The move to beef up communications expertise at the prominent Silicon Valley venture firm continues: Sequoia Capital has hired Andrew Kovacs, a well-regarded senior manager from Google, for a new job to help its portfolio companies with public relations and other related issues, sources said.

Google’s top flack Rachel Whetstone told staff about the move this past week, sources said, which will take place in mid-January.

Kovacs (pictured here, looking very GQ), who has been at the search giant for five years, has most recently headed PR for its apps unit.

His appointment comes after competing firms, including Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins, bolstered talent to the comms areas of their firms, in order to better service the companies they invest in.

This is especially important to early-stage start-ups and their often young entrepreneurs, who usually have little experience with the media or with marketing. But such expertise is increasingly important in the crowded and ever-noisier tech sector, as companies try to rise above the fray.

Sequoia already has a longtime marketing partner, Mark Dempster, to whom Kovacs will be reporting, serving the firm’s companies in the U.S. and Israel. Kovacs will not be working on PR for Sequoia itself.

Some of Sequoia’s better-known start-ups include Dropbox, Tumblr and Eventbrite.

Kleiner Perkins has nabbed former Twitter engineering head Mike Abbott, who left the social communications company less than two months ago to be an entrepreneur in residence at Benchmark Capital.

(Well, that didn’t last long, Mike, but maybe the food was better at 2750 Sand Hill Road than at 2480 Sand Hill Road.)

In an interview this morning, Abbott said that he hopes to stay a VC for 20 years (yipes!), since it allows him to work closely with a wide range of entrepreneurs and also get a broad view across a spectrum of businesses.

“I am really energized about what’s been happening in a lot of places like software,” he said. “From my experience, I think I bring a lot of differentiation for the companies Kleiner is invested in.”

And tech cred too. “We think engineers will be thrilled to have access to Mike and he’s a magnet for talent,” said Kleiner partner Ted Schlein, who compared him to all the comic-book heroes, The Avengers, in one person. “Mike is multi-faceted.”

Abbott was indeed a high-profile hire for Twitter a little over a year ago from Palm, where he served as head of its software and services, in charge of its webOS mobile platform.

He was brought in to provide a level of discipline and reliability to the Twitter communications platform and service, which had been plagued by persistent outages that made the Fail Whale infamous.

Abbott will focus on social, mobile and cloud investments at the well-known Silicon Valley venture firm while working on a team that includes high-profile players Mary Meeker and Bing Gordon.

Here’s the official press release:

Michael Abbott Joins Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as Partner

Engineering Leader to Help Social, Mobile and Cloud Entrepreneurs Build Teams and Ventures

MENLO PARK, Calif., December 1, 2011 – Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) today announced that Mike Abbott, former vice president of engineering at Twitter, has joined the firm as a partner on its digital team. Abbott led the building of innovative, high-performance applications and services at Twitter, Palm and Microsoft. With a deep background in social and mobile applications and infrastructure, Mike is also an expert in enterprise infrastructure and cloud computing and “big data” businesses, having founded Composite Software, and advised Cloudera and Jawbone.

“I’m excited to join KPCB’s partners to build new ventures faster,” said Abbott. “The partner mix of founders, operators and investors is ideal for entrepreneurs racing to scale at this disruptive time.”

“Mike is an exceptional and well-respected leader with an outstanding track record shipping great products,” said Ted Schlein, partner, KPCB. “Mike’s deep expertise from Palm and Twitter will help social, mobile and cloud entrepreneurs win.”

Dick Costolo, CEO of Twitter, said, “Mike is a huge engineering talent and will be a terrific asset to Kleiner’s technology companies. He was instrumental in helping us scale Twitter’s architecture to support incredible growth ̶ from 100 million daily Tweets in January 2011 to about 250 million daily tweets today.”

