Because I am an obessive-compulsive and Facebook is my new target of stalkery, I have re-read its IPO filing from earlier this week about nine times so far.

It’s chock full of interesting little bits of tasty info about the Silicon Valley social networking giant that I plan to shine a little more light on this week.

First up is not exactly a news flash: Besides graphic artists, VCs also clean up in the public offering docs.

But I am not talking about the variety of venture firms with their fingers in Facebook, which run the gamut from Accel Partners to DST Global and more.

I am talking about individual wins for venture capitalists, most especially Accel’s Jim Breyer and Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz.

According to the filing, while Accel holds almost 190 million shares, Breyer himself holds 11.7 million shares personally in the “James W. Breyer 2005 Trust dated March 25, 2005.”

Depending on what Facebook’s valuation turns out to be, based on current estimates, that hovers around $300 million. One caveat, according to the filing, is that 10.4 million of those shares — which are currently Class B stock and will be converted to Class A stock — are “subject to a voting agreement in favor of Mr. Zuckerberg.” That would be CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, who controls the company via such arrangements.

Not so the shares of super-VC Marc Andreessen, whose firm holds 3.6 million shares. But he himself has 5.2 million restricted stock units, presumably for board service and other advisory duties to Facebook. That’s a possible $125 million or more windfall.

Other board members have also gotten RSUs, but not in that large an amount. Washington Post head Don Graham holds one million of them, while Washington, D.C. political vet Erskine Bowles and Netflix’s Reed Hastings each clock in at only 20,000 each.

That’s a big delta, of course, which means it’s good times for VCs in Silicon Valley, both professionally and personally.

Let’s be clear on the much-awaited Asian deal that Yahoo and its Asian partners have been working on: While it is certainly still moving forward, once signed, it will not actually officially close until next year.

Yes, that’s right — 2013!

Still, what everyone and his investor is waiting for is the splashy announcement of the agreement, which involves the Silicon Valley Internet giant, China’s Alibaba Group and SoftBank, a large shareholder in Yahoo Japan.

Yahoo leadership has been hoping that could happen before Feb. 24, an important date after which activist shareholder Daniel Loeb could begin to mount a proxy fight against the current board.

And while the definitive agreement — involving the sale of Yahoo’s 33 percent stake in Alibaba and 35 percent stake in Yahoo Japan — has been moving back and forth among the dealmakers, one source said its completion might take a little longer than that, perhaps even into mid-March.

“It is one of the most complicated cross-border transactions in a long time,” said one person close to the situation. “It’s three different languages, three time zones and three companies that have not always seen eye to eye.”

It’s not that the companies don’t have the top talent on the effort. For Yahoo, it is CFO Tim Morse (who most recently also warmed the CEO seat, until Scott Thompson’s recent appointment); for Alibaba, it’s CEO Jack Ma and CFO Joe Tsai; and, for SoftBank, it is top man Masa Son and his top man Ron Fisher.

To make things even more complex, at the same time as the negotiating is going on, the trio also has to pay mind to how the Internal Revenue Service in the U.S. is going to view the whole deal.

As you can see here from a Wall Street Journal chart, it’s a pretty complicated “cash-rich split-off” to avoid taxes.

While the IRS cannot take an application for a “private letter ruling” until it has an actual agreement in hand, and will not issue one on a hypothetical transaction, the agreement still must be crafted so it is most likely to pass muster.

And only then can anyone move on to the many billions of dollars that Yahoo will instruct Alibaba and SoftBank to pay or contribute in kind for the asset part of the arrangement.

As the Journal noted, in more clarity than I ever could: “A key part of satisfying tax-code requirements is that the company shedding its shares get assets, not just cash, in exchange for them. Cash can’t account for more than two-thirds of the transferred value, tax rules say. This restriction was adopted in 2005 to limit misuse of the provision.”

While Yahoo’s execs have met about the various possibilities, it is more considering now than anything else.

And although a lot of names have been bandied about — Weather Channel, WebMD, as well as Glam Media and even Digg — the more likely direction Yahoo will go in will be different, according to many sources.

First, said sources, the key criteria for the purchase will be to diversify revenue streams, a theme Thompson sounded in his first earnings report recently. That could mean more online commerce, perhaps, rather than advertising or media assets.

Second, said sources, international properties might be more valuable to Yahoo than owning more U.S.-based ones, which opens up a range of interesting possibilities.

This could even include some already held by Alibaba, for example, such as garnering a big stake in its publicly-traded Alibaba.com. Technically, via Alibaba, Yahoo already owns some of the e-commerce giant, but not directly. Another possibility is to get back the Yahoo China business, also now owned by Alibaba.

Third, U.S. companies that Yahoo might look at could be unusual and even bold. Two names brought up in recent internal meetings, for example, were Netflix (before its stock revived) and Yelp (which is prepping for an IPO, and which Yahoo once tried to buy already).

And if things were not already needlessly complex in fixing its Asia problem, expect a change in the Yahoo board composition, too, as early as this week.

As I previously reported, at least four directors are expected to move on. More to the point, there will also be replacements announced at the same time.

