"We are seeing... good people leaving their jobs and joining startups, which is always a sign of confidence," a partner at Redpoint Ventures told the Beeb. "We are entering a stage of new reality." Apparently, there's talk of a boom. A handful of medium-sized companies most people have never heard of were recently acquired — Mint.com, OmniTure, SpringSource — and venture capitalists are dribbling out some cash from the oceans of money they are paid to invest. The Nasdaq has limped its way past the 2,000 mark again.

But enough of the selective evidence. Unemployment is still nearly 10 percent. The flow of capital outside the Valley startup bubble is still severely constrained. And even within the tech sector, the big paydays are few and far between. The IPO pipeline is dry, and startup buyers like Google and Yahoo have tightened their purse strings. This is why hot companies like Twitter, which is taking a fresh $50 million even with a reported $30 million in the bank, are stockpiling cash. Many are unprofitable, which also helps explain why, like Facebook, many have no plans to IPO any time soon.

This sort of brutal assessment is frowned upon in the Valley, where the hope of a big payday can get engineers working long hours for cheap, lawyers accepting scrip as payment and gullible investors pumping money into unworthy ventures. Hence, hype all too often prevails, despite an utter lack of profits or even, as is the case today, any big speculative infusions of cash from the equity markets. That's not a "new reality;" it's a cycle as old as the State of California.

(Image via)

Apple has posted video of its closed iPod event yesterday, material Wall Street will no doubt seize upon to double-check its initial reaction to Jobs' return yesterday, when Apple shares hit a 52-week high but closed down 1 percent. It could have been worse, had Jobs been a no-show, a stock analyst tells the Wall Street Journal. Such is the demanding CEO's importance to Apple, and shareholders must now weigh Jobs' still-gaunt look and scratchy voice against his characteristically enthusiastic delivery.

Ideally they could take Jobs at his word, and leave the physical evaluations to the CEO's own medical caretakers. But Jobs' past obfuscations and distortions have made hard evidence an especially valuable commodity.

Sure, Apple's stock would have survived if he'd skipped out. But, as we wrote earlier today, it would have taken a hit. Many investors would have seen Jobs' absence as a conspicuous, out-of-character dodge by a leader known for his obsession with control and an amazing ability to extract money from worshipful customers via direct appeals. We were right to question the expectation that Jobs wouldn't show up; wrong to write that it was only a "remote" possibility.

In retrospect, it seems obvious that, as much as he hates providing information about his health, Jobs would rather calm Wall Street with a public appearance than spend months answering especially heated questions about his health, which would certainly have happened if he hadn't walked onto that Moscone Convention Center stage.

Now, of course, comes the endless analysis of how Jobs looked and sounded. We might as well get things started; above and below are Getty pictures of Jobs at this year's iPod event, on the left, next to pictures from last year's event, on the right. (Full-sized originals are here and here.) The CEO seems to have neither lost — nor added — much weight. But given the once-declining state of Jobs' health, no news is probably good news.

Eberhard has suddenly dropped his suit, the San Jose Business Journal reports. It seems safe to assume some sort of settlement was reached; the $465 million in federal funds Tesla received from the Department of Energy after Eberhard filed could have freed up other cash for a payout, or convinced Eberhard that Tesla had the resources to mount a protracted fight. Or maybe Tesla was simply scared: it just lost a preliminary motion to throw out the case.

Tesla's money also helped it secure land in the Stanford Research Park, not far from Facebook's new headquarters, replacing a San Jose parcel it had planned to acquire but lost in January thanks to its lack of capital.

Now the company can turn its attention to the real challenge: Fighting off Nissan, which just rolled out its "Leaf" electric car, which it plans to introduce in 2012. Nissan, which will lease the battery pack separately, has said its car will compete with gas-powered vehicles costing $25,000-$30,000. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, meanwhile, has staked his company's future on the Model S, which is a full-sized sedan to the compact Leaf but starting around $50,000. In addition to an apparent price gap, Tesla must also wrestle with the recent departure of its science director, in charge of the critical battery system. And it must site and build a factory to manufacture the S itself.

