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.

(Some previous reports have had it at six cents a share and at a $100,000 level.)

Three of the others, according to Auletta, all of whom ponied up the same amount, were Stanford University computer science professor David Cheriton, entrepreneur Ram Shriram and Sun Microsystems (JAVA) co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim.

Later, more angels invested in Google (GOOG), followed by the big $25 million venture round by Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital in mid-1999.

While it was known back when Google went public in 2004 that Bezos held about three million shares in the IPO (Auletta said it was precisely 3.3 million shares), the book has a lot of the details about the meeting between him and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in the Menlo Park, Calif., garage of current Google exec Susan Wojcicki.

He had been brought there, according to the book, by Shriram, who had sold his company, Junglee, to Amazon (AMZN) in 1998.

“I just fell in love with Larry and Sergey,” Bezos told Auletta in an interview–not that there’s anything wrong with that considering the flip-flop relationships of Silicon Valley.

He’d presumably be more in love–and less inclined to be fighting Google, first in search with A9 and now in online publishing–if he had held onto those shares.

That stock would be worth $1.6 billion today.

But a spokesman for Amazon declined to comment on what Bezos did with his Google stake, noting it was a personal investment.

Interestingly, Bezos is also an early investor in the current hotsy-totsy microblogging start-up, Twitter.

A part of Auletta’s book, which is slated to come out Nov. 3, is in this week’s New Yorker in an excerpt called “Searching for Trouble.” It is, oddly, not available online.

In any case, the piece is mostly about the various ways Brin and Page dissed big media moguls, figuratively (destroying old media advertising business models) and literally (showing up at meetings sweaty and wearing skates and gym shorts).

Good thing they never did that to Bezos.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

San Francisco-based Sugar Media, which specializes in Web sites aimed at women, cut its ties with NBC Universal by buying back its shares and got a Series C funding of $16 million from Sequoia Capitol.

Sequoia has been an existing venture investor, having put $5 million into the start-up in late 2006. NBC, a unit of GE (GE), invested $10 million in 2007.

It is unclear at what discount the shares were bought back at, but it seems likely. NBC had been selling online advertising for the site, an arrangement which had previously ended.

Sugar, which runs the flagship PopSugar.com site, also announced it has bought video shopping start-up, Shopflick, and had hired its CEO to run a new Los Angeles-based entertainment unit called Sugar Digital Entertainment.

David Grant was former president of Fox TV Studios and his new unit will be charged with expanding into video, TV and film with Sugar-branded content.

Here’s a video interview BoomTown did with Sugar in 2007:

And here’s the full press release:

Sugar Inc. Launches Sugar Digital Entertainment with former Fox TV President

New Unit to Expand Sugar Brand into Video, TV and Film; Sugar has also Acquired Video Shopping Start-Up Shopflick.com and Completed a $16 million Series C Funding from Sequoia Capital

San Francisco, CA, June 1, 2009–Sugar Inc. announced today a series of steps to expand and diversify the fast-growing woman’s lifestyle media company.

Sugar is launching Sugar Digital Entertainment, an LA-based unit that will expand the Sugar brand into online video, television, film, videogames and other content formats. David Grant, former President of Fox TV Studios, Exec VP of the FOX Network and founder and CEO of Shopflick.com, joins Sugar as President of SDE with a mandate to work with talent and media partners on Sugar-branded projects.

Sugar has acquired Shopflick.com, the video-powered fashion marketplace founded by Grant in 2008. Shopflick is a pioneer in online video-driven shopping, with a critically-acclaimed brand that has quickly built a following with both designers and shoppers. Shopflick will enable Sugar’s ShopStyle–the leading social shopping destination for women–to pioneer a new video-driven commerce offering for its merchant partners.

Sugar also announced that it has completed its Series C funding by securing $16M from existing investor Sequoia Capital. Sugar intends to use the funds for acquisitions and international expansion to support the company’s growth into a major media company targeted to women’s lifestyle. In conjunction with the transaction, the Company has repurchased shares sold in 2007 to NBC Universal.

“These moves further our rapid growth into a leading media company,” said Brian Sugar, founder and CEO of Sugar Inc. “Sugar Digital Entertainment, run by an executive with a successful track record in television and digital, will leverage our brand and expertise into online video, TV and film. Shopflick’s team and online video expertise will enable ShopStyle to further leverage the powerful relationship between content and commerce, an area of vast potential online. In short, we have become a media company with exceptionally diversified revenue streams encompassing advertising, commerce and license fees.”

