on what is likely to turn into a significant restructuring of the massive software company, which could also move several current execs to more prominent roles.

Sources noted that the changes — which center on solidifying Microsoft into the “devices and services company” that Ballmer wrote about in his annual shareholder letter last October — are still being worked out, and could still change substantively.

But, noted several people close to the situation, the new configuration could include larger roles for several execs, including Satya Nadella, president of its Servers and Tools division; Tony Bates, president of its Skype communications division; and Don Mattrick, president of its Interactive Entertainment division.

How their new and perhaps expanded roles and those of others in top management will shake out is unclear.

What seems likely is an organizational structure that will focus on configuring Microsoft around devices and services, both in the enterprise and the consumer space, and simplifying its management. Currently, Microsoft has a rather convoluted set-up, with other major units such as Business Solutions, Online Services and Microsoft Office.

But how Microsoft’s flagship software product, Windows, fits into the new org is still under debate.

Wrote Ballmer about the changes for Microsoft last fall: “This is a significant shift, both in what we do and how we see ourselves — as a devices and services company. It impacts how we run the company, how we develop new experiences, and how we take products to market for both consumers and businesses.”

The possible restructuring comes amid increasing investor pressure on Microsoft and, interestingly, a recent run-up in its stock.

Nomura Equity Research analyst Rick Sherlund, who has covered the company since it went public, wrote last week that “there may be a shift in the wind upcoming for Microsoft, with shareholders potentially demanding a greater say in the direction of the company and how it might be run to drive a better return to shareholders.” In his note, Sherlund recommended that Microsoft consider selling off its Bing search business, as well as its Xbox gaming unit.

This focus on shareholder returns has again come into sharper relief since it was disclosed that ValueAct Capital had bought about 1 percent of Microsoft’s stock, and Sherlund noted that this stake could allow the hedge fund to push for change “with the support of others to advance their agenda for change.”

But unlike a more pugnacious previous effort to spur change at Microsoft by Greenlight Capital’s David Einhorn, ValueAct’s Jeff Ubben has been more dulcet in his tone, noting that Microsoft’s strong software background and enterprise strength was key when combined with future trends, such as cloud computing.

“Microsoft could be the largest cloud company in the world,” Ubben said in a recent speech.

That’s an open question still, but investors are certainly warming to Microsoft, after a long period of weak stock performance. Interestingly, over the last six months, Microsoft shares have risen more than 31 percent, perhaps in anticipation of some change to come.

A Microsoft spokesman declined to comment.

According to numerous sources close to the situation, Yahoo has bid from $600 million to $800 million for the premium video site Hulu.

The reason for the wide range is due to the fact that the Silicon Valley Internet giant — similar to most bidders in the new effort to acquire Hulu — has proposed several different prices based on a variety of circumstances. That includes the length of the licensing rights for content and how much control the programming companies selling Hulu have over their media.

At the same time and separately, according to sources inside the company, Yahoo is also contemplating at least two other significant purchases — in the $150 million to $200 million range — each for a mobile and a communications company.

It’s certainly an ambitious and busy M&A agenda for Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Mayer, who just forked over $1.1 billion in cash to purchase youth-skewing blogging site Tumblr last week.

Presumably, she is interested in upping Yahoo’s longtime lackluster video efforts — it famously lost out at the last minute on the acquisition of YouTube many years ago to Google — as the arena becomes more critical to advertisers.

But, said sources, while allowing the bid to proceed, Mayer is more focused on the integration of Tumblr, as well as other acquisitions that will bolster other key product areas.

Thus, sources said that the Hulu effort is being led at Yahoo by Los Angeles-based Ian Weingarten, VP of corporate development, who works for M&A head Jackie Reses.

AllThingsD.com first broke the news of that deal, as well as Yahoo’s initial interest and subsequent bid for Hulu, which is owned by a trio of media giants: News Corp., Disney and Comcast.

The site, which has both a subscription and an advertising business, was on the market in 2011, with the hope for a bid of $2 billion that came with several years of programming rights. The sale was pulled after those higher bids did not materialize.

But Hulu is on the market again in the most advanced effort to sell it so far, with bids coming in from a range of suitors over the last week.

Yahoo’s Mayer and COO Henrique De Castro had met with Hulu’s team earlier this month for a get-to-know-you, just after an effort to buy a large stake in French video site Dailymotion was blocked by the government there.

Besides Yahoo, others interested in acquiring Hulu include: Separate bids from private equity firms KKR, Guggenheim Digital and Silver Lake (in conjunction with Hollywood talent agency William Morris Endeavor); Time Warner Cable; DirecTV; and the Chernin Group.

There could still be others, of course, though a deadline for initial bids has passed. Interestingly, so far, neither Google nor Amazon have made official efforts, perhaps because the pair already have robust video platforms.

Chernin’s bid, as had been widely reported, started in the $500 million range, which is interesting since the longtime media executive was once the COO of News Corp. and was critical to Hulu’s creation. Translation: He’d know just what the video platform is worth and how the place works.

Of course, low bids at the start are part of the normal process; sources close to the owners said that any bids under $1 billion are unlikely to be accepted.

One thing is certain: Now comes what will look a lot like a very noisy game of musical chairs, in which the various groups will vie for one-upmanship, even as they talk to each other about possible joint efforts. Who the most attractive candidate is, of course, will be much debated.