Like most startups, Tesla has been through its share of booms and busts. Right now it's on a roll; the question is whether it can build up enough momentum for the inevitable crash back to reality.

[lawsuit news via Business Insider]

Yukari Iwatani Kane and Joann S. Lublin of The Wall Street Journal - who, it now appears has an outright monopoly on exclusives and leaks regarding Jobs (something that'd make sense, considering the most direct implication of the Apple CEO's various health crisis: Apple's stock price) - reported last night on the revelation. Though not going to far as to state anything but the actual surgery as outright fact, the Journal's filing vaguely speculated that Jobs' 2004 pancreatic cancer came back, and spread to his liver:

William Hawkins, a doctor specializing in pancreatic and gastrointestinal surgery at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., said that the type of slow-growing pancreatic tumor Mr. Jobs had will commonly metastasize in another organ during a patient's lifetime, and that the organ is usually the liver. "All total, 75% of patients are going to have the disease spread over the course of their life," said Dr. Hawkins, who has not treated Mr. Jobs.

Getting a liver transplant to treat a metastasized neuroendocrine tumor is controversial because livers are scarce and the surgery's efficacy as a cure hasn't been proved, Dr. Hawkins added. He said that patients whose tumors have metastasized can live for as many as 10 years without any treatment so it is hard to determine how successful a transplant has been in curing the disease.

Jobs took a leave of absence in January, handing control of Apple's day-to-day over to COO Tim Cook after publicly disclosing that he had a "hormone imbalance" that was "robbing" Jobs of his body's healthy proteins. Which sounds nothing like what causes one to get their liver removed.

The Apple CEO's been beset by rampant speculation about his health problems by Apple shareholders, journalists and bloggers of the tech and financial stripe, and some very self-entitled fanboys since said 2004 cancer scare. He's also been notoriously mum on the details of said health. Even when more or less busted red-handed, like this, the company continues to run interference, with Apple flack Katie Cotton barely even dignifying the question ("Steve continues to look forward to returning at the end of June, and there's nothing further to say.") and Jobs not returning anything for comment to the Journal.

The notoriously showy CEO enjoys managing his own press, and probably isn't too ecstatic about this bit of news leaking; then again, after what sounded like a pretty traumatic few months, he could probably care less. The guy's got his health back, and a company to run. No doubt the inevitably glitzy Steve Jobs Comeback Special will happen soon in front of a grey curtain, with cheeky jokes and maybe a not-so-subtle U2 soundtrack.

Meanwhile, the company didn't go down the shitter while he was gone (at least no more than maybe this), and other than what's no doubt going to be rampant speculation on this potential efficacy (or lack thereof) of Jobs' procedure and a few nutty conspiracy theories on whether or not Jobs pulled a Woz and cut in line, there's not too much more to see here until the guy gets back up on stage and shows us his about-town face. Don't worry, fanboys, haters, and otherwise: your vicariously lived-through deity carries on.

Jobs Had Liver Transplant [WSJ]
Apple boss 'had liver transplant' [BBC]

Previously: Why Steve Jobs's Health Matters to Us

Writes the Journal:

Two people who do business with Apple said senior Apple managers have told them the company is now trying to coordinate Mr. Jobs's return with a product launch or public event.

The prospect of a public return by Apple's CEO, following a six-month medical leave, will no doubt help build buzz for the company's developer event, where Apple is expected to launch a new iPhone into a barrage of free publicity.

But the inside information leaked to the Journal also helps highlight how traumatic Jobs' health scare has been for him and his company — despite past indications to the contrary.

Apple once attributed Jobs' rail-thin appearance to a "common bug." When later announcing his medical leave, Jobs avoided disclosing the seriousness of the situation, saying he was leaving due to the complexity of his health issues and even because of the distracting "curiosity" over them."