David Grant, founder and CEO of Shopflick.com said: “Sugar has tapped into the passions and interests of women in a way other media companies can only dream of, so I see this as a big opportunity to help the founders take an already successful company to another level. Sugar’s brand and expertise in women will play a role in creating great video content on all platforms, including online, TV, film and wherever smart, passionate woman are gathering. I am equally excited about finding a terrific home for the Shopflick team and the opportunity to turn our vision of video-driven shopping into reality for the millions of women who visit Sugar every month.”

Facebook CFO Gideon Yu (pictured here) is leaving Facebook, as the company announced internally today that it was replacing him and searching for a new CFO on the path to an eventual IPO.

The Wall Street Journal also reported the news, noting that the huge social-networking start-up was looking for a CFO with “public company experience.”

But several sources within the company said the departure was more due to an increasingly strained relationship between Yu and Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg over strategic disagreements about a wide range of issues, from increasing advertising revenue to fund-raising discussions with investors.

“At Facebook, you’re either with Mark or you’re not,” said one source at the 800-person company, located in Palo Alto, Calif., and founded five years ago. “And, if you’re not, you leave.”

As a sign of that, Yu was out of the company HQ immediately today after a meeting, said several sources.

Facebook confirmed the move in a statement, focusing instead on its hope for an IPO sometime in the future:

“Facebook confirms that CFO Gideon Yu will be leaving the company. Gideon has played an important role in helping us achieve our financial success, building a strong finance team and establishing the core financial operations of our company. We are grateful to Gideon for his contributions to Facebook and what we are trying to accomplish. Despite the poor economic climate, we are pleased that our financial performance is strong and we are well positioned for the next stage of our growth. We have retained Spencer Stuart to lead our search for a new CFO and will be looking for someone with public company experience.”

In addition, trying to stanch the rumors of its financial weakness and need to raise more funds, Facebook said in its internal memo to staff that it was on the path toward a public offering soon, with revenue growth up 70 percent in 2009 and EBITDA profitability this year, and that it would be cash-flow positive in 2010.

The memo also painted Yu’s departure as another step toward its much anticipated IPO, although it is clearly an ouster of much more complex internal reasons about how Facebook is run.

Facebook has had a lot of those in its short history.

From come-and-then-gone Google tech exec Ben Ling to former COO Owen Van Natta to the pair who started Facebook with Zuckerberg, the fast-growing start-up has seen more executive turnover and turmoil than most big companies.

In fact, Yu–who was an exec at both Yahoo (YHOO) and YouTube and integral to its sale to Google–replaced former CFO Mike Sheridan in 2007, in another case of a key exec being replaced.

Some inside and outside the company were quick to blame COO Sheryl Sandberg for Yu’s departure–probably due to the fact that the pair’s relationship was initially tense when the well-known Google exec arrived a year ago. That has been much less so of late, sources said.

And while Facebook can be a highly political place, with an unusual level of passive-aggressive infighting among execs, it is also a place where Zuckerberg and his wishes firmly hold sway.

And those wishes included the fact that Zuckerberg has long and publicly maintained that Facebook’s growth was paramount over a focus on monetization of the service.

Yu is known internally to be more conservative fiscally, pushing on Zuckerberg to ramp ad revenue more quickly and to consider a range of options outside of IPO, including selling the company.

Many current and former execs had hoped the company would IPO, a process that has been dragged out due to the weaker economy. But–barring that–many had also hoped it would sell to a larger company like Google (GOOG) or Microsoft (MSFT).

In fact, Microsoft has expressed interest in buying Facebook many times, and it was Yu and Van Natta who were key to getting the software giant to outbid Google to invest in the company at an astounding $15 billion valuation.

After raising more than $500 million previously, Yu has more recently been busy working with top execs on the best way to raise more funds for Facebook, in order to allow it grow faster and give it a deeper financial cushion.

High user growth has blown past Facebook’s internal projections, which is both an audience blessing and a cost curse.

But that fund raising has been at a much lower valuation and in a very weak economic climate, adding to stress internally at Facebook, many said.

Yu has held a number of meetings with investors, many of whom have told me they have asked him consistently about the monetization issues at Facebook and exactly when Zuckerberg would turn on the ad spigot at the service.

Yu has also has been involved in some recent debt financing of equipment, which is not as unusual for a fast-growing company as some recent reports have portrayed it, although that might also have been a source of tensions.