In addition, there is much disagreement over who and how Hulu should be sold by two of its owners, Disney and News Corp., which have squabbled over its direction from the start. (Comcast gave up its management rights as a concession to federal regulators a few years ago, so is sitting on the sideline twiddling its giant cable thumbs and doubtlessly wishing it could be a bidder, too.)

No matter the ceaseless bickering among giants, the trio of media conglomerates are providing Hulu’s most valuable programming, largely television shows from their broadcast networks. And that is the real point of the negotiating, according to many involved.

“Hulu is a very nice brand and technology, but the entire negotiation will be about the control and price of the content,” said one person close to the situation. “It’s the only thing that matters.”

I sent an email for comment to Yahoo, but expect no response.

(Full disclosure: News Corp. owns Dow Jones, which owns this site.)

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.

Earlier this week, Yahoo CFO Ken Goldman spoke at JP Morgan’s Global Technology conference and underscored the need for the aging Silicon Valley Internet giant to attract more users from the coveted 18-to-24-years-old age bracket. Along with more marketing, he explicitly said Yahoo needed to be “cool again.”

“One of our challenges is we have had an aging demographic,” said Goldman at the Boston event. “Part of it is going to be just visibility again in making ourselves cool, which we got away from for a couple of years.”

According to sources close to the situation, that could mean a strategic alliance and investment in or outright buy of perhaps the coolest Internet company of late: Tumblr.

Sources said the talks were serious, but any kind of deal — of course — could come to naught.

But it’s not the first time Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has been interested in the New York-based hipster blogging service. As an executive at Google, she had closely watched its fast growth, along with that of Foursquare. Since she took over at Yahoo, several sources said that she has met with its top execs, including founder and CEO David Karp.

But sources said that interest has gotten stronger more recently, coming at the same time as Tumblr has been stepping up its efforts to raise a large funding round that could value the New York company at $1 billion. In a series of fundings since 2007, Tumblr has raised $125 million so far, at a reported valuation of $800 million.

In the latest round, one source close to the situation said Tumblr was considering “strategic” investments, which would presumably be of the kind that Yahoo had tried and failed to do recently with France’s Dailymotion video service. Since then, Mayer and her team have looked at the ongoing deal to purchase Hulu that has many possible other bidders.

Tumblr is different from Dailymotion or Hulu, of course, in that it focuses heavily on user-generated content, largely text and photos, although there is an increasing use of video on the site.

But this puts it directly in Yahoo’s main wheelhouse, especially recent efforts to undergird its strong set of existing media offerings to appeal to a different audience and also get into the social space via consumer-based software solutions that are both elegant and easy to use.

“If you could pick a company that fits in with what Marissa Mayer has demonstrated in her career — aesthetics software technology and fast-growing — you could not land on a better choice,” said another source.

That said, Yahoo has been sticking to smaller acquisitions under Mayer’s regime, spending very little on a clutch of small mobile startups to up its game in the important sector. And at the same investment conference, Goldman also said additional M&A would continue to be smaller for Yahoo.

Still, any kind of deal with Tumblr could certainly bring Yahoo a big, young audience. Its worldwide traffic was at 117 million visitors in April, according to comScore. On its home page, Tumblr claims it has 107.8 million blogs and 50.6 billion posts. U.S. desktop traffic to Tumblr was 37 million in April, close to LinkedIn and Twitter, although Twitter obviously has much more via mobile.

But figuring out how to make money from that audience is a task that the company has only recently started to tackle.

Like other recent Web startups that have seen rocket ship growth — see: Twitter, Facebook — Tumblr resisted advertising for its formative years, and its user base seems particularly unwilling to accept standard banner ads. In addition, many industry observers think that Tumblr’s pages are packed with porn and/or other questionable content that would scare off advertisers.

But within the last year or so, Tumblr has started selling modestly sized “native ads” promoting brands’ Tumblr pages, on users’ “dashboards.” That’s the equivalent of running ads in a Facebook user’s News Feed or a Twitter user’s main feed.

Initial signs are promising. Tumblr told Forbes that it generated $13 million in revenue last year, and suggested it could do as much as $100 million this year; people close to the company say its momentum has continued this year.

In addition to figuring out its top-line business, Tumblr and its backers have also been spending a long time trying to figure out a managment structure. Even Karp’s strongest backers say that the 26-year-old needs help running the company, and for months they have been looking for a “Sheryl Sandberg”-style COO candidate.

“David is very charming, and clearly very very bright, and understands the product,” said an executive who talked to Tumblr about the role. But, “he’s incredibly confrontation averse, and there’s almost a ‘Game of Thrones’ palace feeling to the management team.”

Possibility of death by wildfire aside, sources said that the search has yielded two or three candidates that Tumblr is considering. It is a key hire since the company needs to build out an extensive infrastructure quickly, given its sharp consumer growth, including fielding a more robust advertising team. Tumblr hired an experienced exec, Lee Brown, from Groupon last fall, who has been busy hiring more sales execs. Interesting aside: Brown was a longtime Yahoo ad exec.

But building out the needed structure at the company is a long slog, and Tumblr might be seeking more help one way or another.

Yahoo declined comment and Tumblr has not gotten back to us as yet.

According to numerous sources close to the situation, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer recently met with top execs at Hulu, the premium video service whose big media company owners have been considering selling it for some months.

