All Things Digital

Former Yahoo music head Dave Goldberg–who has been an entrepreneur-in-residence at Benchmark Capital since he left the Internet company more than two years ago–has finally landed at another company, sources said, taking over as CEO of SurveyMonkey.

Goldberg will head the Portland-based private company, which is an online survey creator, including offering analytics of the results.

Sources said he will also become a minority investor in SurveyMonkey, as part of a deal in which Spectrum Equity Investors and other investors, including Bain Capital Ventures, are acquiring a majority interest in the company.

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Pure Digital, the maker of the popular Flip digital video cameras, has sold itself to Cisco (CSCO) for $590 million in stock.

The deal, which had been rumored last week, was announced this morning by Cisco.

The simplicity of Pure Digital’s line of relatively inexpensive cameras has made it a huge consumer success, which is no easy task in the devices arena.

And Cisco has been trying to turbocharge its consumer-focused business and the move is a clear step in that direction.

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Since BoomTown constantly called the $15 billion valuation of Facebook “insane” when Microsoft forked over $240 million in 2007, and gave Slide’s Max Levchin a very hard time when his widget company got a $550 million valuation a year ago, it’s only fair that I say something equally appropriate about Twitter.

The hot microblogging service just got its very own $250 million valuation, but without a dime of revenue in sight. (I know, Bijan, it’s coming, it’s coming!)

After all, Facebook and Slide got their funding in boom times and here we are hurtling toward a possible Depression: The Sequel.

But I am torn.

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This morning, FriendFeed, which is a kind of content delivery version of Twitter, went international, launching in six new languages–German, French, Spanish, Japanese, Russian and simplified Chinese. Now live, the move is a natural extension for the Mountain View, Calif.-based start-up–founded earlier this year by a small gang of ex-Googlers, who joined together to create a service for super-aggregating updates of all kinds for social-networking and news items in an ongoing feed. Here’s a video interview I did last week with Taylor and Buchheit about a range of topics, including–my favorite–monetization, or lack thereof, of a lot of terrific services like FriendFeed and Twitter.

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Here’s a video of star VC John Doerr reciting his 10 tips for start-ups to follow in the economic downturn, dispensed at a VentureBeat roundtable event on the downturn yesterday.

And the Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers VC didn’t need a massive, noisy PowerPoint like Sequoia Capital to make his quick and clear points, which he delivered in four minutes flat.

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Here’s one certainty in the hubbub that has resulted in the wake of the departure of high-profile exec Ben Ling from Facebook last week: COO Sheryl Sandberg is definitely not responsible for the melting of the polar ice caps.

That’s the joking question–Was global warming Sandberg’s fault too?–that was asked at a staff meeting at the social networking start-up last Friday afternoon, after the news of Ling’s departure, on the heels of some other previous employee exits, suddenly morphed into a series of increasingly vituperative posts on the Valleywag tech gossip site that all centered on what blogger Owen Thomas called Sandberg’s “reign of terror” at Facebook.

The truth of the situation, though, is actually a lot more interesting.

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It looks like Facebook will definitely be moving from its funky multi-building setup in downtown Palo Alto, Ca. to a centralized campus in Silicon Valley, said several sources.

The high-profile social networking company–which has been undergoing a major managerial shift of late as it matures from its startup status to that of a more established Web player–has been growing quickly to almost 600 employees today from a couple hundred last year.

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In a move BoomTown is still trying to noodle over, longtime Facebook exec Matt Cohler (pictured here) will be leaving the social networking site to become a general partner at Benchmark Capital.

Cohler, who is currently Facebook’s VP of Product Management, was one of its earliest hires and, as I wrote once, seemed to me like “the Yoda figure at Facebook to me.”

He will not leave the prominent social networking company for the venture capital firm until the fall, though.

And, after he goes, Cohler will remain as a “special advisor” to Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and senior management.

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Yahoo’s board has been meeting today and, doubtlessly, its directors had a lot to talk about (more on that later!).

Of course, there’s the obvious topic of having to figure out how best to deal with the noisy stylings of billionaire investor Carl Icahn, who is waging a proxy war on Yahoo and calling for new management at the top.

But perhaps what the board should be focused on is the old management at Yahoo, especially in the levels just below the top, who have been operating the company under a lot of stress for far too long.

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So I moderated a panel yesterday at AlwaysOn’s Venture Summit West, held at the Ritz Carlton at Half Moon Bay, Calif., with the title “Is There Still an Upside to the Internet?”

Of course, I redubbed it: “Has the Internet Jumped the Shark?” For the love of All Things Fonzie, you bet it has.
The discussion centered [...]

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I always pay attention when anyone calls a media executive smart and, when it is a newly minted one, I pay particular attention. In a post today, BuzzMachine’s Jeff Jarvis points to a story in The Wall Street Journal also today about CBS’s renewed efforts to plunge into the digital space under the leadership of [...]

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Yet another departed Yahoo executive has landed at a well-known venture capital firm–this time with its former music head David Goldberg’s new stint as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Benchmark Capital. Earlier this week, Andrew Braccia, Yahoo’s vice president for consumer Web search, left the company to become a principal at Accel Partners.
The warm embrace of [...]

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