In less than a year and a half, Abbott grew the Twitter engineering team from 80 to more than 350 engineers in an intensely competitive recruiting market. Abbott’s team rebuilt and solidified Twitter’s infrastructure. Prior to joining Twitter in 2010, Abbott led the software development team at Palm that created HP/Palm’s next-generation webOS platform. Abbott was previously the general manager at Microsoft for .NET online services, which became Azure. Prior to that, he co-founded Passenger Inc. and founded Composite Software. Abbott has advised and invested in numerous software companies such as Cloudera, Hearsay Labs, Saynow and Jawbone.

Mike Abbott is just the third senior KPCB partner added in three years, joining Bing Gordon and Mary Meeker, each with exceptional records serving mobile, social and cloud entrepreneurs. KPCB’s digital team also bolstered its infrastructure expertise with the recent addition of Ray Bradford from Amazon Web Services, where he helped grow the company’s cloud database business.

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.

Revolution Growth, a new investment vehicle led by former AOLers Steve Case, Ted Leonsis and Donn Davis, has raised $450 million in their first investment fund.

Originally, as I reported in March, the growth fund was going to be $400 million, but more was added due to investor interest.

The figure is a large one for a new venture and includes two dozen limited partners.

According to a letter to its partners, which I posted below in its entirety, Revolution said it will make 10 to 12 investments over five years in the consumer space of about $25 million to $50 million and mostly on the East coast, where its principals live and work.

The fund will focus on the “speed-up” stage — which is apparently just past venture stage and not yet in growth.

While both Leonsis and Case have done a lot of investing in the Web 2.0 space both together (Revolution Money) and apart (the Groupon and LivingSocial social buying sites, respectively), this is the first time the pair of well-known Web pioneers are creating a more formal investment partnership.

The pair are also investing $75 million of their own money in total in the Revolution Growth fund.

Revolution’s three partners said they will also be deeply involved with entrepreneurs at its companies.

“We are not just investors, but former CEOs and business builders who have the expertise and passion to be actively involved with the companies we back,” said the letter. “By making only a few investments each year, we will have the time to really help the entrepreneurs with whom we partner.”

Well, you can read about the Revolution Growth fund yourself here:

letter

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.

As bidders ready their offers for all or parts of Yahoo this week, a lot of the eyes for one of the more aggressive ones will likely be on well-known Silicon Valley entrepreneur and powerful VC Marc Andreessen.

That’s because he’s deciding whether or not to play a significant role — as a key board member and even possibly as chairman — in an effort by private equity firm Silver Lake to buy part of the troubled Internet giant and attempt a dramatic reversal of its waning fortunes.

Andreessen, who now runs the Andreessen Horowitz venture firm with Ben Horowitz, has visited Yahoo execs, as I reported last week, part of a weighing of whether to deeply enmesh himself in turning around the iconic Web property.

He has been, as was also reported several months ago, allied with Silver Lake on a Yahoo effort since September and worked with the firm on its purchase and then sale of Internet communications service Skype.

For Andreessen — who serves on the board of Hewlett-Packard and has a lot on his plate running a major venture firm with investments at key companies throughout the tech sector — the decision to join with Silver Lake is a tough one, given that the possibility of failure is not unheard of.

“The question is whether Yahoo can be a growth company again,” said one person close to the situation. “And that is still unclear.”

In meetings with Yahoo execs, several sources noted that Andreessen was unusually blunt about the problems Yahoo faces and its mistakes in the past. They noted as well his reticence over the amount of work required to make a difference.

“He seemed very negative on the idea of whether anyone had what it took to turn it around,” said one exec.

Another factor: Possible friction with Yahoo co-founder and Andreessen friend Jerry Yang. The pair have discussed the issue on friendly terms. “Marc would not do this without Jerry being okay with it,” said one source.

That’s because observers expect the entrance of the Netscape co-founder — who has enormous clout with engineering talent across Silicon Valley, which Yahoo dearly needs — to overshadow and even minimize Yang’s involvement.