Sources said Yahoo is “in the process,” although the Silicon Valley Internet giant has not made any kind of formal bid. Other players whom sources said are considering purchasing all or parts of Hulu include: Former News Corp. COO Peter Chernin, who now has a successful and well-funded multimedia and investment company called the Chernin Group; Guggenheim Partners digital arm, which is led by former Yahoo interim CEO Ross Levinsohn; and Amazon.

Sources said Mayer also had an extensive getting-to-know-you meeting, which was apparently not held at Hulu’s offices in Santa Monica, Calif., along with COO Henrique De Castro. The discussion is taking place in the wake of Yahoo’s failed bid — largely engineered by De Castro — to purchase a majority stake in France Télécom’s Dailymotion video service, after a top French government official said Yahoo could not own 75 percent of the company.

Had the deal — which was reportedly valued at $300 million — gone through, it would have been the most significant by Mayer since she took over at the company last July. Thus far, she has limited her purchases to small mobile startup.

While the meetings with Hulu are only preliminary, Yahoo has been to this video rodeo before, having seriously considering buying Hulu when it was previously being shopped by its owners, News Corp., Disney and Comcast. (News Corp. also owns this site.)

Of course, if Yahoo’s interest becomes more serious, Mayer will have to make important visits to top execs at those media giants, since they control the rights to critical content, and thus Hulu’s value.

As Peter Kafka noted in a previous post about Hulu’s possible sale, “much hinges on the licensing rights News Corp., Disney and Comcast would provide for the money-losing site, as well as what happens to the $300 million debt its owners have taken on in the last year.”

Without those rights, Hulu by itself is a very pretty Web site and video platform, but not worth the billions it would be with very long-term television rights, content that attracts users. Currently, sources said its media owners are offering two to three years of rights, with a lot of flexibility over removing content from the site, which is not quite as attractive a deal (to say the least).

But video is a key component of Yahoo’s strategy going forward. Along with mobile efforts, Mayer has explicitly told investors that video was a key to company under her tenure.

Coincidentally, today in an onstage interview at a Wired conference in New York, Mayer broadly addressed the video issue when asked a question about the topic, noting it was important across all of Yahoo’s properties.

“I think video is really important … video is something that we’re all innately designed and born to experience, everyone is born being able to watch and to hear,” she said. “Video is just this amazing format.”

Mayer would know that well, having been at Google when the search giant bought YouTube, ironically snatching it at the last minute from a competing bid by Yahoo, which was then led by Terry Semel. Since then, YouTube has become the most important and powerful player in the space by far.

Yahoo, despite being one of the largest video players on the Web, has mostly been a lackluster competitor in the arena, pinging over the years from creating original content to doing branded deals with media companies, but never establishing a major beachhead with consumers as Hulu did from scratch.

Short of a full acquisition, there may be a way for Yahoo to partner and invest in Hulu, instead of buying it outright that works for all sides — owners get a new owner to foot part of the bill and also increase distribution, and Yahoo can claim that it’s providing users with exponentially more content that would help Yahoo’s long-declining engagement problem.

Sources said News Corp. and Disney have mulled scenarios where one or both companies hang on to the site, while Comcast has no control over Hulu’s fate, having given up its management rights to the site as a concession to federal regulators.

But the strength of the Hulu brand is clear and it has had some success in building a more significant business. While a lot of its video offerings are free, about four million people are paying for a Hulu Plus subscription.

Still, Hulu’s strength might be lagging, especially given after talented founding leader Jason Kilar recently left. Last year, Hulu was a top 10 video site, according to comScore. No longer — in a report in March, it had dropped out of the top 10.

While this likely has more to do with methodology than real decline in Hulu ratings, it does show that while it’s the biggest thing Yahoo could buy or invest in, Yahoo itself has plenty of video views, many more than Hulu.

The question for Mayer then is how much of Yahoo’s multi-billon-dollar cash kitty she wants to bet on a big video play. She might also be considering buying several smaller ones, said sources, with Yahoo having also looked at some smaller video sites, including Blip and Grab Media.

A spokeswoman for Hulu declined to comment and Yahoo PR has not responded to a query for comment (if ever).

Accel Partners has added longtime tech exec Rob Solomon — who was most recently president and CEO of Groupon — as a venture partner. The high-profile Silicon Valley venture firm said Solomon will focus on early stage and growth equity opportunities and focus on “operational issues like product management, scaling infrastructure, business operations, and mergers and acquisitions.”

Said Accel Partner Andrew Braccia in a statement: “[Solomon] has been at the helm of some of the most high profile consumer internet brands and has demonstrated a unique ability to inspire and lead teams through both rapid growth and challenging times.”

Indeed, Solomon has had a long Silicon Valley career, including as an top exec at Yahoo, running its e-commerce efforts. He was also CEO of SideStep, a real-time vertical search engine in the travel sector that was later sold to Kayak and is also on several boards, including HomeAway.

But Solomon is best known for his stint as the No. 2 exec at the Chicago-based Groupon, the once high-flying daily deals site. But, for a variety of reasons, including wanting to be located in California, he left the company two years ago.