To stave off Loeb and even give him a perceptible win, sources said the company is considering announcing the changes sooner than later, with the hope that fresh new members will placate other shareholders.

Lastly, with Thompson starting to take the reins after a month there, I would also expect he’ll weigh in on some significant restructuring (his word, not mine!) at Yahoo soon enough, too.

Complicated? Sure is! Perplexing even? And how! But until Asian and board resolutions, the real work of fixing Yahoo can’t really begin.

Early last year, his San Francisco company, which makes social games such as “FarmVille” that are played on Facebook, was on track for one of the hottest initial public offerings of 2011. But when Zynga finally went public last month, its stock price dropped 5% on the first day of trading and has since consistently traded below its $10 offering price.

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Zynga was up 42 cents, or almost 5 percent today, to close at $8.87 a share.

That’s a huge reversal from earlier this week when the stock nosedived to an all-time low. Meanwhile, none of the traditional game makers were having such a good day.

Electronic Arts closed down $1.47, or 7.5 percent, to $18.04 a share; THQ fell 7 percent to 66 cents a share; Take-Two Interactive fell .5 percent to $14.50 a share; and industry-leading Activision Blizzard slipped 2.5 percent $12.24 a share. GameStop also traded lower, finishing off the day down 2.8 percent to $23.51 a share.

The game makers were universally feeling the impact of an NPD Group report that revealed yesterday that videogame software sales fell 8 percent in December compared to the same month in 2010. When including hardware and accessories, like game cards, the entire industry contracted by 21 percent year over year.

Potentially, investors were betting that if the traditional game-makers weren’t fairing well, then Zynga was a good bet. The leading Facebook game-maker operates purely online and on mobile, so it potentially would be more isolated from the retail and packaged goods sectors.

The old guard vs. new guard battle also played out on the front lines yesterday.

EA was dealt an additional blow when Zynga announced it had hired away Barry Cottle, head of Electronic Arts’ Interactive division. Cottle, who was in charge of the company’s digital strategy, including social and mobile games, was EA’s biggest weapon in fighting Zynga’s dominance on Facebook and had led EA’s rise on mobile.

But EA’s loss was Zynga’s gain.

The social games leader appointed Cottle to the position of EVP of business and corporate development in charge of new global partnerships, acquisitions and other development roles.

Here’s the deal for new Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson, who left a job running eBay’s PayPal:

Annual pay: $1 million.

Bonus (if he’s very, very good): $2 million.

Bonus (even if he’s not): $500,000

Stock grant: $11 million.

One-time inducement grant: $5 million.

Make-whole cash bonus: $1.5 million

Make-whole restricted stock units: $6.5 million.

Shareholder horror if it doesn’t work this time: Priceless!

Oh, just read it for yourself:

YHOO-20120106-8K-20120103

The company’s stock dipped below $9 a share, and by midday, shares had fallen 29 cents to $8.90, nearing its all-time low of $8.75 a share.

Just last month, the largest social games company successfully sold 100 million shares at $10 apiece to raise $1 billion. On its second day of trading, the company’s stock  sank to what for now is its low before settling at $9.02 a share.

Since then, it has been trading fairly consistently, and there was no obvious explanation for today’s sell-off.

If anything the stock should be pushing higher on the release of its latest games. Typically, more games translates to more revenue for the company, which is focused on selling virtual goods in the free-to-play model.

This morning, Zynga announced its newest mobile game, a spinoff from its ultra-popular Words With Friends franchise. The game, called Scramble With Friends, challenges players to connect letters to spell as many words as possible before the clock runs out.

The game closely follows yesterday’s launch of Hidden Chronicles, which is the company’s first Facebook game in the popular “hidden objects” category, where players are challenged to find a number of items within a scattered and cluttered scene.

Still, Wall Street apparently isn’t impressed.

Based on intraday trading, the company’s market valuation dropped to $6.2 billion, about two-thirds of its IPO valuation of $10 billion.

Zynga isn’t the only stock market newbie trading lower today.

Groupon, the other hot Internet IPO of 2011, also sank. The company’s shares were down 90 cents, or almost 5 percent, to trade at $17.89.

Confidence in the stock was still reeling from two reports released this week. One surveyed merchants to find out how satisfied they were after running a deal. The other reported that revenues in November were weaker than expected across the entire daily deals industry.

The first quarter is the most common period for new stock and options to be awarded and therefore for older equity grants to become vested, according to compensation-research firm Equilar Inc. And so some Bay Area executives will soon be able to cash in millions of dollars of restricted stock units and stock options granted over the past few years.

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As I reported late last night, Yahoo said it had named PayPal President Scott Thompson as its new CEO. The exec is currently in charge of the large eBay online payments unit.

He’ll start next week, but there are staff conference calls today and also an all-hands meeting on Yahoo’s main Silicon Valley campus (meet at URLs, troops!) tomorrow.

Yahoo shares are down almost three percent on the news so far, as Wall Street has been hoping for a big sale of some sort and not another turnaround.

Yahoo will be holding a 7 am PT press conference about the move and presumably to swan around Thompson.

(Welcome, Scott! I hope you were informed — please do not listen to what co-founder Jerry Yang says on this important issue — that you are supposed to send all internal memos to me! Also, as one of my Twitter followers, Mike Dudas of Google just tweeted: “If Thompson leads companies as well as he grows a moustache, Yahoo made a great CEO choice!!” I concur.)

A Yahoo PR person confirmed the hire very cordially in a phone call early this morning and the Internet giant also put out a press release.

So did I, of a sort, last night. Given I am too tired to rewrite myself, here is what I had reported:

The company fired its last CEO, Carol Bartz, in September, and Yahoo has been run by the board and also by interim CEO Tim Morse, who had previously been its CFO.

After Bartz’s ouster, Yahoo said it was looking at a range of strategic options, including the possible sale of all or part of the company.

That was the focus at first, although Yahoo had simultaneously hired Heidrick & Struggles to look for a new CEO.

The company attracted two partial investment bids from private equity firms, Silver Lake and TPG Capital, but shareholders were unhappy with the low prices of these so-called PIPE — Private Investment in Public Equity — arrangements.

Yahoo then moved to try to strike a tax-advantaged deal with its long disgruntled Asian partners, China’s Alibaba Group and Japan’s SoftBank, to sell back parts of the large stakes it has long owned in Alibaba and Yahoo! Japan.

Those complex negotiations are still ongoing and look promising, which could yield Yahoo billions of dollars in capital to be given to investors, for stock buybacks or to invest in new initiatives.

Since then, the board — long considered one of the more cloddish in tech — has turned its attention to hiring a new CEO, in the hopes of trying once again to revive its flagging fortunes.

Thus, it began looking to hire someone with deep tech experience at a large public consumer Internet company in Silicon Valley.

That narrowed the field, with Yahoo looking at a range of choices with expertise in advertising, technology platforms and more.

There is a lot of that on the deep bench that eBay CEO John Donahoe has assembled at the online commerce giant, including Thompson.

Plus, he is a genuine Internet geek.

According to his eBay bio, Thompson became president of PayPal in early 2008, after serving as its CTO in charge of information technology, product development and architecture.

Before eBay, he worked at Inovant, a subsidiary of Visa formed to oversee global technology for the organization. He was also CIO of Barclays Global Investors and has worked at Coopers and Lybrand on information technology.

And here’s a tasty new wrinkle: Thompson recently “liked” Yahoo on his Facebook page, along with the decidedly more interesting Kickstarter and Splunk.

Again, Scott, thanks for the Facebook tip — I knew the social networking site could come in handy!

(Also, here is an interview I did with him post-announcement.)

And here is Yahoo’s official press release where Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock says nice stuff about Thompson:

YHOO_News_2012_1_4_General

According to sources close to the situation, Yahoo is poised to name a CEO, an announcement that could come as early as tomorrow.

Sources said the leading candidate likely to get the nod is a dark horse and someone who has not been named in previous reports (and not on my suggested lists!): PayPal President Scott Thompson, who runs eBay’s massive online payments unit.

While the situation could certainly change, the Yahoo board has definitely been moving aggressively of late to try to find a new leader for the Silicon Valley Internet giant.

The company fired its last CEO, Carol Bartz, in September; Yahoo has been run by the board and also by interim CEO Tim Morse, who had previously been its CFO.

After Bartz’s ouster, Yahoo said it was looking at a range of strategic options, including the possible sale of all or part of the company.

That was the focus at first, although Yahoo had simultaneously hired Heidrick & Struggles to look for a new CEO.

The company attracted two partial investment bids from private equity firms, Silver Lake and TPG Capital, but shareholders were unhappy with the low prices of these so-called PIPE — Private Investment in Public Equity — arrangements.

Yahoo then moved to try to strike a tax-advantaged deal with its long-disgruntled Asian partners, China’s Alibaba Group and Japan’s SoftBank, to sell back parts of the large stakes it has long owned in Alibaba and Yahoo! Japan.

Those complex negotiations are still ongoing and look promising, which could yield Yahoo billions of dollars in capital to be given to investors, for stock buybacks or to invest in new initiatives.

Since then, the board — long considered one of the more cloddish in tech — has turned its attention to hiring a new CEO, in the hopes of trying once again to revive its flagging fortunes.

Thus, it began looking to hire someone with deep tech experience at a large public consumer Internet company in Silicon Valley.

That narrowed the field, with Yahoo looking at a range of choices with expertise in advertising, technology platforms and more.

There is a lot of that on the deep bench that eBay CEO John Donahoe has assembled at the online commerce giant, including Thompson.

Plus, he is a genuine Internet geek.

According to his eBay bio, Thompson became president of PayPal in early 2008, after serving as its CTO in charge of information technology, product development and architecture.

Before eBay, he worked at Inovant, a subsidiary of Visa formed to oversee global technology for the organization. He was also CIO of Barclays Global Investors and has worked at Coopers and Lybrand on information technology.

