Murphy joined Yahoo in November 2010 as the VP of engineering for cloud services. Murphy was poached by Blake Irving, Yahoo’s former chief product officer, who became CEO of Go Daddy on Jan. 7, according to a report in AllThingsD. In that short time period, Irving has already taken another Yahoo employee, SVP of consumer and global platform group James Carroll, who is now in charge of Go Daddy’s international efforts.

“From my perspective as a product guy, Go Daddy is not yet a world class platform, but we have the opportunity to build the largest scale platform for tiny micro-businesses in the world,” said Irving in an interview with VentureBeat. “What you saw today is Elissa Murphy saying she thinks this is an amazing story and different from other companies. You can be a cog in a company that has already changed the world in a significant way, or you can come to a company that is poised to do it and be the reason that happened.”

With two defections in two weeks, Irving has quite the track record. Go Daddy is the world’s largest provider of web hosting, domain name registrations, and SSL certificates. He joined Go Daddy to fuel growth at home and abroad, and change the way people view the brand. Irving said recruiting top people with expertise at building global technology companies is a priority, and he has also hired employees away from Google, eBay, and Microsoft.

“Go Daddy is a sort of unknown quantity within the technology community, few people know what we really do,” he said. “We are doing something huge and making that apparent through hiring right now. I am looking for people who have done big things and are taking on things that are important. Every person I have hired shares a passion for customers and wants to do something good. You will start seeing us make that apparent to marketplace over next months.”

Photo Credit: Life at Yahoo blog

Small business software giant Intuit has announced a partnership with LinkedIn to help small business owners make better hiring decisions.

The initiative, known as “Hire Smart,” kicks off with a free event featuring a host of speakers, including “Apprentice” winner Bill Rancic, Intuit CEO Brad Smith, and LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner (Weiner also serves on Intuit’s board). HR specialists, lawyers and accountants will also be on hand at the event to answer any niggling questions.

Attendees will receive a discounted membership to LinkedIn’s First Hire package of talent-finding software and discounted job listings, as well as three free months of access to Intuit’s online payroll service. This all amounts to about $400 in discounted software.

According to Smith, the event is just the beginning of where the partnership could go. “This event is our initial foray,” he said by phone. “Then we’ll pull back to make decisions on offering similar programs and discounts.” It’s reminiscent of Microsoft’s BizSpark program, which offers free software and support to startups.

Smith said the companies are currently brainstorming other cost-effective ways to help solve problems for potential employers who are competing for talent with large franchises. He said they already have a “leg up,” as small businesses are the preferred employer. Currently, 19 million people in the U.S. work at a small company.

The inaugural event takes place on April 27 at Intuit’s Mountain View headquarters, and registration starts now.

Stripe, the mobile payment platform for developers, has just announced its acquisition of three-man app Kickoff.

Kickoff is a desktop Mac app for group chat and task management for teams. The Apple-flavored product looks and feels at home on Mac devices, but its features are pretty duplicative of what Stripe already offers.

Check it out:

But the service itself isn’t really the point. As app designer and Kickoff team member Benjamin De Cock wrote today on his personal blog, he’d been doing freelance work for Stripe for some time.

“As my experience with Stripe evolved, we talked about ways to work together and eventually decided that it made sense for Stripe to acquire Kickoff,” he continued.

Another reason it made sense is Stripe’s lovely Scrooge McDuck-like vault of money. The company took $18 million this time last year and doubled down with an additional $20 million in July. At this point we’re pretty sure they use gold bricks as doorstops.

So, what does an API company do with a team of product designers? We’ll just have to keep an eye on the company’s roll-outs for the rest of the year to find out.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Wherry cofounded a startup called Meebo, which raised $70 million from True Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Draper Fisher Jurveston, Khosla Ventures, and others before Google acquired the company for $100 million in 2012. Meebo provided social-messaging and advertising tools that helped publishers achieve greater engagement with their users.

Meebo began to takeoff in 2009 and Wherry needed to double her JavaScript team by the end of the year to meet the companies first real revenue target.