How to answer prospective new investors has probably been at the heart of his problems with Zuckerberg, who has been known to run hot and cold on top managers, especially with those who disagree with him too much.

That was clearly the case with Yu.

But, said many execs at the company, Zuckerberg’s conviction that growth is key over all other concerns–about which the company today is taking the edge off by noting sunnier financial results in the internal document–has been the correct one.

Currently, Facebook is veering in on 200 million users, which represents an astounding accomplishment.

But how it is going to take those numbers and make Facebook into a revenue-rich company on par with its increasing power on the Web is the question it will face until, of course, it does.

Besides the current drama over Yu today, Facebook has also recently been embroiled in unhappiness about its recent redesign and separately, about onerous changes to its Terms of Service.

Facebook has since backtracked on both issues, likely adding to the level of pressure on Zuckerberg and top execs.

And that is not even mentioning the curse of the Winklevii–it seems the fun never stops at Facebook HQ!

On an actually more amusing note, I once nicknamed Yu “Death Cat.”

As I wrote in mid-2007:

“Like that cat named Oscar who can detect death, Yu seems to have an amazing ability to get a sweet job at the hot Web company of the moment at just the right time. Case in point: He left Yahoo as its treasurer and went to YouTube as its CFO just a month before it sold to Google for $1.6 billion, a deal in which Yu apparently played a key role. Then, on his way to a spot as a junior partner at also-hot VC firm Sequoia Capital, he grabbed the Facebook CFO job in July. I say we watch where Yu goes and follow stealthily behind so as not to be detected.”

It’s more than likely Yu will pop up again soon in Silicon Valley in another prominent CFO job or as a venture investor. Although, after today’s events, this digital cat has definitely lost one life.

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 by TechCrunch, was announced this morning by Cisco.

The innovative San Francisco-based start-up has made it big from its modest roots as a white-label digital video camera shrink-wrapped for themes parks and drug stores.

But the simplicity of its line of relatively inexpensive cameras, including the recently released Mino HD, has made it a huge consumer success, which is no easy task in the devices arena.

Using its own software, a user can plug the Flip into a USB port of computer to upload digital video easily. Flip models cost anywhere from $100 to $299.

Cisco has been trying to turbocharge its consumer-focused business, especially in home networking, and the move is a clear step in that direction. It is better known for its business making hardware and software that powers the plumbing of the Web.

Although it used stock in buying Pure Digital, Cisco has a $29 billion pile of cash. Recently, I wrote a piece about how a lot of tech companies, with big hordes of money, will soon be buying up a lot of the most promising tech start-ups.

The first commercially-branded Flips were, in fact, introduced at the third D: All Things Digital conference in 2005 by CEO Jonathan Kaplan (pictured here at D3.)

In an email to BoomTown this morning, Kaplan was happy with the outcome, because no matter its success, taking Flip to the next level is not easy:

“We’re thrilled by the partnership. Cisco shares my vision for capturing and sharing simple, accessible, and high-quality video to the mass-market consumer. Now we can deliver that ideal on a global basis.”

Cisco said that “upon the close of the acquisition, the Pure Digital team will become part of Cisco’s Consumer Business Group, which includes Linksys® by Cisco® home networking, audio and media-storage products. Kaplan will become general manager of the combined organization,” reporting to Ned Hooper, SVP of Corporate Development and Consumer Groups.

He and his team will also get a $15 million in retention-based equity incentives.

The sale to Cisco is a big win financially overall. Pure Digital got another $40 million in additional funding in mid-2007, from investors Morgan Stanley Principal Investment, Heights Capital Management and AllianceBernstein, who joined initial investors Sequoia Capital and Benchmark Capital.

It had previously gotten $28 million in 2004 from Sequoia and Benchmark, as well as Crescendo Ventures, Steamboat Ventures and Focus Ventures. It was founded with $200,000 in seed funding in 2001.

And, more to the point, Flip cameras have been used by me for nefarious interviewing of scared Web execs since our site’s launch. In fact, I have been so bizarrely enamored with the Flip that I even did a video of my many old Flips meeting the new high-definition Mino last November.

Here is that Felliniesque effort:

And here’s the full press release from Cisco about the deal:

Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire Pure Digital Technologies, Makers of Flip VideoTM Networking Leader Adds Popular Flip Video Solutions to Consumer Portfolio Photos

SAN JOSE, Calif.–March. 19, 2009–Cisco today announced its intent to acquire privately held Pure Digital Technologies Inc. San Francisco-based Pure Digital, creator of the best-selling Flip VideoTM brand, is a pioneer in developing consumer-friendly video solutions with mass-market appeal.