One thing is clear: Major shareholders, who are wary of any deal that would keep the current regime in place at Yahoo, told me in multiple interviews last week that the only way they would accept a partial investment by a private equity firm — called a PIPE — would be if there was new leadership in any deal.

And the first name mentioned by almost every Yahoo investor as a key get? Marc Andreessen.

Andreessen declined to comment on any of the 53 emails I sent him asking to.

In a new filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission concerning its upcoming IPO, Zynga is expected to unveil two key management and board changes at the online gaming phenom:

Chief Business Officer Owen Van Natta — who came to the San Francisco-based start-up several years ago to help CEO Mark Pincus grow it and develop it — will step down from his job and become a strategic adviser focusing on major partnerships. He’ll still remain board member at Zynga, but will give up millions of pre-IPO shares by moving out of his operational role.

And director and venture investor Brad Feld will leave the the board, which VCs sometime do as companies move to a public offering and add members with more specific business experience.

In his place, longtime entrepreneur and investor Sunil Paul, who founded a company called FreeLoader with Pincus many moons ago, will join the board.

Zynga confirmed the changes to me in a statement by Pincus:

“Owen is a valuable business partner. He’s made great contributions to Zynga and continues to be an important part of our team.”

Sources said the changes related to Van Natta around are not part of a recent controversy around a Wall Street Journal story about clawing back of some share options grants of early Zynga employees who had become less involved in the company. While the company cannot actually take back already vested shares owned by those staffers, the article has put a lot of scrutiny on Zynga and raised questions about how to cope with the kind of hyper-growth some Internet firms experience.

That’s certainly been the kind of rocket ride Zynga has been on, as it has grown from a small social gaming company on Facebook to a high-profile public company.

Zynga is in the final stages of its IPO process, answering questions from the SEC that are typical. If all goes well, Zynga execs are expected to go on a road show after the Thanksgiving and go public by the end of the year at a market valuation of close to $20 billion.

That was different from when Van Natta officially got to Zynga in the spring of last year — after a rocky experience running the doomed Myspace. At the time, he told me at the time that planned to be focused on scaling the business and did not consider himself a long-term operating executive.

Since then, he has helped Pincus hire a series of experienced gaming execs, including a chief operating officer, a chief marketing officer and others.

Zynga was Van Natta’s third high-profile Web company in recent years. He was a top early exec for Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook until early 2008, and in 2009 he took over News Corp.’s (NWS) MySpace, a job that lasted less than a year.

Early in his career, Van Natta was also was a top strategy, marketing and deal exec for Amazon, which bought an early social networking start-up called PlanetAll that he worked at.

It will now be interesting to see what Van Natta does next, but it is unlikely he will take a permanent position. He is a longtime angel investor in Silicon Valley, including in hot start-ups such as Asana and still holds a significant stake in Facebook.

But, in moving out of his job at Zynga, he will be giving up many millions of shares of a rich trove he was given when he arrived at the company. That said, Van Natta already owns millions of accelerated vested shares and will get another large grant as a board member.

Translation: Don’t cry for Mr. Van Natta, Silicon Valley — he made $42 million last year from Zynga shares alone.

Thismoment, the San Francisco-based digital marketing platform provider, said it has raised $7.3 million in its first institutional venture round from Sierra Ventures.

Before this funding, the company raised $4.25 million since 2008, when it was founded as a content-sharing Web site.

The company, which serves brands and agencies with its Distributed Engagement Channel platform, said it is aimed at “managing content, conversation and creative assets across earned, owned and paid media channels.” That means marketing “initiatives across Facebook, YouTube, brand sites, rich media ad units, mobile devices, tablets and digital outdoor placements,” as well as a platform to manage these social marketing campaigns.

Sierra’s Mark Fernandes will join the board. Other investors include private equity firm Fenway Partners, as well as well-known digital execs Shelby Bonnie, Jason Hirschhorn and Mika Salmi.

Thismoment said it will use the new funds to expand operations in the U.S. and also add them internationally.