Solomon emailed me last night to explain why he decided to take a job as a VC at Accel and here’s what he wrote:

“I love the tactics and strategies associated with scaling up Internet companies. Nothing is more exciting then digging deep into a space and then figuring out which companies stand the best chance to create new markets and become iconic category defining companies. I was lucky enough to work with some of the world’s best founders, technologists and executives at Yahoo and that experience taught me what is possible in a very short span of time. I’ve joined Accel because they have an incredible global platform to find, nurture, fund and grow the next generation of global iconic Internet companies and nothing could be more exciting to me for my next career adventure.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image copyright LHF Graphics

Okay, so what? Companies are built on people. That’s nothing groundbreaking. But in the startup world of Silicon Valley, where we’re experiencing the highest annual employment growth in more than a decade, we spend more time talking and writing about the product and than thinking about how we can attract and retain talent.

To be fair, it’s hard to avoid hearing about the perks at gigantic companies like Google, Apple, Facebook and Twitter. But most startups can’t offer high salaries, luxury buses, catered meals and on-site laundry services to entice and maintain the most talented workers.

Startups can, however, entice them with vision, responsibility and recognition. And once you have the right people in place, all it takes is a little bit of structure to build and maintain the developer dream team.

Who needs free lunch when you have inspiration?
Before founding a startup, I worked as a medical researcher, and if I learned one thing while in medicine, it’s that scientists don’t work in a lab to sequence DNA. They work in the lab to cure cancer.

Doctors give up lunches, time with their families, sleep and whatever else they could be doing during the day and night for even the slightest breakthrough. They give their time and energy because they’re inspired by the purpose.

We might not be so directly curing cancer in the IT industry, but we can affect the technology that helps a doctor make a breakthrough. Because after all, it’s technology experts who built the nanotechnology that enables earlier cancer detection and the identity management solution that protects a cancer research company’s patients.

Too often in the IT industry we focus on technology and tools instead of their higher purpose and relationship to the rest of the world. Giving away free meals might seem nice, but the real key to attracting and retaining talent is that you must give them a higher purpose than the hammer that they’re swinging.

Recognition shouldn’t always be monetary
In addition to providing a purpose, you have to give your employees recognition. There are all types of potential recognition: raises, promotions, shout-outs in company meetings and yearly awards, to name a few. Although employers often motivate their employees with lofty titles, my advice is to put the emphasis elsewhere.

The truth is, there’s always someone who can offer your engineers a higher salary or a fancier title. But no matter how high the salary or lofty the title, positive reinforcement and strong connections are often the things that build loyalty and create a strong community, and that’s ultimately more meaningful.

So if personal recognition through great work is as important as a salary, there’s no need for titles. I would abandon them completely if I could, because in my experience, the best policy is to let compensation and ownership reflect importance and contribution.

And once you place importance on ownership, you should encourage your engineers and technical experts to speak at conferences, teach classes, blog, write whitepapers — do anything more than just write patents. Let them be recognized (and perhaps even become tech celebrities) and known in their respective fields and they’ll become advocates for your company more than if they were to brag about their high salaries or fancy titles.

You need a captain for more than the coin toss
As a founder, CEO, CTO or VP of engineering, it’s your job to provide your employees with the vision and recognition necessary to inspire them in their day-to-day work.

Whether or not you established the company in question, if you’re in charge of a developer team, they’ll follow your lead. If you stay in your office all day, only responding to a select few emails, engaging with a couple of your coworkers or joining the executive meetings when the biggest decisions are at stake, you won’t inspire.

Teams need a captain for more than just the coin toss. They need their best player, too. So if you’re technical, work with your engineers to validate and shape their work and dig in if something’s broken. Work hard and share your vision and they’ll imitate you.

Now all you need is a fire team, and a sergeant
Beyond the lofty job of instilling a vision and culture, you need to establish an organizational team structure to ensure your developers are working to the best of their ability.

Teams are essential to everything we do. And whether they’re teams of cells in your body, your March Madness bracket pick or your company’s team of developers, they function well because they’re designed to do so.

I believe team structures have a basic biological aspect to them. When I was younger, I spent some time on military bases and picked up a thing or two. Army fire teams and squads have an almost tribal structure — that’s the reason they work so well. A military fire team is made up of four people: a sergeant and three team members. A squad is a team of two or three fire teams plus a staff sergeant.

As a leader, you need to be capable of running a fire team and a squad. But you should never attempt to run more than a squad. You need to bring on sergeants and staff sergeants, or in our case VPs and managers, to stay organized. It’s true in the military and it’s true in technology and larger business.

When looking for these sergeants and co-captains — or whatever metaphor you choose to use for your co-manager — consider how they’ll be able to inspire, recognize, instill culture and organize.

I, like most founders I know, know that building and scaling core engineering, product and operations teams is nothing like building your post-work intramural kickball team. There’s so much more at stake: Your funders’ investments, your reputation and most full nights of sleep, to name just a few. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t apply the same team mentality in your workplace. If you continuously give your employees a purpose, encourage and recognize them (and organize your management to do the same), then there’s no need to tempt them with an office keg or ping-pong table — those are really just perks, after all.

Jason Hoffman (@jasonh) is the CTO and founder of Joyent. An expert on scalable systems, Hoffman earned his PhD in Molecular Pathology at The Burnham Institute and UCSD School of Medicine, and MS and BS in Chemistry and Biochemistry at UCLA.

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.”

According to numerous sources, Vivek Sharma, who is GM of the powerful Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Messenger products, has left the company.

It’s not clear where Sharma — who has been at the Silicon Valley Internet giant since 2009 and has worked in a number of areas, including commerce and search — is going or what the reasons are for his departure from Yahoo.