“The acquisition of Pure Digital is key to Cisco’s strategy to expand our momentum in the media-enabled home and to capture the consumer market transition to visual networking,” said Ned Hooper, senior vice president of Cisco’s Corporate Development and Consumer Groups. “Pure Digital has revolutionized the way people capture and share video with Flip Video. This acquisition will take Cisco’s consumer business to the next level as the company develops new video capabilities and drives the next generation of entertainment and communication experiences.”

Pure Digital’s Flip Video has sold more than 2 million units and quickly demonstrated market appeal in the United States by making video simple, accessible and fun. All Flip Video products come equipped with FlipShare, a best-in-class software that allows users to easily organize and edit videos and then share them instantly on YouTube, MySpace and other popular sharing Web sites.

“Flip Video puts the power to instantly capture, edit and share video into the hands of everyday consumers,” said Jonathan Kaplan, chairman and CEO of Pure Digital. “By combining forces with Cisco, we join a company that shares our passion for video and whose global scale and tremendous technology expertise we expect will enable us to quickly expand and enrich the Flip Video experience.”

Upon the close of the acquisition, the Pure Digital team will become part of Cisco’s Consumer Business Group, which includes Linksys® by Cisco® home networking, audio and media-storage products. Kaplan will become general manager of the combined organization, reporting to Hooper.

The Pure Digital acquisition exemplifies Cisco’s “build, buy and partner” innovation strategy to move quickly into new markets and capture key market transitions. Under the terms of the agreement, Cisco will pay approximately $590 million in stock in exchange for all shares of Pure Digital. In addition, Cisco will provide up to $15 million in retention-based equity incentives for continuing employees. The acquisition is subject to various standard closing conditions and is expected to close in the fourth quarter of Cisco’s fiscal year 2009. The acquisition will be accounted for in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles.

While there are very few bright spots to look at in the start-up space in Silicon Valley these days, especially those relying on online advertising, the San Mateo, Calif.-based AdMob is at least slightly shiny.

The mobile advertising marketplace, backed by Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners, just got a big slug of funding–almost $16 million–to keep pushing to get ads on mobile phones, which has gotten a huge boost from the popularity of the iPhone.

The number of ads AdMob is serving on the iPhone jumped to more than 100 million in September, compared to 35 million the month before, for example.

The massive data usage by users of the popular mobile device by Apple (AAPL) has clearly turbocharged AdMob’s prospects, which were already on the rise. Compared to a year ago, the company said, the number of ads it served more than tripled the number of ads served on a monthly basis to 4.5 billion.

Obviously, the better quality and more actionable nature of ads on improved screens is the reason for the shift, which should accelerate as more smartphones like Google’s G1 and newest Blackberry Storm from RIM (RIMM) become more popular too.

Most importantly, even now, AdMob is cash flow-positive, which is not a bad thing to be in the current econalypse. It also has a cushion of cash–AdMob had previously garnered $15 million in funding from Sequoia and Accel.

It’s not all sunshine and daisies, of course, since the ad market in general is headed for a deep slump, and new markets are not going to grow as quickly, as marketers pull back from spending.

But, when the economy turns, the mobile advertising market is clearly going to be a fast-growing arena, with big players like Google (GOOG), Yahoo (YHOO), Nokia (NOK) and Microsoft (MSFT) as AdMob competitors (or potential acquirers, especially Google).

With the money it just raised, AdMob said it would be getting ready for that race, and also use it to expand internationally.

Here’s my video interview with Omar Hamoui, Founder and CEO of AdMob, on all that and more, as well as a tour of its offices:

Yet another Web 2.0 wunderkind got itself more shelter from the economic storm–widget maker RockYou announced today that it has nabbed a $17 million investment from two Asian firms, SoftBank Group and SK Telecom Ventures.

The investment will be added to $35 million from the Redwood City, Calif.-based start-up’s C round in June. Overall, RockYou has raised a total of $67 million from investors, including DCM, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Partech International and Sequoia Capital.

It is unclear if the company’s valuation is at the previous $400 million level or not.

In a video interview with BoomTown on Friday (see below), the company’s co-founders, CEO Lance Tokuda and CTO Jia Shen, said the money would be used to expand into the Asia-Pacific market, including onto Xiaonei, one of China’s largest social-networking sites.

