Who said the venture capital industry is sucking wind lately?

Well, it is–but not today and, especially, not Accel Partners, which sold two of its portfolio start-ups to large public companies for a total of $1.5 billion.

That would be the sale of AdMob to search behemoth Google for $750 million in stock, and the acquisition of Playfish by gaming giant Electronic Arts for about $300 million.

While Accel is not getting all that dough, it’s not a bad haul for the day.

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Another former Yahoo exec has landed at a Silicon Valley venture firm. This time, well-regarded serial entrepreneur Satish Dharmaraj will become a partner at Redpoint Ventures, according to sources.

The move of Dharmaraj is interesting, given that he is not starting a new company or taking a post as an entrepreneur-in-residence at the venture capital firm, which many operating execs do after leaving a company.

Sources close to the situation said Dharmaraj would focus on business software, the enterprise arena and infrastructure at Redpoint.

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Bucking a trend of contraction in the venture industry, Accel Partners today announced that it had raised two funds totaling $1 billion.

The well-known VC firm said that it had closed the $480 million Accel Growth Fund and the $525 million Accel London III.

The first will be managed from its Palo Alto, Calif., HQ, focusing on “growth equity” across several sectors, while the London fund will be managed there and aim to invest in early-stage and growth companies across Europe and Israel.

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Here’s the official press release from the popular news and blogging site, The Huffington Post, which announced $25 million in funding from Oak Investment Partners this morning.

Sources told BoomTown the investment gives the site, which had 4.5 million unique visitors in September, a quadrupling from a year ago, a valuation of “south of $100 million.”

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Last night, I was the master of ceremonies, as I have been for several years, at the laudable annual Astia Awards Dinner, which celebrated venture firms that support women-led companies.

And VC Tim Draper really went above and beyond in showing–quite literally–his support.

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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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Accel Partners and Greylock Partners will officially announce today that Yahoo Network head Jeff Weiner will become an executive in residence at both Silicon Valley venture capital firms.

That obviously means Weiner is officially out at Yahoo too.

Of course, loyal readers of BoomTown would have known about this development last week, when this column broke the news of Weiner’s departure from Yahoo, where he was one of its top execs, in charge of all consumer-facing products at the company.

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So what prompted TechCrunch Editor Michael Arrington to pen a pugnacious piece on how blogs should not be raising so much venture capital and instead roll themselves into a “Dream Team,” with the unusual title of “More Bloggers Raising Money. Here Comes Politics. And Here Comes My Rant” yesterday?
Well, besides garnering Arrington a big dollop [...]

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Here are two articles from The Wall Street Journal’s online site you might have missed in your holiday stupor.

One looks at the newfound fervor in India for Lord Balaji (pictured here), an incarnation of the Hindu Lord Vishnu, because of his apparent pull in getting adherents visas to the U.S. and other Western countries. Well, [...]

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Here’s an interesting idea if you don’t want to get bought and you can’t quite IPO yet and you need to have a tidy war chest for expansion or perhaps a choice acquisition or two: Bring in more investors and raise more money at a huge valuation.

That’s a concept that the top dogs at Facebook are seriously mulling over now, according to sources, after getting so many inquiries from investment funds and several bigger companies–such as its ad-serving partner, Microsoft–about grabbing a stake in the fast-growing social networking Web site.

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There’s is nothing lovelier than a sun-dappled summer night, terrific food and drinks and a giant gathering of khaki-wearing venture capitalists.
OK, strike that last one, but the valet parking was nice.
Last night, it was hearty partying in Silicon Valley, with two big events that attracted the digerati in numbers. Tech folks, for all their earnest [...]

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I have known Larry Kramer since I was a college student in Washington, D.C., and he hired me as a stringer for the Washington Post’s Metro section–even after I insulted him about the newspaper’s terrible coverage of students. At the time, Kramer was running the section.
Since then–back in the dark ages and after a stint [...]

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I have known Simon Levene for a long time–he’s been working in the European operations at a handful of Web companies, such as @Home, Time Warner and Yahoo, over the years and is now working as a venture partner at the European branch of Accel Partners, the Palo Alto, Calif., backer of Facebook and other [...]

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I motored on out to Stinson Beach, the lovely coastal community about an hour’s drive north of San Francisco, yesterday for the annual get-together thrown by True Ventures, a venture firm.

I missed the clambake part of the event–my kids need tending, so I can’t be all Elvis-acting!–but had a nice time chatting with its partners [...]

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