Some sources said he clashed with CEO Marissa Mayer, who has been involved in the recent overhaul of one of Yahoo’s key consumer products, due in part to recent issues related to email vulnerability and other issues. But others said he simply wanted to move on and has a new job lined up already.

There are several other top Yahoo execs who are likely to go in the coming weeks, especially given many bonuses are awarded this month. Mayer has also been looking over her top management and wider workforce and culling it, sometimes in ways that attract national controversy and even a lawsuit.

Keeping talent and finding new blood has been an issue for the fledgling CEO. As I have previously reported, as well as others in more detail this week, she is approving all new hires herself and has put in place more stringent hiring standards at Yahoo.

Sources said she has been trying to convince a top product exec at Google to essentially replace Shashi Seth — with whom she parted ways in January — who would oversee Mail, Answers, Messenger, the homepage and possibly the media group.

In addition, her COO Henrique De Castro has a search out for a new head of the key Americas unit to man its important sales division and more in the U.S. market.

In other words, a lot of empty desks that need filling.

I have an email in for comment into Yahoo, but you know how that goes (FYI: It doesn’t).

Alibaba Group said it had selected Jonathan Lu Zhaoxi to replace its co-founder and CEO Jack Ma, starting on May 10. Ma, who is only 48 years old, will remain executive chairman, and will be involved in the Chinese Internet e-commerce giant’s business strategy and management development. Alibaba has seen tremendous growth in the last year, as it is has increased both its revenue and profit, and many expect it will go public within the next 12 months. The strong performance has, in turn, boosted the stock of Yahoo, which owns a 20 percent stake in the company.

Lu, 43, has been at Alibaba for more than a dozen years, leading major divisions of the company, including its massive and important Taobao unit. He is currently Alibaba’s chief data officer and president of Aliyun Mobile OS.

“Serving as Alibaba Group CEO is an extremely challenging and difficult job, especially succeeding a founder CEO like me. One can only imagine the responsibilities and pressure that Jonathan will shoulder,” said Ma in a letter to employees. “Alibaba has never been only the CEO’s business, it is everybody’s business.”

Here’s Ma’s full letter to employees on the change:
alibaba

And here is some of Lu’s bio, according to Alibaba:

Lu joined Alibaba in 2000, a year after the company was founded as an Internet directory allowing China’s increasingly competitive factories to more easily connect with international buyers. After forming Alibaba.com’s sales team for South China, including manufacturing powerhouse Guangdong Province, Lu in 2004 led the launch of Alipay, the company’s online payments affiliate. He later served as Alipay’s president.

In early 2008 Lu moved to Taobao, China’s dominant online retailing platform. During his tenure Taobao’s GMV (total sales generated by sellers using the platform) soared eightfold, and the online shopping unit began developing and integrating social networking into e-commerce.

Lu, who holds a master’s degree in business administration from China Europe International Business School in Shanghai, was named chief executive officer of Alibaba.com in early 2011, presiding over the privatization of the business-to-business trading website the following year.

Since July 2012, Lu has been an Alibaba executive vice president and the Group’s chief data officer. In this role, he has been responsible for driving the company’s strategically important Big Data initiative, centered on the creation of a data-sharing platform that can be accessed by the millions of small businesses that use Alibaba services. He is also responsible for Alibaba’s Aliyun mobile device operating system.

At the point where I wrapped up part one of our conversation from late last year, Levine had been talking about opportunities he saw around data storage in the enterprise. As he sees it, another big space ripe for disruption — and thus investment — is in security. That’s where the conversation picks up below:

AllThingsD: So Andreessen Horowitz has done a bunch of security deals. What kinds of opportunities are you seeing there?

Levine: Data security. Okta puts active directory out in the cloud. All SAAS apps, everything goes out there. That’s access control, which very much is security. Security is also being exacerbated by the number of mobile devices in an environment. If you have BYO devices and you’re using someone else’s SAAS, as a CIO you don’t own either piece of that. So an interesting security problem to solve is how you make corporate data usable in that scenario.

Is anyone coming close?

Sure. There’s one company in our portfolio. Silver Tail (now part of EMC) does behavioral prevention. It can look at the behavior of an endpoint and determine if it’s a human being. If you can detect patterns of illicit behavior, you can shut them down before they do any damage. So that’s interesting. Bromium, which just announced, which builds impenetrable walls around processes that live on mobile devices. The premise of Bromium is that you no longer have to do virus scanning. It assumes that viruses are coming into a system anyway, and they’re going to come by way of something like a browser, and affect a running process. But if that process is wrapped by an impenetrable wrapper, it can’t get onto the system. To kill that virus, all you do is shut down that process. So that’s an interesting investment we’ve made.

How do you go about finding the companies that you invest in?

We are not thematic investors, first of all. And I love that. To me, if you’re a thematic investor you end up being the 40th one to pick a company in a given stack, because you have to be in on a certain kind of company. We really do see nearly 100 percent of all the deals that are occuring at any given point of time. We evaluate every single company on its merits. As soon as we say we need to be in on something like, say, database technology, then all of a sudden I have made a preordained and preconceived decision that this is important. I don’t want to have a bias coming into things, that I throw out something that’s actually interesting, or include something that may be way overinvested. We look at each company as a fresh canvas, but we will look at companies that have great technical co-founders who believe that they are going to go dominate a given market segment. It may not be obvious at all. Most obvious things are obvious to many people. It’s a matter of finding the non-obvious things. There are a lot of things we see, and there are a lot of areas where we haven’t invested.