As part of the investment, SoftBank–which has major Web investments all over Asia–and RockYou, the company said in a press release, “will also set up a new joint venture company that will develop widget and application products and services for use on PCs and mobile devices in the Asian market, in particular the Japanese, Korean, Russian, and Chinese markets.”

Well, that’s a horse of a different color, what with most Web 2.0 outfits pulling in their horns of late.

Indeed, RockYou said it would also use the money to open offices in New York, Los Angeles and Detroit and look at making some opportunistic acquisitions, as well as adding to its advertising sales force and developing more brand and vertical channels.

The company’s NYC sales office, previously a one-man shop, is expanding, adds MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka. It hired two people since August and still has one position open and plenty of applicants, says sales boss Paul van de Kamp.

Why all the frenetic activity from RockYou, which says it had over 100 million monthly uniques with over eight billion page views from its popular third-party applications like Super Wall?

Well, a few good reasons, such as: the need to keep up with its key competitor, Slide, which raised its own huge war chest; to find new audiences away from the two top social-networking site, Facebook and MySpace, from which it gets most of its traffic; to improve its products, in order to get better ad rates; and, most of all, to weather the current econalypse in the ad sector.

While RockYou’s execs believe the ad market for widgets and social networking is on the rise in comparison to other kinds of media, it will still be a glum outlook for everyone for a while.

Tokuda and Shen talk about that, as well as the investment, in the video here, and below that is a video I did a year ago with the pair:

Today, a panoply of prominent tech and Internet leaders is taking a very public stand against a controversial initiative before California voters, which would eliminate the current legal right of same-sex couples to marry.

Forming a group and taking out a full-page ad in the San Jose Mercury News tomorrow, the execs hope to convince voters to reject Proposition 8, which is titled “Eliminates Right of Same-Sex Couples to Marry.”

Silicon Valley has had a long history of supporting gay rights. And recently, Google (GOOG) Co-Founder Sergey Brin has made a strong statement opposing Proposition 8, while Apple (AAPL) gave $100,000 to help defeat it.

The honorary co-chairs of “Silicon Valley Leaders Say NO on Proposition 8″ include: Brin; Bill Campbell, Chairman, Intuit; David Filo, Founder, Yahoo; Chuck Geschke, Founder and Chairman, Adobe Systems; John Morgridge, Former CEO and Chairman, Cisco Systems; Pierre Omidyar, Founder and Chairman, eBay; Sheryl Sandberg, COO, Facebook; Eric Schmidt, CEO, Google; and Jerry Yang, Founder, Yahoo.

In a statement in a press release set to go out this morning, Yang said: “Silicon Valley has always been an example for the rest of the country of how diversity and openness help to drive innovation and value creation. This divisive measure is the antithesis of those values that make Silicon Valley so unique.”

An ad the group–which also includes star venture capitalist Mike Moritz of Sequoia Capital, as well as Palm Founders Donna Dubinsky and Jeff Hawkins, and many others–is putting out tomorrow in the Mercury News reads:

Silicon Valley Leaders Urge You to Stand for Equality.
Vote No on Proposition 8.

As Silicon Valley leaders, we are committed to equality and fairness. We are opposed to Proposition 8 because it would change our state constitution to take away rights from one group of people. It would set our state, and our country, back in the fight for fundamental fairness and equal rights.

Please join us by reaching out to friends and neighbors and asking them to stand for fairness: Vote No on Proposition 8 on November 4th.”

(The ad and a longer list of tech leaders opposing Proposition 8 is below.)

If passed by a majority of voters, the California Constitution would be amended to include a new section stating “only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.”

Earlier this year, the California Supreme Court held that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry under the state’s constitution.

Former California State Controller and former exec at eBay Steve Westly noted that his own interracial marriage was once illegal, which is one of the reasons he was opposing Propostition 8.

“It really is the civil rights issue of the day … people stood up and fought for people like me and now it is time to stand up for others,” said Westly, who was an early supporter of gay marriage and is said to be eyeing a run for governor of the state. “While this is a polarizing issue, it is mind-boggling to me not to support the right of any two adults who love each other to marry.”

One thing is certain–the issue is indeed polarizing. Currently, the vote on Proposition 8 is very close, and a huge amount of money–more than $60 million–has been spent by both sides in the battle, which is considered one of the most contentious and high-profile in the nation.

