VentureBeat

Apple’s Steve Jobs dealt setback — Former Apple finance chief Fred Anderson now says Apple chief executive Steve Jobs misled him about stock option accounting. Story here, and statement by Anderson here. Question: Will this bring down Jobs?

Ram Shriram weighs in on FCC vote on wireless rule changes — See the Google investor’s VentureBeat column, where he advocates the FCC should take the first step toward opening wireless standards and access when it meets later today (Wed). He says the innovation gap will grow, if it doesn’t. Separate but related: India added 67 million mobile phone users (WSJ sub required) last year alone, more than the 41 million land lines in the entire country.

Google Maps have limited reach — Indian streets, along with the village masses of the Indian countryside, defy Google’s search for order, and so Silicon Valley venture firm Kleiner Perkins, and its investing scout in India, Ram Shriram, have invested in Mapmyindia, according to Content Sutra. Although even Mapmyindia has trouble in India’s own capital.

Blackberry users get VoIP — Iotum’s Talk-Now feature lets Blackberry users see who in their contact list are available to chat with. Now, Iotum has incorporated Jajah’s VoIP service, letting users make low-cost global phone calls with an Internet call.

…while other phone users can get Blackberry features — Users of Windows Mobile 6 phones, including Palm Treos, will this fall be able to use software from BlackBerry that makes these phones work like a BlackBerry. It will load applications like its push email, phone, address book, calendar, browser and so on. We remember Silicon Valley’s investors dismissing Blackberry a few years ago, saying it didn’t understand software. Despite its recent outage, this company isn’t going away.

FunnyOrDie.com continued — Turns out, the comedy site, run by Will Ferrell and Adam McKay, got its capital from Sequoia Capital partner Mark Kvamme. Kvamme became interested, he tells Forbes, when his 17-year-old son, an aspiring stand-up comedian came to him and said there weren’t any good comic sites online. Kvamme’s explains why this is a venture-backed company: On one hand, you have the talent of Ferrell and McKay driving things but they can only do so much, so you also draw on user generated content and voting to do the rest. (Photo via Valleywag).

Chinese video clones keep coming — Ku6.com has received $5 million from DFJ ePlanet Ventures and some others, according to Bill Bishop. Meanwhile, Tudou.com has raised a very large (for China, and for video) $18 million from JAFCO in its third round of financing, and is reportedly valued at about $70 million. This comes after it got more than $9 million from IDG, Granite Global and others.

Check out Zude — It launches May 1. Mashable says it is a better version of the homepage Netvibes, but it is really just a convenient way to drag and drop any content from the Web onto your page.

Peace between MySpace and Photobucket — The announcement is here, but we don’t know how they resolved it.

The proliferation of Twitter continues — When a company spreads virally, it’s a good sign. Twitter, the service that lets people update their friends with their latest goings-on, is finding itself being pulled into various plug-ins for your browser — from 30boxes’ feature, which lets you share Flickr photos, Youtube video and URLs via Twitter, to TwittyTunes, which lets you send a message to Twitter telling friends what music you’re listening to, with a link back to the song and artist.

Controversial company, PayPerPost, now seeking readers — PayPerPost, the company which pays bloggers to post articles about advertisers, just acquired Zookoda, which gives those bloggers another way to distribute their paid posts to readers. Announcement here. Zookoda, of Australia, lets a bloggers update their readers via email whenever they blog a new post. (Presumably, paid articles won’t draw hordes of readers — so now the strategy is to push the posts on people). Zookoda is the second company that listed on our VentureBoard to be sold.

Sequoia Capital is Silicon Valley’s most respected venture capital firm, having made money from backing Yahoo, Google, YouTube and many others.

It’s been known for some time that Sequoia Capital’s partner Mark Kvamme is married to the daughter of Sequoia partner Pierre Lamond. No big deal, right?

Now it emerges that, through reporting of PE Week’s Alex Haislip (sorry the full version is subscription only), that David Lamond, son of Pierre (Pierre pictured here), is an investor at hedge fund Artis Capital. Another family connection, and again, who cares?

Sequoia made a killing off its investment into video site, YouTube when it was sold to Google for $1.6 billion, and eyebrows were raised when it emerged that the obscure Artis Capital had also been in on the investment. Who were these guys? One of its partners has since bought the $20 million Tiburon estate of Andre Agassi. Is it a coincidence that David Lamond, who has been with Artis since at least 2005 appears to have been among the few to benefit from the YouTube investment? And is it a coincidence that since that time, Artis has landed as an investor alongside Sequoia in a surprising number of deals, from Aruba in Sept. 05, to Open Silicon in Oct. 05 and AdBrite in February, to name just a few?

Again, no big deal, unless of course investors in Sequoia’s fund begin to argue that their stakes in companies like YouTube are being artificially reduced because Sequoia is letting in Artis simply for family reasons. We should caution that we know very few facts about the relationships. We contacted both Sequoia and Artis for comment. However, another common thread is that both firms are obsessively secretive. Sequoia did not respond. COO John Milani of Artis, when contacted, told VentureBeat: “We don’t comment on employees or our investments.”

Sequoia took public money from the University of California for decades. While working for the Mercury News, we engaged in talks with Sequoia and other firms in an effort to obtain their financial performance, which we thought the public investors a right to access, especially given the downturn in the economy and in venture capital. UC, CalPERS and many other public-backed institutions had invested in VC firms, and almost nothing was known about the money-losing investments the VCs had made. Notably, Sequoia initially agreed to release its basic data, the so-called Internal Rate of Return, in exchange for an agreement that we not request other, more detailed information about the fund. Two days later, Sequoia reneged on that agreement, and decided to boot the University of California as an investor for its initial decision to reveal Sequoia’s financial performance to the public.

Of course, the public coffers can only profit if a firm like Sequoia does well, and Sequoia did do well (in contrast to most venture firms, which aren’t doing so well). But it’s important that the public be aware if its investments in venture firms are riddled with favoritism, especially if firms aren’t doing well. Pierre Lamond reportedly lost $250,000 from his personal investment in the CKS Group, an ad agency, which was run by Mark Kvamme (pictured here) in the late 1990s. It was also a time when Lamond’s firm was taking money from UC. Even then, Lamond’s son, David, was partaking of Lamond’s investments.

PE Week’s Haislip points out that there is no evidence (yet) that Sequoia’s partners invested in Artis — which would be of concern for Sequoia’s remaining investors. To repeat, we don’t know the full facts on this, but it is a significant reminder that family and relationship ties do matter at a time when many tend to think — quite naively — that meritocracy alone rules in a place like Silicon Valley.