Is that how do you explain GitHub? That was a huge deal, and no one really understood it at first.

I wasn’t really looking to invest in a collaborative source code control system. Before last year, I didn’t even know it existed, and didn’t internalize the value of what they do. After we met them and realized the power of what they do, and have done, and the potential future for that company, we invested. It’s interesting when you don’t have biases and just let everyone come in and pitch, knowing you really can see things in the eyes of the entreprenuer, which I believe is really critical. As soon as I have opinions, I start to shape the company in my mind’s eye, and that’s really backward, because as a board member you want them forming the vision and to help along the way.

I’m hearing deal flow has been really high. Is that likely to continue for awhile?

It’s good that we’re seeing tons of stuff, and there’s a tremendous amount of innovation occuring. It used to be there was a lot of consumer stuff going on, and maybe only a few things happening in the enterprise. Now the enterprise deal flow is much higher than consumer. But I’ll tell you, it’s so cool to see all that. And we’ll pass on most things. But it’s cool being here, at this firm, but also at this time. The last time there was really a lot of flourishing innovation around the enterprise was in the mid-1990s.

Will you be doing many more deals in 2013?

I’m sure we will. We have a lot of seed investments right now. It’s a lot like dating before you get married, so I’m a big believer right now in what we have going on with our seed portfolio. They’ve come up for A rounds, and we have the opportunity to really work with the company. But I like seeds, because you get to watch a company and watch the execution and the dynamics of the team. One recent deal we did was Convergent-IO, which was a seed that turned into an A round.

What do you like and dislike in a team?

We’re very much pro-technical co-founder or founder. I would say that that is like a fundamental criteria. It is easier to coach a technical co-founder on how to run a business than it is to coach a professional manager on the DNA of what the vision of the company is. We look for someone who has a burning passion to go take on the world. We want entrepreneurs that want to go for the long ball. They want to run the company for the long term, and they want it to be a standalone enterprise, as opposed to building something to get acquired. We also like to make sure the entrepreneur understands how they’re going to use the money they’re raising. We like for them to have an appreciation of the clear understanding of how to get from point A to B.

The Seattle-based company has lost four of its top executives, representing 40 years of combined service. So far, only one has been replaced.

All of the changes have happened quietly, without any announcements from the company — and stranger yet, most of the departed continue to be listed on the company’s leadership page.

But the departures are easily trackable after reading the company’s annual report filed last week with the Securities and Exchange Commission. When compared with the same filing a year earlier, it’s clear that Amazon’s top ranks are dwindling.

In 2011, the executive team had a dozen members. Now it has nine. The departures appear, though, to be part of a normal turnover process, rather than any meaningful restructuring.

Still, it’s hard to comprehend that Amazon’s management team has gotten smaller during the past year while the company’s overall headcount swelled to 88,400 in 2012 from 56,200 in 2011. Additionally, the e-commerce giant has entered several new businesses over the past decade.

The four executives who are gone are: Michelle Wilson, Amazon’s general counsel; Steven Kessel, SVP of Worldwide Digital Media; Marc Onetto, SVP of Worldwide Operations; and Sebastian J. Gunningham, SVP of Seller Services.

Two of the departures are easier to explain than the others.

For example, Wilson, who had been the company’s general counsel since 1999, stepped down in September to take parental leave. Her departure was documented by GeekWire in August, and Ty Rogers, a company spokesman, confirmed that she was replaced by David Zapolsky, who now holds three titles: VP, general counsel and secretary.

Another executive who can easily be accounted for is Kessel, who oversaw the company’s digital strategy, including books, music, video and the all-important Kindle. He has been on sabbatical now for about a year, as we reported last April.

“Steve continues to enjoy his well-deserved sabbatical, and we look forward to him returning later this year,” Rogers said.

Rogers also explained the departure of Onetto, though very briefly, saying that he had decided to retire after seven years on the job. Rogers declined to specify Onetto’s departure date, but according to the company’s annual report, he is no longer a top executive.

The biggest mystery of the four is the disappearance of Gunningham from the executive officer list (mostly because Rogers would offer only vague comments related to his standing at the company). Gunningham had served as the company’s SVP of Seller Services for five years. Update: Gunningham continues to hold the same title at Amazon, but is no longer a Section 16 officer, according to the company.

As I previously reported, I called what I believe to be Gunningham’s home number twice to clarify, but no one answered and his voicemail was full (Note to Gunningham: clean out your inbox!).

And, in response to multiple inquiries, Rogers repeated one answer: “As you may know, the 10-K only lists Section 16 officers.”

To explain, a Section 16 officer is essentially legal jargon for a member of the company’s executive team, so essentially Rogers is saying that Gunningham is simply that — no longer on the executive team.

Amazon, like other publicly held companies, is not required to disclose the departure of all executive team members, only the CEO, president, CFO, chief accounting officer and COO (although there are some exceptions). Therefore, the one way to notice if an executive has left is by checking the annual report year after year. In this case, that’s especially true since Amazon generally has no C-level execs. Rather, all of its officers hold the title of SVP.

Despite the departures, the Amazon team still has a bench of nine executives (including Wilson’s replacement), so it’s not like the company is running without an engine. And, of course, at the top of the pyramid continues to be founder and Chairman and CEO, Jeff Bezos.

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.

In a major exec departure, Square COO Keith Rabois will be leaving the San Francisco payments company.