Here is the ad (click on the image to make it larger):

LEADERS (partial list):
Deborah Barber, Principal, Jackson Hole Group
John Battelle, Chairman and CEO, Federated Media
Larry Birenbaum, Former Senior Vice President, Cisco Systems
Lorna Borenstein, President, Move
Larry Brilliant, Executive Director, Google.org
Owen Byrd, President, Byrd Development
John Chisholm, Chairman and CEO, CustomerSat
Barry Cinnamon, CEO, Akeena Solar
Tod Cohen, Director of Government Affairs, eBay
LaDoris Cordell, Administrator, Stanford University
Sue Decker, President, Yahoo!
Jack Dorsey, Chairman, Twitter
David Drummond, SVP, Corporate Development & Chief Legal Officer, Google
Donna Dubinsky, CEO, Numenta
Alan Eustace, SVP, Engineering and Research, Google
Naomi Fine, President & CEO, Pro-Tec Data
Rachel Glaser COO/CFO, Reunion.com
Carl Guardino, President and CEO, Silicon Valley Leadership Group
Andre Haddad, CEO, Shopping.com
Jeff Hawkins, co-Founder Palm, Handspring, and Numenta
David Karnstedt, Investor
Scott Kaspick, Managing Director, Kaspick & Co.
Steve Kirsch, Serial Entrepreneur
John Koza, CEO, Third Millennium
Ross LaJeunesse, Head of State Policy Western US, Google
Gary Lauder, Managing Partner, Lauder Partners Venture Capital
Laura Lauder, General Partner, Lauder Partners Venture Capital
Len Lehman, Investor
John Luongo, Former CEO, Vantive Corporation
Roger McNamee, Managing Director & co-Founder, Elevation Partners
Ken McNeely, President, AT&T California
Michael Moritz, Partner, Sequoia Capital
Susan Packard Orr, CEO, Telosa Software
Randy Pond, Executive Vice President, Cisco Systems
Amy Rao, Founder & CEO, Integrated Archive Systems
Jana Rich, Managing Director, Russell Reynolds
Miriam Rivera, Former Vice President and Deputy General Counsel, Google
Dan Rosensweig, Investor
Dan Rubin, Partner, Alloy Ventures
Hilary Schneider, Executive Vice President US Region, Yahoo
Len Shustek, Chairman, Computer History Museum
Jeff Skoll, Former President, eBay Inc.
Stephanie Tilenius, SVP, eBay North America
Joy Weiss, President and CEO, Dust Networks
Steve Westly, former California State Controller & former SVP eBay
Evan Williams, CEO, Twitter

[UPDATED on 11/05/08] In the interest of full disclosure, I am obviously not a supporter of Proposition 8. And, after I wrote this piece and hours before it passed last night, I got married in California under its recent same-sex marriage law, which the initiative has now overturned. It is still legally unclear what that will mean for people like me who married before Proposition 8 was passed, as it is not retroactive; as of now, the marriages remain valid. In any case, please see this disclosure related to me here.

Here’s a video of star VC John Doerr reciting his 10 tips for start-ups to follow in the economic downturn.

Doerr gave out the advice at VentureBeat’s “How to manage your start-up in the downturn” roundtable event, which took place at the Stanford Park Hotel in Palo Alto yesterday morning.

The Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers VC got a lot of attention for his list, which he culled from a survey of 18 of the companies his firm has invested in.

Doerr didn’t need a massive, noisy PowerPoint like Sequoia Capital to make his quick and clear points, which he delivered in four minutes flat.

Doerr was on an investors panel with Ram Shriram, one of Google’s first investors, Ron Conway, Kittu Kolluri of New Enterprise Associates and Matt Cohler of Benchmark Capital.

I moderated the second panel of entrepreneurs, including: Toni Schneider, chief executive of Automattic, the company that makes the WordPress blogging software; Max Levchin of Slide, Jason Calacanis of Mahalo; and Nirav Tolia of Web 1.0’s Epinions. Video of interviews with them and also Shriram to come later today!

But here’s Doerr reciting his 10 tips:

It will take place at the Stanford Park Hotel in Palo Alto from 8 a.m. to noon.

Toni Schneider, chief executive of Automattic (the company that makes the WordPress blogging software) 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 panel of investors, moderated by VentureBeat’s Matt Marshall, which features: John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers; Ram Shriram, one of Google’s first investors, Ron Conway, Kittu Kolluri of New Enterprise Associates and Matt Cohler of Benchmark Capital.