But things got pretty bad, at least according to the Journal's well-placed source. Select members of Apple's board received weekly updates about his condition, a "person familiar with the matter" told the paper, and they wouldn't have all been pretty:

He was one real sick guy... Fundamentally he was starving to death over a nine-month period. He couldn't digest protein. [But] he took corrective action.

From a PR standpoint, it seems unlikely Apple's directors and executives would want Jobs up on any stage until he looks as healthy as he feels. But the CEO is notoriously headstrong about these sorts of things. If he wants to show up Monday, he will.

Last December, we'd heard his departure might have something to do with wrongful-termination lawsuits Tesla was facing. (Our sources had told us the employee lawsuits been settled at considerable expense; in fact, they're still pending. And Siry, who was subpoenaed in a case, ended up not being asked to testify.)

What actually prompted his departure: Siry learned last fall that CEO Elon Musk planned to collect deposits from customers for Tesla's Model S Sedan, a car that exists only in prototype.

Why would that drive Siry to quit? Tesla has no factory to build the car, and no financing for it. Musk recently said that Tesla had gotten $350 million in loans from the government; in fact, it hadn't, a reality even Musk's own flack had to acknowledge. Taking deposits from customers under those circumstances in the hopes that everything will come together amounts to a fraud, Siry believed, and he wanted no part of it.

Valleywag first reported Musk's plans to take deposits from customers for the Model S. And sure enough, he's going ahead with them — taking $40,000 deposits starting next month, for a car he may never be able to deliver.

Instead, he's starting a new site, Kaplan index, which promises to help people "get recognized for your skills in 2009," which, as TechCrunch's Michael Arrington notes, sounds like a boring jobs site.

Kaplan strongly considered relaunching FuckedCompany, even approaching former Valleywag editor Nick Douglas to run the site. "i really wanted it too," Douglas told me by IM. "A new shot at calling out the bad guys, this time with more grace and fewer civilian casualties. [I] wanted to prove I've learned a lot since my rocky tenure at Valleywag."

Too bad for Douglas, and a pity for fans, who must make do with pale imitiations. But understandable for Kaplan, who lived in New York when his site viciously savaged the Valley's failing startups after the dotcom bubble burst in 2000. He now lives in San Francisco and has founded a startup of his own, AdBrite, an online-advertising firm whose troubles would make good fodder for a revived FuckedCompany. He's engaged, too, to a do-gooding lawyer. A happy insider makes for a poor chronicler of disaster. But it's disappointing to see a one-time prince of derisive darkness turn to the light.

(Photo by Brian Solis/Bub.blicio.us)

Adderton and Amp'd lost most of it by selling handsets to consumers with bad credit. But a good portion went toward Adderton's daily commute from his home in Orange County to Amp'd's headquarters in Los Angeles. By helicopter. (Photo by tiarescott)

The new branding effort will solve a problem of AMD's own making; with the purchase of ATI, a graphics-chip company, AMD signaled that it was more interested in winning business from videogamers and other consumers. Intel, meanwhile, remained the safe choice for companies to buy; no purchasing executive would blink at approving an order for PCs with Intel inside.

For years, Ruiz tried to beat Intel on technical prowess alone — "multicore" chips, "hyperthreading," and so on. That worked for a while: People were so amazed that AMD, long an Intel copycat, was beating its rival, that they bought more chips, perhaps out of the sheer novelty of it all. That Ruiz is now thinking about how his chips are packaged and sold is wise. But late.

(Photoillustration via Hexus)

A previous return vehicle, Bond Art + Science, promised to be exactly that. But artsy, high-end Web design, while profitable enough as a career, will never scorch the heavens.

So Dachis persuaded Austin Ventures to hitch itself to his star, which is unusual. (If convenient for Dachis personally; he has a child who lives in Texas, and he has been commuting there to visit for some time.) Venture capitalists rarely write a blank check to make things convenient for their entreprenurs. Dachis's company, as yet unformed, promises to be "an industry leading strategic consulting practice and an enterprise class Social Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) suite." Stripped of the jargon, that means Dachis plans to charge companies for advice and rent software to them over the Web. Specifically, "social software"; the most reasonable guess for that is something like Marc Andreessen's Ning, a service which allows users to create their own miniature social networks.