“If I didn’t, innovation would stall, and without revenue, our business would in serious jeopardy,” she wrote in a post on her personal blog.

To make the situation worse, Meebo’s recruiting team lost many of its core member to maternity leave. To find the best developers, Wherry needed to find the best recruiters, and to find the best recruiters, she needed bait.

So she created a fake online persona named Pete London, a JavaScript “ninja.” Wherry wrote a resume and posted it on LinkedIn. Shortly after, the interest began to flow. “Pete” began receiving email from Google, Mozilla, Bing, and Facebook. He got 530 messages from 382 recruiters across 172 organizations and averaged a ping every 40 hours.

Wherry recently told this tale at First Round Capital’s CTO Summit last month. She said Pete was also offered seven iPads, one Xbox, one MacBook Air, $1,000 referral cash incentives, two $10,000 referral cash incentives, eight coffees, seven phone calls, and six lunch invites.

The whole experience taught Wherry a few valuable lessons about the battleground of recruiting technical talent to work at startups rather than Google or Facebook. She advised, “going guerrilla,” which means searching outside of LinkedIn for talent, emphasizing what makes your startup unique (beyond being a startup), and shelling out for professional (trustworthy) recruiter until the company can afford its own team.

Everyone trying to build a strong and growing technology company is faced with this problem. Hiring top-notch technical talent is a crucial part of building a successful startup. The ideas and network can be great, but without the technology to execute and scale, a company won’t get anywhere. If only technology could form real developers, instead of fake Internet ones. 3D printing and robotics are at least a step in the right direction.

Photo Credit: JulyYu/Flickr

Greg Becker is the  president and CEO of Silicon Valley Bank, which opened its doors to the technology industry 30 years ago.

The majority of the entrepreneurs and startup CEOs we work with share a common dilemma: They struggle to find, attract and retain the engineering, scientific, and technical talent they need to grow their businesses. This is a problem widely attributed to large technology companies, but it’s equally problematic, and perhaps even more acute for the companies that are just starting out.

The results of our annual Startup Outlook survey this year highlight this situation directly. While nine in ten startup executives said they were hiring, an equal number said it’s challenging — or extremely challenging –- to find workers with the skills they need.

Since technology startups have historically created 11 percent of all private sector jobs and 21 percent of U.S. GDP, it’s definitely in the best interests of the government to make sure we have a vibrant workforce, and that we increase the size of our tech-educated talent pool.

Our clients don’t report that immigration is their issue – they don’t think of it that way. Technology, healthcare and clean-tech companies need skilled engineers, mathematicians, and scientists to build on their ideas and their fast-growing companies. One of the ways to support these companies is through changes to immigration policy, but education is another important piece of the puzzle.

We need to create a tech-savvy, highly skilled American workforce. The more people with skills that are in demand, the better for all of us. Congress is well aware of the issues facing the technology industry, so the time to act is now.

Approximately half of all the startups in our 2013 survey had at least one immigrant on their founding team. Our future economic success depends on our ability to attract – and employ – talent from around the world.

Fixing this problem won’t just help high-skilled tech workers, either. Two in three of the startups in the healthcare, cleantech, or hardware sectors said they either currently manufacture or plan to start manufacturing in the next 18 months. More than eight in ten said they’ll do some or all of that manufacturing in the U.S., and at least a quarter of those newly created U.S. manufacturing jobs will go to people with high school educations or on-the-job training. But all of that will only happen if those startups make it.

Considering the ripple effect that successful startups have on our economy, it’s  just good business sense to make it easier for them to succeed. Having spent a couple of days on Capitol Hill last week, I am encouraged that members of Congress know what needs to be done, and are willing to make the necessary compromises to get a fix over the finish line.

You can see more results from Silicon Valley Bank’s Startup Outlook survey here.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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This guest post is by Jim Yu, the founder and chief executive of BrightEdge.