Oh, it is sure to be a festival of Web 2.0 pondering.

Said Marshall in a post about the gathering:

One goal of this event is to provide context and advice for start-up CEOs and founders facing the recession. We’ve handpicked the speakers for their remarkable records and experiences in the previous downturn. …

While the Sequoia [Capital] ‘RIP Good Times’ presentation gave a broad overview of the economic problems facing the tech world, it provided mostly a macro analysis, and a general prescription for companies.

Now is the time to take the analysis one step further, and discuss the variety of situations we see among valley investors and their start-ups: How cleantech companies are different from Internet start-ups, and how under certain conditions, a profitable company may actually be poised for aggressive growth, hiring and M&A–and not necessarily ideal for cost cutting. We intend to explore all of this and more.

Given the fairly predictable ‘Silicon Valley is in circle-the-wagons mode’ story line we’ve been seeing so far in the media, this event is also the Valley’s opportunity to help dispel this myth and explain how the area’s start-ups are actually quite diverse and that there are a mix of strategies at play.”

The event is sold out, but it will be streamed live.

And, as usual, look for a shaky video report of the roundtable from me later!

As usual, serial entrepreneur Jason Calacanis makes lemonade from lemons–or is it vice versa?–touting cost-cutting at his human-powered search engine start-up and newest venture, Mahalo, almost as much as he touted its prospects when he started it up more than a year ago with $20 million in funding.

The colorful Calacanis has been around the Web space for a long time, with a range of ventures back in the day, like “Silicon Alley Reporter,” up to the last of which–Weblogs Inc.–was sold to AOL in 2005 for $25 million.

But in a blog post yesterday, Calacanis sang perfectly in tune with the new, decidedly grimmer, times. Thus, he announced the cuts at Mahalo, which include layoffs, with his typical showman style.

The venture was funded by–among others–Sequoia Capital and its wunderkind VC Roelof Botha.

But, after Sequoia lowered the boom on the start-ups it invested in recently, it’s no surprise they are lining up to show how well they can play “Survivor.”

Wrote Calacanis, in part:

Although we’ve got a significant amount of cash on hand, and the business is ahead of schedule in terms of traffic (4m uniques a month, double where we thought we would be at this point), we’re fairly certain that the advertising climate for the next two years will be severely depressed. To ignore this obvious fact would be irresponsible…While I anticipated and prepared for the ‘internet winter’ we’re now facing (you’ve read my posts and e-mails about the startup depression I’m sure), I failed to realize how bad the situation would get. It’s much worse than I thought it would be, and ignoring market conditions today would only mean deeper cuts down the road.”

Ah, for happier times, such as in these three videos of Calacanis, which I shot when life was quite a bit sunnier.

The first two are of my visit to Mahalo’s Santa Monica, Calif., HQ last summer (tony digs and giant screens for all) and the third is the video from when Walt Mossberg and I demoed Mahalo at the fifth D: All Things Digital last year.

Now that the plot has inevitably thickened, it’s interesting that Mahalo means “thanks” or “gratitude” in Hawaiian. And BoomTown is surely thankful for the ongoing drama that Calacanis brings to the Web.

Here are the videos:

Visit to Mahalo:

Interview with Calacanis:

Mahalo Demo at D5:

Of course, the stock market had to come roaring back and it had to be extra sunny on the very day I was scheduled to have lunch with well-known Silicon Valley investor Ron Conway to talk about the worrisome state of the digital sector.

After all, it was Conway (pictured here), as well as Sequoia Capital, who sent out a stink bomb of an email last week to his start-ups to deliver a simple message: The Web 2.0 party is over.

Said Conway to his entrepreneurial troops as the market was crashing down and smacking tech companies hard in the process:

“Unfortunately history DOES repeat itself but I hope we can learn from history and prevent the turmoil from occurring again. The message is simple. Raising capital will be much more difficult now … the name of the game in this environment in some respects is survival–survival until conditions change.”

Survival!?! What ho? This from the man who is one of the more upbeat of Web investors! Who is one of the backers of Digg, Facebook, Twitter, Ning, Seesmic and 125 other Web 2.0 companies?

Ironically, our lunch yesterday was little more than a year after I had had another lunch with Conway, where I also made a video, and during which we had a lively discussion about a range of topics, including the venture business (better than ever!), innovation (better than better than ever!), monetizing video content on the Web (best of all!) and more.