And here’s a tasty new wrinkle: Thompson recently “liked” Yahoo on his Facebook page, along with the decidedly more interesting Kickstarter and Splunk.

(Dear Scott, Nice to meet you. And thanks for the tip! FYI, it’s a juicy giveaway like that which feeds my insatiable quest to find out All Things Yahoo!)

More to come soon, I expect.

Yahoo, as usual, never got back to me on my query, although the much more cordial people at eBay politely declined to comment.

The stock fell $1.36, or roughly 6.6 percent, to $19.27 a share.

In November, the company’s stock priced at $20 a share and has been fairly consistent since, except for one major hiccup late last month when shares dropped as low as $15.

But it’s almost as if investors were looking for a reason to dump the stock — the survey released today by Susquehanna Financial Group and daily deal industry tracking firm Yipit was largely positive. It found that 80 percent of merchants said they enjoyed working with daily deals sites, such as Groupon, LivingSocial and others.

Some of the more negative points included concerns about the high level of discounts associated with featuring a daily deal and low repeat rates from consumers who purchased vouchers.

The response the market may have found the most alarming was how often merchants were comfortable running deals. The survey found that 52 percent of the merchants had no plans to feature deals in the next six months, and only 24 percent intend to offer one in the same time period.

But realistically, most small-to-medium-size merchants could not offer deals more often than once a year, given that it typically takes that long for vouchers to expire. Most customers redeem the coupons over several months.

The survey polled nearly 400 merchants that had run daily deals in the past with companies such as Groupon and LivingSocial, but only 100 responded to the questions.

Last week, I posted on the so-so overall performance of tech stocks in 2011.

Most were in the negative numbers going into last week, and they stayed that way for the full-year comparison.

Bottom line: Tech was a bad investment if you started buying stocks on the first day of trading in January of 2011. And you got really socked if you bought into most of the IPOs of a spate of new Internet companies.

No pressure for 2012, Facebook! (I’m talking to you, Sheryl Sandberg!)

As we open trading this morning after the holidays, here’s where we stand with share prices since one year ago from a sample group I wrote about the most in 2011:

UP

Google: Rose 8.7 percent.

eBay: Rose 8.98 percent.

Apple: Rose 25.6 percent.

Jive Software: Rose 6.7 percent (went public December 15, 2011).

DOWN

Amazon: Declined 4.3 percent.

Yahoo: Declined 3.01 percent.

Microsoft: Declined 6.99 percent.

Cisco: Declined 10.6 percent.

ROUT-ROH DOWN

AOL: Declined 36.3 percent.

Hewlett-Packard: Declined 38.8 percent.

Juniper: Declined 44.7 percent.

FRESHMAN SLUMP (AND INVESTOR DUMP)

Zynga: Declined 0.95 percent (went public December 19, 2011).

Groupon: Declined 20.99 percent (went public November 7, 2011).

LinkedIn: Declined 33.2 percent (went public May 20, 2011).

Pandora: Declined 42.5 percent (went public June 16, 2011).

Yandex: Declined 49.3 percent (went public May 25, 2011).

The stock market is closed today, as part of the Christmas holiday. But it is doubtful — barring any major announcements — that the vastly different performances seen by a range of tech companies will change much.

Which is to say, some companies — such as eBay and Google — did well, although only Apple shares rose significantly enough to cause festive feelings.

As of Friday, Google rose almost 7 percent for the year to date, eBay rose 10.8 percent and Apple was up almost 26 percent.

As for all the others in tech? Lumps of coal for investors of varying size.

Let’s start with the better negative performances: Amazon was down 1.95 percent, Yahoo was down 2.7 percent and Microsoft was down 6.7 percent.

Not exactly anything to wassail about. And Yahoo shares were only down a little, since the recent swirl around its possible sale gave its stock a recent bump, or the performance would have been worse, based on its financial results.

And the oft-troubled AOL? Down 35.3 percent.

The crop of new Internet companies was also not doing so great. The latest, Zynga was down only 1.2 percent, Groupon down 12.5 percent and LinkedIn down 32.3 percent. Pandora truly tanked, with a 42.5 decline in share price. Only Russia’s Yandex bested that, with a 48.6 percent drop.

Enterprise-focused companies also had a lackluster year. While recently public Jive Software was up 9.2 percent, Cisco was down 8.7 percent and Hewlett-Packard was down 38.5 percent. Juniper got truly socked, with a 43.6 percent decline.

The music you are looking for right about now is “(Hey, Won’t You Play) Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song” by B.J.Thomas, which you can enjoy here in this timely video:

Yahoo shareholders felt a little giddier earlier this week, when it seemed as if the company had finally decided to make a deal with its Asian partners.

But the happiest crew might end up being the Silicon Valley Internet giant’s outside counsel, Skadden Arps — and especially Leif King, the fantastically named legal eagle who has been advising Yahoo on the deal.

That’s because today the Yahoo board approved continuing the negotiations to come to a final agreement over the stake, sources said, which should take six to eight weeks.

It’ll surely be happy holidays for billable hours!

As costly as the legal bills will be, if it all goes well, an Asian solution will mean one major problem solved, with a possible pile of cash and new assets coming in to Yahoo.