Square gave no other information about the sudden management change, but sources said disagreements between Rabois and CEO and founder Jack Dorsey were part of the reason for his exit.

It’s not clear if there were more serious issues between them, or whether the parting was related to a specific business problem. But the departure of the No. 2 exec is significant, so definitely more to come on what happened.

In a statement about the move, Rabois only said:

It is amazing what Square has accomplished since August of 2010. When I joined, there were 17 engineers all reporting flatly to Jack. The local coffee shop served as our interview room. Leading our amazing crew has been the most rewarding professional journey of my life. I am forever grateful to Jack, for his confidence in me and to each and every member of the team for allowing me to learn from them.

But every day matters. And it is better at this point for me to be doing something different every day.

As a result, I’ve decided to resign from Square. I am very excited about what lies ahead for the company. Square could not be better poised for greatness.

I will have more to share about my next opportunity soon.

Said Square’s Dorsey:

Today I accepted Keith’s resignation from Square. When he joined, we had fewer than 30 employees and under 1000 active merchants. Today, over 3 million individuals and businesses are able to accept credit cards with Square, processing over $10 billion annually. We couldn’t have done it without him and we wish him well in his next opportunity.

Square CFO Sarah Friar will become acting COO, Square said. It’s an unusual move to put an exec without a lot of deep operational experience in the second-most-important slot at Square, though the former Goldman Sachs analyst and Salesforce.com finance exec is clearly familiar with the heart of the company’s business.

The change in top management comes at a time of fast growth for the three-year-old Square, which completed a $200 million funding round in the fall that valued the company at $3.2 billion. At the time, the company said it had more than 400 employees and would grow by 100 more by year’s end.

Square is best known for allowing a range of small businesses, such as taxicab drivers, to accept credit and debit cards using their mobile phones. But it has also branched out into other mobile payments areas.

Besides his stint at Square, Rabois is a well-known angel investor in Silicon Valley, and serves on several boards, including Yelp’s. He has worked at many startups, too, including PayPal (acquired by eBay) and Slide (acquired by Google).

TaskRabbit, the San Francisco-based marketplace for personal projects and services, has hired longtime Google exec Stacy Brown-Philpot as COO.

As both its funding and also competition have increased, the move is another major effort by TaskRabbit to up its management game.

Brown-Philpot certainly fits the bill, having worked at a wide range of jobs at Google for more than a decade. The Detroit native was most recently an entrepreneur in residence at Google Ventures, and has worked on global operations for a wide range of products — including as head of online sales and operations for Google India — and also in high-level finance jobs at the Silicon Valley search giant.

Previous to Google, Brown-Philpot worked at the PricewaterhouseCoopers accounting firm and also in M&A at Goldman Sachs. She attended the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, and has an MBA from the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University.

In other words, a very impressive resume — more impressive, given that she has always been a straightforward and charming exec in my many encounters with her over the years.

Brown-Philpot will be the second time that TaskRabbit founder Leah Busque has tried to expand the company’s top talent base. In June of last year, Busque took back the title of CEO from Hotwire founder Eric Grosse, who had been hired in late 2011.

But in November of 2012, TaskRabbit bought One Jackson, adding Anne Raimondi (pictured above with Brown-Philpot and Busque) as chief revenue officer. And now Brown-Philpot.

The trio has their work cut out for them. Last July, the company garnered another $13 million in funding in a Series C round, led by Founders Fund and including existing investors such as Shasta Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Parters. The startup has raised $38 million in total over its five-year history.

Here’s the video of an interview about the expansion plans that I did late last week with Busque and Brown-Philpot at their SOMA offices in San Francisco:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130114/taskrabbit-hires-googles-brown-philpot-in-a-renewed-management-expansion-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121227/despite-latest-alibaba-ipo-rumors-yahoo-deal-creates-incentive-to-offering-by-end-of-2015/ http://allthingsd.com/20121227/despite-latest-alibaba-ipo-rumors-yahoo-deal-creates-incentive-to-offering-by-end-of-2015/#comments Thu, 27 Dec 2012 21:38:58 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=280944

It seems like a month does not pass without another rumor about when Chinese Internet powerhouse Alibaba Group will have its much-anticipated IPO.

Today, in the latest loosely-sourced report, a newsletter quoted a Chinese-language site on a leaked memo that allegedly said the preparations would begin in the second half of 2013 for a public offering in late 2013 or early 2014.

Maybe not so fast, according to sources close to the situation, who note that incentives in a recent stock buyback with major shareholder Yahoo could drive a public offering to the end of 2015.

The timeframe is not a deadline, of course, but Alibaba benefits more if it does its IPO by then. Sources said the IPO will depend entirely on market timing and there is not a current plan to do so soon.

The news matters a great deal to Yahoo investors, especially because much of its market valuation is still made up of the remaining 22 percent stake it still holds in Alibaba, as well as its assets in Yahoo! Japan.

Yahoo completed the sale of half its stake in Alibaba earlier this year for $7.6 billion, netting the Silicon Valley Internet giant about $4.5 billion — most of which is being used for repurchases of shares.

As Alibaba noted at the time of that deal:

“Under the terms of the agreement with Yahoo!, Alibaba Group has the right to repurchase one-half of Yahoo!’s remaining stake upon a qualifying initial public offering in the future. Yahoo! originally acquired its stake in Alibaba Group in 2005 in exchange for US$1 billion and sale of its Yahoo! China business to Alibaba Group.”