The Facebookification of business may be an inevitable and proftiable trend. Yet it is dangerous for Dachis to launch this so amorphously. He may never live down the time, almost a decade ago, when, faced with a CBS News cameraman, he fumbled at explaining to 60 Minutes II what, precisely, Razorfish did. "We've asked our clients to recontextualize their business," he said. "We've recontextualized what it is to be a services business. We radically transform businesses to invent and reinvent them." He could say the same thing for his career.

The announcement:

Austin Ventures Announces Partnership with Jeffrey Dachis to Create Social Enterprise Software and Services Company
Digital Services Pioneer Secures $50 Million Commitment
AUSTIN, Texas - April 28, 2008 - Austin Ventures, ("AV"), one of the nation's largest venture capital firms, announced today that it has entered into a partnership with Jeffrey Dachis to form a new company which will focus on creating an industry leading strategic consulting practice and an enterprise class Social Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) suite. AV has committed up to $50 Million in capital to support management's strategy to build and grow organically and through acquisition. Mr. Dachis will serve as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer for the new firm.

Prior to establishing the new firm, Dachis' leadership and vision helped establish the digital services industry when, as co-founder, CEO, President and Chairman of Razorfish, Dachis profitably grew the company revenues to over $250 Million, expanded its talent base from 2 to 2,200 employees with offices in nine countries, completed over 25 M&A transactions, lead its IPO which raised $55 Million, and catapulted Razorfish's public valuation to over $5 Billion. Over the last decade, as the recognized leader in the digital services industry, Razorfish has won numerous performance, design, and professional service awards. Continuing its growth, although Dachis left the company in 2001, Avenue A | Razorfish now part of aQuantive, was recently sold to Microsoft for $6 Billion in May 2007.

Dachis is also a Senior Partner at Manhattan based Bond Art + Science, an Experience Architecture firm specializing in information architecture and user experience design for digital media and information services. He serves as an advisor to companies including: Bazaarvoice, Waterfall Mobile and Swapagift.com. Dachis also serves as the Co-Chairman and national board delegate of the Producer's Guild of America New Media Council East, and is on the Board of Directors of Austin's ArtHouse.

Recognized as a leading expert in digital technology, media, and business, Dachis was awarded Ernst and Young's Entrepreneur of the Year award in 2000, and has frequently appeared as a speaker at industry conferences, and in publications such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and Wired Magazine, and on television shows such as CNBC, CNN, CNNFN, MSNBC, 20/20, and CBS 60 Minutes.

"I believe there is enormous opportunity in helping companies devise and implement a strategy to engage their constituents in a meaningful dialog throughout the enterprise. As companies begin to see the benefits of utilizing "social" technology to engage their customers, employees, suppliers, shareholders, and communities in an active and transparent dialog, they will need a trusted partner to help them navigate the opportunities, and an integrated set of scalable, robust, and secure enterprise class tools to implement them. We are here to provide both expertise and implementation," said Jeffrey Dachis.

Dachis added "Austin Ventures' considerable resources, experience, commitment, as well as their quality relationships with entrepreneurs, in addition to an unparalleled track record, gave me a high degree of confidence that this was the firm to work with."

"Through his leadership at Razorfish, Mr. Dachis was instrumental in helping enterprises leverage the web during the early phase of the Internet. The proliferation of social networks has created another paradigm shift wherein enterprises need to drive commercial benefit from the evolving social fabric of the Internet. We believe Mr. Dachis' experience and vision are ideal to take advantage of this most recent shift. The relationship with Mr. Dachis is part of AV's ongoing strategy of partnering with talented, proven executives to pursue investment opportunities. We continue to build relationships with executives who share our passion for growth businesses and are energized by the partnership we build with them," said Chris Pacitti, General Partner, Austin Ventures.

The new company will be headquartered in Austin, Texas.

No other bidders have publicly emerged. Microsoft could walk, leaving shareholders in the lurch — and Yahoo's board of directors exposed to legal repercussions.

The board's rationale? According to the Wall Street Journal, the $44.6 billion price "massively undervalues" Yahoo. (And the original price for the half-stock, half-cash deal has already dropped by $3 billion, along with the value of Microsoft's shares.) The directors also fear that regulators, who have already lengthened their antitrust supervision of Microsoft, will put a Microsoft-Yahoo deal through the paces.

There are two ways to look at this rejection. The cynical view: MIcrosoft has already established what Yahoo is; they're just negotiating over the price. Microsoft can easily afford the extra $12 billion; it's just a question of appeasing its own shareholders.

But there's a more optimistic view. Why is Yahoo's board willing to risk Microsoft walking away? Perhaps it's because, unlike most of the Valley, unlike Wall Street's investors, they have yet to write Yahoo off. Yahoo has value, they're saying. For Yahoo's dispirited employees, that's not just a matter of numbers. Someone out there believes that what they're doing has purpose. Do you Yahoo? In telling Microsoft "No," the board has answered yes.

Unconfirmed, but sensible, is a rumor that Windsor might switch strategies from merely investing in companies to developing original content. If so, Semel seems to be assembling an appropriate team. Drew Buckley, who headed up Yahoo's original-programming business, and Jeff Karish, former head of strategy for Yahoo's media group, are joining him. Understandable departures, given the shakeup Scott Moore's leading in that group. What I wonder: Will it take long for Jeff Weiner, embattled head of Yahoo's Network division, to rejoin Windsor Digital, which he cofounded with Semel?

Same guy, and it looks like his move to California has been a boon to his common sense. In an interview with the late, lamented Business 2.0, Goldstein comes clean with the most honest thing ever said about running a startup.

All of entrepreneurship is a sort of confidence game. So all along I thought I had a clear plan; it's only later, looking back, that I realize I didn't know what the fuck I was doing.

Of his past transgressions, which included doctoring his resume to say he worked at McKinsey (he hadn't) and completed his Stanford degree (he later finished it), he had this to say: "I did it, it was wrong, it was dumb, I won't do it again." And he had news of interest to Valley oldtimers: He's thinking of restarting Round Zero, the '90s boom-era networking group famed for its lavish dinners and raucous arguments.

Business 2.0, up until late yesterday, was unquestionably in the process of shutting down. Columnists had been told not to bother turning anything in for October. Staffers — both those whom Time Inc. hoped to retain, and those not on the favored lists — had been seeking other employment. And a squad of higher-ups at Time Inc. had set travel plans to fly out to California to finish shutting the magazine down.

And now, most of those travel plans have been cancelled. Employees have been asked to stay to work on the October issue, and freelancers have been assigned pieces. And, I can only imagine as the fellow who used to write these things, hurried revisions are being made to a valedictory editor's letter. It's good news of the exceedingly inconvenient kind.

As of last night, Time Inc. execs have decided to enter into some form of due diligence with prospective buyers, and keep the magazine alive while it considers the dozen or so offers it's received. (Want to buy a magazine? It's not too late to throw your hat in the ring: send email to Maurice Edelson, the VP who's running the sale process.)

The question, though, is why? Did social media save the magazine? Perhaps so, in a roundabout way. The Facebook group "I Read Business 2.0 — and Want to Keep Reading!" numbers more than 2,000 people, but that's hardly enough for Time Inc. honchos, who deal with magazine circulations numbering in the millions, to pay notice. But Facebook, with its early-adopter audience, may have proved an ideal way to get the attention of serious prospective buyers.

Everything's up in the air, of course. Time Inc.'s top brass could decide to refuse the offers. They could proceed with plans to fold some of the staff into Fortune. They could even — though this seems unlikely — decide that the buyers have a good idea in wanting to own the magazine, and reconsider holding onto it.

This much is clear, however. Business 2.0 has gone, overnight, from certain death to an uncertain life. It's the kind of back-from-the-brink business-revival story that I used to read all the time. In the pages, naturally, of Business 2.0.