To get there, the company signed a term sheet earlier this week with Japan’s SoftBank to sell back all its holdings there, and with China’s Alibaba Group to sell off more than half its stake (moving from a 40 percent stake to a 15 percent one).

The deal values Yahoo’s total shares in both companies at about $17 billion.

While it gets a pretty accounting name — “cash-rich split “– the vehicle to unwind it all is essentially a complex tax dodge finally cooked up by the trio, in which cash, new assets and stock will be moved around until everyone gets what they want (except the U.S. government).

I would explain it — but I am on vacation, and would rather drink eggnog and sleep — so here is The Wall Street Journal’s version, which I like because it sounds like Alibaba and SoftBank are giving Yahoo a hugely loaded Starbucks card for Christmas:

“As envisioned in the scenario, Alibaba would create a subsidiary into which it would put several billion dollars of cash, plus an operating asset that Yahoo wants to buy using additional cash from Alibaba, almost like giving Yahoo a prepaid card for an asset of its choice, the people said.”

Everyone is hoping there will not be any hiccups in the deal, which has been spearheaded by Yahoo board member and Intuit CEO Brad Smith, and Jerry Yang, who is also the company’s co-founder and a major shareholder.

Alibaba CEO Jack Ma and CFO Joe Tsai, both co-founders of that company, were the point men for the Chinese company. And for SoftBank, it was its founder and CEO Masa Son and his main U.S. exec, Ron Fisher.

Now, said sources, Yahoo’s board is hoping to still keep the bids from a pair of private equity firms — Silver Lake and TPG Capital — alive.

While initially the focus on the action, the PE bidding for partial Yahoo stakes has recently been sidelined by the Asian deal.

Now, sources said, Yahoo is hoping the new infusion of cash and assets will allow it fend off shareholder unrest — stock buybacks and dividends, anyone — to solicit higher prices from the firms to make strategic investments.

Yahoo had considered the initial bids too low, as did some very pissed-off activist shareholders.

Still, it’s not clear if those firms will jack their offers now, although sources said Silver Lake is still interested in some sort of deal that would give it influence over remaking Yahoo.

Silver Lake and others think the long-troubled company could be revived with some effort, and become a much more lucrative Web property.

But those negotiations might run into roadblocks over who gets to pick leadership for the company. Yahoo has accelerated its efforts to hire a new CEO, after firing Carol Bartz in September.

The PE firms, who would buy a large stake in Yahoo, also have wanted some level of control, including CEO and board approval, in order to be able to make massive changes at the company to turn it around.

Wall Street seems to like the Asian part of the deal, at least, since it shows some sort of forward momentum at Yahoo, and from its often-lugubrious board.

Shares are up almost 7 percent in the last few days, although they are not popping as they might be, given that new valuations based on a successful Asian deal put the stock at a much higher price.

In other words, investors like what they see, but are watching and waiting for more.

The price for the 100 million shares being sold values the San Francisco company at $7 billion. Including unexercised options and warrants, the value is $8.9 billion.

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In midday trading, the company’s shares fell 5 percent to $22.09 a share. Even so, that’s up from late last month, when the Chicago company traded as low as $15.24 a share, or roughly half of what some investors paid on day one.

The company is like a student in high school who still needs to push in order to get accepted into an Ivy League school. Even though it’s likely a shoo-in — and it’s already gone public — there’s no leeway for senioritis.

Most of the analysts’ evaluations were concerned about risks, such as the company’s short operating history, the prospects for growth now that it has gotten so large and intense competition coming from peers like LivingSocial, Amazon and Google among many others.

“While much execution lies ahead in order to meet expectations, the opportunity is large and Groupon has competitive advantages,” according to Barclays Capital, which had a neutral rating and a price target of $27.

J.P. Morgan also gave Groupon a neutral rating, but set a lower price target of $24 a share because there was still a lot to do despite its first-mover advantage.

“As subscriber growth slows, we project a major profitability ramp for Groupon over the next two years. However, we believe this ramp is largely anticipated and its magnitude leaves little room for error in execution and operations at current levels,” the analyst wrote.

Citigroup’s Mark Mahaney had the harshest words, saying he was “waiting for a better deal.”

He attributed his neutral stance and $24 price target to the lack of success in the company’s new segments, such as real-time offers, vacation packages and physical goods. “That, we believe, could take significant time to prove out,” Mahaney explained.

Nearly all the analysts were also concerned about the upcoming expiration date for a lock-up period. Expected in May 2012, it would allow some early investors and employees to dump the stock.

In other words, we could see a lot of people cashing in their vouchers right as the offer expires.

Last night, the New York Times dropped a juicy little tidbit into its everything-but-the-kitchen-sink daily update of the board mishegas at Yahoo around the deliberations yesterday over two competing private equity bids to buy a partial stake in the company.

No, not the one about Jeff Jordan — former eBay exec, OpenTable CEO and now VC at Andreessen Horowitz — possibly taking a big role at Yahoo if the firm’s bid with Silver Lake prevailed — which was mysteriously removed very soon after it posted (’cuz he will not, so good move, NYT!)