Since then, Alibaba’s value has risen dramatically on a strong performance in its various units, including e-commerce giant Taobao.

At the time of its stock buyback with Yahoo, Alibaba’s value was $40 billion, which some think will rise strongly over the next few years.

That’s no guarantee, of course, and it depends how Alibaba’s business in China and elsewhere fares. That has not stopped some Yahoo investors, in fact, from flogging gigantic Alibaba IPO valuations, despite the fact that the company is mulling whether to keep it lower to avoid a Facebook-like debacle.

And while it’s clear the company is eventually headed for an IPO, those close to the situation said its management is not in any rush, especially with a recent influx of capital from investors such as Silver Lake, DST Global, Temasek and Yunfeng Fund.

“So many rumors have been floated on this IPO and we can expect a lot more until it actually happens,” said one source.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121227/despite-latest-alibaba-ipo-rumors-yahoo-deal-creates-incentive-to-offering-by-end-of-2015/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121214/max-levchin-says-marissa-mayers-very-ballsy-move-to-ceo-of-yahoo-was-the-reason-he-finally-took-board-seat/ http://allthingsd.com/20121214/max-levchin-says-marissa-mayers-very-ballsy-move-to-ceo-of-yahoo-was-the-reason-he-finally-took-board-seat/#comments Fri, 14 Dec 2012 08:34:23 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=278064

When I asked him to talk to me about why he decided to finally became a director at Yahoo after what was a very long mulling that started even before former Google exec Marissa Mayer became CEO, Max Levchin alerted me earlier today to a very solid post he did on the subject on his blog, which is called “too long to tweet.”

I now remember why I really like that Max Levchin: He blogs! (Also because he is an unapologetic coffee snob.)

In his essay, he breaks down the reasons into three parts: Personal, business and sentimental.

Noting his longtime admiration of Mayer, he noted “her decision to take the top role at Yahoo! was a very ballsy move, and when she asked for my help, I was excited about working with her.” Levchin, a well-known tech entrepreneur, also wrote that he hoped for a strong Yahoo, since it was a “massive net-positive for the Silicon Valley ecosystem, the market in general, and the US economy.”

Most of all, he said, Yahoo “showed me that computer geeks can start companies that create that future. I’d love to do my part in helping the company that inspired me.”

Levchin also emailed me to add: “If she gets the place into shape, it will be the absolute greatest turnaround in Valley’s recent history, possibly ever.”

Indeed.

Sources close to the situation told me that Mayer convinced Levchin to join the board by convincing him that he’d be able to help her inject entrepreneurial vigor into the company.

That would be good, and Levchin’s post is actually one of the best recitations of the kind of spirit Yahoo needs to revive itself that I have read in a long while.

It also tracks exactly on many conversations I have had with Levchin in the past about Yahoo’s troubles. He has long been intrigued by the opportunity despite management woes, innovation doldrums and the relentless talent exodus.

But judge for yourself — here’s the whole thing:

As announced by Yahoo! this morning, I have been asked and agreed to join its Board of Directors. It is an honor to be asked, in and of itself. There are three key reasons I accepted:

Personal: I’ve long respected Marissa’s talent and tenacity. Her decision to take the top role at Yahoo! was a very ballsy move, and when she asked for my help, I was excited about working with her.

Business: a stronger, fast-growing Yahoo!, with its tremendous resources is a massive net-positive for the Silicon Valley ecosystem, the market in general, and the US economy.

Sentimental: Yahoo! was one of the first true giants created by this amazing new thing, the Web. Before Google or Facebook, before almost everything there was Jerry’s Guide, right up there with What’s New page in Mosaic. Through amazing luck, I was a Computer Science freshman at UIUC in ’93, which gave me a glimpse into the fantastic future we are now living. Yahoo! showed me that computer geeks can start companies that create that future. I’d love to do my part in helping the company that inspired me.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121214/max-levchin-says-marissa-mayers-very-ballsy-move-to-ceo-of-yahoo-was-the-reason-he-finally-took-board-seat/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121128/ready-for-his-close-up-ross-levinsohn-join-zefr-board/ http://allthingsd.com/20121128/ready-for-his-close-up-ross-levinsohn-join-zefr-board/#comments Wed, 28 Nov 2012 16:00:51 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=273281

Former Yahoo exec Ross Levinsohn, who has laid pretty low since he left there earlier this year, will be joining the board of the Venice, Calif.-based video start-up, Zefr.

“Ross is a perfect intersection of everything we are in media and technology,” said Zefr co-founder Zach James. “He understands both sides natively, and we need that kind of expertise.”

Indeed — the company raised $18.5 million in additional funding this summer to turbocharge its offerings.

At the time, Zefr changed its name from Movieclips, and added sports, television and music videos to its film efforts. Zefr launched in 2009 as a niche video catalog site, focusing on helping movie studios collect and monetize fan and professional postings on YouTube, and offering advertisers a large network of premium movie clips.

The company said then that it had 600 million monthly views, 25,000 movie clips, and three billion total lifetime views on YouTube. It is about to celebrate one billion monthly views.

“Zefr has all the ingredients for success — dynamic, inspiring management, the ability to marry technology and content, and a business model that can scale,” said Levinsohn. “I’m thrilled to be part of the team.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121128/ready-for-his-close-up-ross-levinsohn-join-zefr-board/feed/ 0