Every Silicon Valley company knows how difficult it is to hire top talent right now. But there are three roles that are especially hard to fill: SEO Director, Growth Product Manager, and UI Designer. Who are these people and why are they in such hot demand? Here are three top hires every company should make in 2013.

SEO Director

An SEO Director is responsible for search engine optimization (SEO): Making sure that the billions of people searching on Google, Bing, and Yahoo find your company’s products and services. Today, search is the primary way prospects and customers find out about your company, so the SEO Director is a critically important role. A great SEO director will have a huge impact on customer acquisition, revenue generation, and long-term company growth — which is why great SEO Directors are in such hot demand.

What makes a great SEO director? The best candidate is a rare breed who possesses a mix of technical knowledge, business acumen, and marketing savvy.

SEO Directors not only have the technical skills to build ‘searchable’ websites, but also deeply understand how search engines work. Google alone changes its search algorithms over 500 times per year, so a crack SEO Director must stay on top of constantly-shifting technology changes every day. He or she must also understand how engines crawl landing pages, how links are searched and catalogued, and the impact natural searches have on conversion.

But technology expertise is not enough; SEO Directors must also have marketing and business savvy. They must understand marketing goals and how paid search, display, social, and email campaigns impact natural searches and vice versa. They must work closely with the CMO and marketing teams to ensure SEO programs work alongside campaigns to drive the most people possible to the company’s site.

Lastly, a great SEO Director knows how to use the sophisticated SEO tools available on the market today to improve your company’s search programs in real-time and over the long haul.

Some of the most well-known SEO Directors in Silicon Valley are Ken Yamada, Mark Fiske, Leo Haryono, Luisa Escobar, and Dave Lloyd. If you can’t poach one of these SEO superstars, you’ll need to find a great SEO Director through a stringent recruitment process.

To find the right candidate, give them a test right up front. Ask them to look at your site and provide a detailed plan for how they would improve SEO. Ask them to provide technical, optimization, and marketing strategies to improve overall searchability of your site. You can also test them on the latest SEO technology platforms. A great SEO Director won’t balk at these tests; in fact, he or she will probably relish the chance to show their expertise.

Growth Product Manager

Product management — with its long planning cycles, focus on minute product specs, and endless meetings — hardly has a reputation as a ‘hot’ job. But Growth Product Managers, otherwise known as ‘growth hacks,’ are the hippest hires of the year. GPMs focus on how to create products people actually want to use now and continue using for a long time. GPMs spend all their time thinking about how to create long-lasting product engagement. GPMs understand that users aren’t drawn to a new product because of its list of features, but instead are looking for an ‘experience’.

Companies, especially software firms, desperately need great GPMs on staff in today’s competitive market. In a cloud-based world, customers can switch software vendors on the fly. So it’s not enough today to create a product and convince companies to buy it; now, technology companies have to create an ever-evolving product experience that is great to start with and just gets better all the time. Customers expect a great product experience, and they’ll jump ship if they don’t get it. Growth hackers increase and protect your revenue stream by creating engaging products that boost both new adoption and renewal rates.

What makes a great GPM? The right candidate will have extensive product management experience, but also understand social dynamics and what motivates people to use a product. They’ll be super-connected via social media themselves, using social networks to evangelize your products, and well versed in both marketing and technology development.

One of the most well known GPMs is Andrew Johns. But there are new GPM superstars in the making; your company just has to find them before your competitors do.

To find these needles in the haystack of product management, ask interviewees to lead through you a product they developed and provide measureable metrics for how this strategy delivered revenue growth. Don’t forget to ask for proof that this product management strategy delivered long-term value — not just a short pop in new business — because a successful GPM creates products that people value using for the long haul.

UI Designer

Remember when phones and computers were extremely complex and hard to use? If you’re under 30, you probably don’t, and you can thank User Interface Designers for making products like the iPhone and Facebook easy to use and intuitive. UI Designers are in hot demand, because people have tasted elegant, simple, easy-to-use technology products and they won’t ever go back. Every company is striving to create products with the simple appeal of the iPhone, but software companies in Silicon Valley must do so or die.