I mean the one about the venture firm’s big-kahuna partner, Marc Andreessen — who will indeed take a board seat and play a strong role in Yahoo’s future if his bid wins — getting a possible competitor in the Silicon Valley savior section of the ongoing show.

That would be in the form of Reid Hoffman, the well-known entrepreneur, VC and angel investor, who the Times said had talked with TPG Capital, Silver Lake’s rival in the Yahoo bidding, about becoming a possible partner.

Wrote the Times:

“TPG has held discussions with Greylock Partners, another venture capital firm, about a possible alignment, two people said. TPG is hoping to draw on the expertise of Reid Hoffman, one of Greylock’s partners and the founder of the professional social network LinkedIn, these people said.”

Translation: If Silver Lake has a tech icon of substance on its team to give uber-geek appeal to its offer — dagnabbit — then TPG was going to raise with another one, whom the very same Times reporter who wrote last night’s article recently nicknamed “The Start-Up Whisperer” in a recent glowing profile of Hoffman.

While I am still trying to grok what a start-up whisperer exactly means (and how someone as self-effacing as Hoffman would react to such a twee moniker without snickering), it’s a move that has likely already irritated Silver Lake.

After all, TPG aiming at nabbing Hoffman is akin to two crazy neighbors trying to one-up each other in holiday-lighting lawn decor. (You have a singing Santa, so I’ll have a singing Santa — and I might even add a Lady Gaga-themed crèche for good measure!)

But it’s not a bad instinct, either, to get your own live-action Silicon Valley legend, even if it is only half true in Hoffman’s case.

Because, according to sources who know such things, while Hoffman and TPG have had conversations, there have been no commitments, and nothing is close to being agreed on to link the pair.

That could certainly change, and quickly, but Hoffman or Greylock aren’t currently in TPG’s proposal to Yahoo.

That’s in contrast to Andreessen, who is all in (I am not even going to bother with “sources said” here, since everyone and my mother has seen the proposal) with Silver Lake on the deal to purchase 19.9 percent of Yahoo for about $16.50 a share.

As I reported earlier this week, for Silver Lake’s money and expertise in fixing broken things, the bid includes: Silver Lake getting three board seats; cash going to a buyback of stock or granting of a dividend to shareholders; the ability to select a CEO; approval of its strategic plan for Yahoo, and its solution to come to terms with Yahoo’s unhappy Asian partners; and all the purple wearables you could ever hope for (perhaps Yahoo’s best asset, IMHO, especially worn by such obviously cool dudes, as seen here).

Also, controversial Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang gets to stay around on the board (but only if he becomes very, very quiet, so as not to rile the activist shareholders).

TPG’s bid is less formed, although its price is slightly higher. And the PE firm has yet to check the “Big Geek Included” box.

Hence, the floating of Hoffman as a contender to take on Andreessen, who was once dubbed the “Golden Geek” by Time magazine.

I hope TPG does, soon, since what a matchup it would be!

But, for now at least, the pair — who share big investments in a range of Web companies, most especially Facebook (Andreessen is on the board of the social networking giant, and Hoffman was an early investor and adviser) — are at peace.

Dagnabbit.

What an amazing coincidence.

On the very day Yahoo’s board is considering actual bids from two private equity firms interested in deals to buy close to 20 percent of the company for between $16.50 and $17.50 a share, comes a spate of eerily similar breathless media postings that there’s another bid in the making for $20!

That’s totes better, right? I mean, how can Yahoo’s directors accept a real live lesser-priced bid now when there’s a prettier one in the fog just ahead?

No, really, it’s there — if you squint really, really hard.

Except it’s not even close, when you actually check with two of the key members of the group of alleged buyers, which would apparently be Blackstone, Bain Capital and Yahoo’s Asian partners, Alibaba Group and SoftBank.

Sources close to Blackstone and Alibaba said while there have been talks, which have been previously reported weeks ago here and elsewhere, there is no bid in the offing that is close to fruition and at that price.

In an unusual public statement, in fact, Alibaba’s John Spelich said flatly: “Alibaba Group has not made a decision to be part of a whole-company bid for Yahoo.”

This from a company whose voluble CEO Jack Ma is prone to making giant and noisy speeches to signal his interest in finding a way — any way — to get back shares of the Chinese Internet giant from Yahoo.

Not this time, and several sources close to Alibaba reiterated that it was nowhere near close to any bid as yet and that a price is still up in the air. In addition, sources added, Alibaba might decide to work with another PE group, such as Providence Equity.

In addition, sources noted that if Alibaba could strike an adequate deal with private equity bidders to get a large chunk of the stake back, it would be highly preferable to a hostile takeover of Yahoo that could end in tears and little else.

“The threat of a takeover is more useful than the damage an actual takeover would cause for everyone,” said one person close to the situation. “No one wants this to be unfriendly.”

So why the rumors — doubtlessly being spread around by hopelessly cynical Wall Street types interested only in stock manipulation — surfacing today?