Yesterday, the news was not so happy, of course, although Conway did try to explain in more detail exactly what he meant in his most recent email, which echoed one he had also sent out when the last Internet bubble was popping a half-dozen years ago.

And that is: You better have a year’s worth of cash and a revenue model or you’re toast.

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, he’s bullish!

Here’s the video (and below it, the one from June 2007, when things looked a little sunnier for Conway and Web 2.0):

I am sure this will be the dumb-as-a-box-of-hammers reasoning this group of Web 2.0 folks gives for this odd video effort, doing a lip-synch romp on their group vacation in Cyprus to Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’,” and then posting it for all to see on Vimeo.

It is titled: “20 world Internet citizens met in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus in October of 2008 for a week of reflections on life, love, and the Internet.”

Um, kids, here’s a reflection: While you swim in that pricey infinity pool in your luxury villa, Silicon Valley is tanking all over the place. You might want to check your email and see if Sequoia Capital or Ron Conway has cost-cutted you out of a job!

Oh, sorry, BoomTown’s karma is so negative, isn’t I?

But the video gave me flashbacks to heedless-partying-until-the-bomb-fell attitude before the popping of the Web 1.0 bubble. It obviously still burns.

The group rollicking includes Blip.tv’s Mike Hudack, Facebook’s Dave Morin, Drop.io’s Sam Lessin and–well, um, eek, bad idea, awkward!–tech reporter Jessica Vascellaro of The Wall Street Journal.

Here is the video:

UPDATE: Apparently, the makers of the video have made it private on Vimeo and blocked it on YouTube, likely due to the reaction to it, but you can see it here.

Is it just me or does the sudden prospect of venture capitalists–the very investors who fueled the Web 2.0 valuation insanity with their typically egregious overfunding of start-ups–lecturing about the bleak economy and the need to tighten belts seem just a tad ironic?

It’s kind of like Washington politicians who handed out-of-control bankers one deregulation after another in exchange for campaign donations now mounting their high horses and decrying Wall Street greed in the current economic meltdown.

And yet, just like that, Silicon Valley’s investors–who could spin you all the way to next Sunday about how Facebook was actually worth $15 billion, despite not having much revenue quite yet–are turning into penny-pinching accountant types.

As reported by Om Malik of GigaOm in a piece titled “Sequoia Rings the Alarm Bell: Silicon Valley Is in Trouble,” for example, Sequoia Capital–one of tech’s most powerful and successful VC firms–held a meeting where it told its portfolio companies that the downturn was quite serious and advised them to start cutting costs.

Apparently, there was even a picture of a gravestone with “R.I.P.: Good Times” displayed at the gathering, in case the start-ups did not get the sledgehammer message. (And here is an update on the meeting by Malik.)

The last time Sequoia did this was when the Web 1.0 bubble was popping in 2000.

The same communication was also sent out to entrepreneurs by angel investor Ron Conway then, and now yesterday again.

The typically jovial Conway (pictured here) sent out a grim email to the start-ups he is invested in, advising they lower their burn rate to get ready for the tough times ahead.

Wrote Conway: “Unfortunately history DOES repeat itself but I hope we can learn from history and prevent the turmoil from occurring again. The message is simple. Raising capital will be much more difficult now … the name of the game in this environment in some respects is survival–survival until conditions change.”

Now he tells us!

In all seriousness, these kinds of prescriptions should have been front and center when times were presumably good, especially after the first orgy of Internet frothiness ended with such a thud.

Instead, the all-trees-grow-to-heaven attitude, the massively inappropriate valuations, the revenue-what-revenue strategies have been pushed on entrepreneurs in this cycle by too many VCs, most of whom should have known better.

And, while it is right for Sequoia and Conway to sound the alarm, I expect all the VCs who touted loudly will now climb aboard this somber bandwagon.

Because, after handing over too much money to start-ups like drunken sailors on shore leave, it is apparently now Sunday morning and time for a little salvation.

But not completely, of course, since this is still an industry where the dreams of hitting it big never die.

After I jokingly called Conway “Oh voice of doom and gloom” after reading his email, he quickly wrote back: “NO WAY DOOM AND GLOOM. I think innovation in the Valley will continue to thrive and I will continue to invest.”

Of course, Conway will. It wouldn’t be Silicon Valley if he didn’t.

And to raise your spirits from these wet-blanket VCs, here’s a video of Mike Settle singing the classic “What Shall We Do With the Drunken Sailor”: