Considering the ongoing skirmishes going on right now between Amazon and Google over digital book publishing, it’s more than ironic that Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos was one of only a few initial investors in the search giant.

But–in one of the many interesting details in New Yorker author Ken Auletta’s new book, “Googled: The End Of The World As We Know It”–it was indeed Bezos who invested $250,000 in the start-up in 1998 at four cents a share.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that!

There’s a great excerpt in the New Yorker this week.

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Last week, StumbleUpon announced it was buying itself out of its much-vaunted previous corporate buyout, by being born again as an “investor-baked start-up.”

The Canadian-born social-bookmarking company, which was launched earlier, came to the Bay area in 2006 and got some fancy venture investors and soon became a traffic-generating hit.

Then StumbleUpon was bought by eBay two years ago for $75 million in one of Web 2.0’s high points.

End of a fairy tale? Um, nope.

Here’s CEO and co-founder Garrett Camp, talking to BoomTown in a video interview about it all.

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The content-discovery service, StumbleUpon, has gotten itself back to start-up status, after being bought by eBay two years ago.

It announced today that it was returning to being an “investor-backed startup” by a roster of well-known Silicon Valley investors, including Ram Shriram of Sherpalo Ventures, Accel Partners and August Capital.

Its founders, Garrett Camp and Geoff Smith, are also back, with Camp now in place as CEO.

“We are grateful to eBay for its guidance. However, we realized there were few long-term synergies between the two businesses. It is best for us to part ways and focus on our respective strengths,” said Camp, stating the very obvious.

That’s quite a boomerang since it was acquired by the auction giant in 2007 for $75 million.

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Earlier today, BoomTown posted a video of star venture capitalist John Doerr’s 10 tips to start-ups for surviving the econalypse that he ticked off at a roundtable in Silicon Valley on Wednesday.

Beside the words of wisdom from the Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner, I also trolled for advice from the panel of well-known entrepreneurs I moderated at VentureBeat’s “How to manage your start-up in the downturn” event.

The message: They will survive! (Cue the disco ball.)

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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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Tomorrow, BoomTown is trying to find a silver lining from a group of entrepreneurs at VentureBeat’s “How to manage your start-up in the downturn” roundtable event.

Toni Schneider, chief executive of Automattic will join Max Levchin of Slide, Jason Calacanis of Mahalo, O’Melveny & Myers’ Sam Zucker, and Nirav Tolia of Web 1.0’s Epinions.

Along with my group, for whom I am planning all sorts of verbal tortures (”Exactly how much do you make?”), there is also a star-studded investors panel.

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Yes, indeedy, this is about as insider as you get in Silicon Valley. But we are just addled enough by all the spiked eggnog we drank this weekend to think you might be interested in this video we did at a variety of industry holiday parties BoomTown attended.
They include a stop at angel investor Ron [...]

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