Simple: To get some easy-to-play media outlet to bite, report it as speculative fact and cause the stock of Yahoo to take flight tomorrow.

Hey, it could happen!

Sadly, this junior-league trick has already worked — Yahoo shares were up a dollar to $16.72 in after-hours trading tonight.

It is likely to go even higher tomorrow, which could cause the board of Yahoo to delay accepting either of the partial bids from Silver Lake or TPG Capital, even if they were the best thing for the company and its employees.

Except that the job of the Yahoo board is to evaluate what’s before them and not what is perhaps, someday, soon, wait-by-the-phone, really soon, I promise is going to be delivered.

In fact, several sources noted that it’s not clear if the Yahoo board has even asked for parties to submit whole-company bids yet.

When and if Yahoo’s board does that and if something better actually does come down the pike, with a much fatter price tag of $20 or more, then the directors can mull that over.

That would be the prudent thing to do for the company, its employees and its shareholders, even if Yahoo’s stock gets a temporary lift now.

Maybe I am just a hopeless Silicon Valley romantic and not a hardened Wall Street M&A type, but the survival of Yahoo is the real point here, rather than the lining of bankers’ already fee-stuffed pockets.

And anything other than that is just fog.

According to sources close to the situation, neither CEO Mark Pincus nor one of its principal venture shareholders, Kleiner Perkins, will be selling any shares in its upcoming initial public offering.

While big investors often divest stock in IPOs, not all do. It is a carefully watched number by investors, who are always wary of insiders who unload a lot of shares in an offering.

But such activity by the fast-growing San Francisco online gaming company will be watched carefully since Pincus has recently been painted in a number of press reports as the greedy Mr. Potter of Silicon Valley.

Among the allegations is that he runs a poisonously tough culture that tracks its employees’ output and performance via elaborate data models that require extraordinary amounts of work, along with nefarious list-making of who’s naughty and who’s not.

That big-brother behavior has reportedly included taking away high-ranking jobs and the sweet stock options that go along with them from those execs found wanting.

While there is no doubt Pincus is a hard-charging personality, his defenders note that it’s due to a belief that life at Zynga is a meritocracy and that his practices are not any more heavy-handed than those at other firms.

Indeed, Pincus has a lot of competition in the tough-guy tech CEO category from longtime legends such as Microsoft’s Bill Gates, who set the gold standard for mean, as well as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and now Google CEO Larry Page.

Pincus does not even rate in this pantheon, which is more typical of tech companies than anyone would care to admit or, to be fair, care to care about. With big benefits, vast wealth and much latitude, many in tech don’t mind the grueling work schedules.

After all, it’s not exactly ditch-digging, now is it?

In any case, sources said the coverage has hit Zynga staff hard, as well as Pincus, who has not responded due to the IPO’s quiet period. That’s in contrast to Groupon, the daily-deals site whose own rough process was rife with highly negative stories about the company’s prospects.

While those media accounts were more aimed at the business itself and less personal, Groupon CEO Andrew Mason vociferously defended the company in a controversial letter that was then leaked and published (to me and by me!).

Pincus will doubtlessly have a lot to say to investors who ask about the company’s culture and its possible negative impact on attrition, as some stories have charged.

His decision not to sell, sources said, was inspired by Zynga investor and close friend Reid Hoffman, who has sold very little of the stock of LinkedIn, where he serves as chairman.

The action all begins next week, according to multiple reports, when Zynga takes its show on the road in preparation for an IPO that is expected to value the company at $15 to $20 billion and will take place before the new year.

It will debut under the ZNGA ticker on the Nasdaq market.

While some have been worried about Zynga’s future growth, its past performance has been a lot stronger than other Internet offerings. In the first nine months of the year, the company posted $828.9 million in revenue, double the amount from a year ago, with net income of $30.7 million.

Pincus’s holding onto shares will be seen as a plus, of course, although he has sold a large amount of stock in Zynga’s history.

According to its S-1 filing:

“From our inception in October 2007 to date, Mr. Pincus, our Chief Executive Officer, Chief Product Officer and the Chairman of our Board of Directors, has purchased an aggregate of 149,197,328 shares of our common stock. To date, Mr. Pincus has sold an aggregate of 43,629,310 shares of our common stock at prices ranging from $0.42 to $13.96.”

Pincus now holds 91.4 million of Class B shares, 16 percent of the total, as well as 20.5 million of Class C shares, 38 percent of that group. Kleiner holds 65.2 million shares, or 11.2 percent, of Class B shares.

Other big Zynga owners, who might or might not sell at the IPO, include Institutional Venture Partners, Union Square Ventures, Foundry Venture Capital and Avalon Ventures.

Investors are not taking it as a good sign that Netflix needs a $200 million infusion of cash, and issuing fresh stock in the process. Netflix’s share price, which fell Monday during an ugly trading session, slipped about 8 percent in after-hours trading but clawed back some of those losses.

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About eight million LinkedIn shares came to market Thursday, with 1.3 million coming from the company and 6.7 million from insiders and early holders. The secondary offering, which followed the company’s successful debut in May, roughly doubled the company’s float, or the number of its shares available for trading.

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As I reported earlier today, social gaming giant Zynga has posted another filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

That includes Chief Business Officer Owen Van Natta stepping out of an operational role and forfeiting shares in the process. To be exact: That will be 4.6 million options and close to 800,000 restricted stock units.

All of the details are in his transition letter in Zynga’s massive new S-1, which is in exhibit 10.12 to the amendment filing.

I would start at page 119, but to summarize: Van Natta is keeping all the vested stock options and restricted stock units, currently more than two million stock options that are already vested and another 936,000 RSUs (Zynga calls them ZSUs) already vested. He also has another 750,000 shares that will continue to vest due to his board position.

But, because he is no longer an employee, he is forfeiting all his unvested employee stock options and RSUs. Although it does seem like a lot, this is typical in such cases.

I need to go to lunch, so just read it for yourself:

ZYNGAINC-20111117-S1A-0

But what about the unknown investors? The ones who purchased the stock on the first day, or picked it up a few days later?

To find out those answers, a San Francisco company called SigFig culled its database, which includes more than $20 billion in investment assets from its users, to gain insight into how private investors actually fared from the daily deal leader’s IPO.

Today, Groupon’s stock is up 26 cents, or 1.1 percent, to trade at $24.33; it has stayed fairly constant after closing more than a week ago at $26.11.

Here’s what SigFig found:

• 22.3 percent of people who bought Groupon’s stock on the day it went public dumped the stock that same day.
• The average purchase price on day one was $28.17, or well above the company’s $20 initial price. At one point, the stock went as high as $31.14.
• Even though Groupon ended the day up, almost two-thirds (62.5 percent) of people who sold off their stock on opening day lost money. The average negative return was 3.3 percent.
• People showed hometown pride: The highest percentage of investors came from Chicago, where Groupon is headquartered.
• For those who bought and sold on day one, Groupon’s IPO performed better than Pandora, but not as well as LinkedIn. Those who flipped Pandora’s stock lost an average of 8.52 percent; those who flipped LinkedIn’s stock made an average of 7.10 percent.

Demand Media beat Wall Street expectations in the third quarter, posting a loss of five cents a share. Investors had expected it to lose from four to six cents.

Revenue was up 25 percent to $85.1 million, compared to $65.4 million in the same period a year ago. Minus traffic acquisition costs, sales increased 26 percent to $78.1 million from $62.2 million.

The stock of the Santa Monica, Calif., social content company has suffered in the quarter due to worries about its traffic and growth, but it has recently bounced back after hitting all-time lows.

After losing almost nine percent today, in profit-taking ahead of earnings after a recent price surge, Demand shares rose over 17 percent in after-hours trading to $8.30.

Some more details, according to a Demand statement on the Q3 financial results:

Content & Media Revenue increased 27% to $50.7 million, compared with $39.8 million in Q310.

Traffic acquisition costs (TAC), which represent the portion of Content & Media revenue shared with Demand Media partners, of $3.4 million, or 6.7% of Content & Media revenue, compared with $3.2 million, or 7.9% of Content & Media revenue, in Q310.

Content & Media Revenue ex-TAC grew 29% to $47.4 million, from $36.7 million in Q310.

Registrar Revenue increased 20% to $30.7 million compared with $25.5 million in Q310.

In addition to its more high-profile content business, Demand also has a domain registry unit.

“We reported another strong quarter as we continue to build Demand Media’s foundation for long-term growth,” said Richard Rosenblatt, Chairman and CEO of Demand Media in the statement. “The Company is uniquely positioned to deliver data-driven professional content through its robust content publishing platform. We are now in the process of optimizing that platform while increasing our investment in video content and enhancing the quality, engagement and user experience of our sites.”

There will be a conference call at 2 pm PT today, which I will liveblog (as long as it is lively!).

Until then, enjoy the official Q3 earnings press release:

3Q11 Earnings ReleaseFINAL

Just last week, it seemed as if the dangerous riptide had finally turned for Demand Media, the social content company whose stock for the quarter bottomed out in mid-October, in the $5-a-share range.

It has now rebounded to close Friday at $7.76, with a market valuation of just over $651 million — still a far cry from a high of over $27 a share in the last year, but well below the target price of upward of $14 from Wall Street analysts.

That’s why there will be plenty of questions for CEO Richard Rosenblatt in a conference call scheduled for after the Santa Monica, Calif.-based Demand reports its third-quarter earnings, following the close of markets this afternoon.

Analysts are expecting Demand to lose four to six cents a share. Revenue is expected to be up.

One issue sure to be on the docket will be the traffic problems at its flagship eHow site, which stymied Demand in the quarter. The situation caused it to release a statement about the issue, “which the Company believes is temporary and was the result of an internal technical issue. The technical issue has recently been remediated.”

Assume you will hear more on that and other topics, including updates on the cost of its content and the continued impact on Demand of search-algorithm changes at Google, as well as how it is faring in attracting more lucrative advertising.

I will be covering the earnings and the analyst call, so tune in later today for answers.