Creating a web, mobile, or product interface that’s intuitive and easy to use is much harder than it looks. What makes a great UI Designer? These multi-disciplinary folks not only have computer science or engineering degrees, but many also have advanced degrees in psychology, computer-human interaction, or design theory. Some are creatives from the design or agency worlds who then got technology religion, but most are engineers with a passion for creating intuitive, human-centric products.

In Silicon Valley, the shortage of UI Designers is especially acute. In the Valley, where the main roles fall mostly three categories — write code, support customers, or sell products — UI Designers don’t fit into a box. They are techie design über-geeks, and every company designing a consumer product wants at least one of them on staff.

Some of the leading UI Designers in Silicon Valley include Alan Tifford, Brendan Bond, and Catherine Courage. How can you snag a gamechanger like this on your team? Hiring a UI Designer takes patience and persistence. The best way to weed out the wheat from the chaff is to ask candidates to walk you through their thinking on a project. Why did they design the interface the way they did? What human need or behavior did they have in mind when creating a particular interface? You can test their technical chops through a coding test, but understanding their creative thought process when designing a product is equally important. You could also ask serious candidates to “redesign” your product to make it more user-friendly.

Attracting top technology talent will always be a challenge, but these three tech mavericks will be the hardest to hire next year. If you’re a Silicon Valley tech company, they are also the most important hires to grow your business. So find the right candidates and then offer them the moon if it that’s what it takes to get them on board.

Jim Yu is the founder and CEO of BrightEdge, a leading enterprise SEO platform. Prior to founding BrightEdge, Jim was at Salesforce.com, where he led a core part of the platform products team that delivered the industry’s first cloud computing platform. At Aether Systems, Jim ran the product management team responsible for the product strategy, roadmap, and delivery of the innovative Scoutware line of wireless products. At Mercator Software (now IBM), Jim directed the development of Mercator Integration Broker, an industry leading enterprise software product, generating over $100M in revenue.

Top photo: Office building in Silicon Valley/Shutterstock

It’s not an acquisition per se, but Facebook has just snapped up the seven-person team behind photo-sharing app Lightbox.

And yes, Lightbox is another mobile-focused company — the latest in a string of mobile acquisitions by the social network.

As Facebook leads the charge with regard to mobile web standards and development, it’s bringing on more and more people, teams, and products that have specific mobile web core competencies. Lightbox is one such team.

On the startup’s blog, we read that the Lightbox devs had been focusing particularly on Android and HTML5 mobile development, making them a perfect fit with Facebook’s current direction and focus.

Lightbox was founded in late 2010 and has taken a total of $1.2 million in funding from such big-name Valley entities as SV Angel (Ron Conway), 500 Startups (Dave McClure), Index Ventures, Accel Partners, and many others.

The Lightbox product will be shut down June 15, and bits of the startup’s code base will be made available on GitHub. Existing users are being asked to download their photos from the service before it’s shut down. Facebook will not take any of the original Lightbox product or user data.

Facebook named mobile as a weakness and/or risk when its S-1 was first filed. Since then, the company has snapped up mobile-focused startups Glancee and TagTile.

And of course, there was the splashy, $1 billion acquisition of Instagram. That deal is likely undergoing some FTC scrutiny based on the pricetag alone, and Facebook no longer expects to close the deal before Q2 ends.

In addition to all these acquisitions, Facebook has given its own mobile apps a big, photo-friendly facelift just days before it is scheduled to go public.

We’ll see if all this mobile activity will inspire investor confidence. The truth will lie in the IPO numbers at the end of the week.

Christopher Dean, formerly Skype’s chief strategy officer and the company’s global business development head, will now be Urban Airship’s chief revenue officer.

At Portland-based Urban Airship, Dean will head up sales and business development efforts for the still-young startup. Dean will work out of the mobile services company’s San Francisco office.

“To be a truly great startup there has to be a combination of first-timers hell bent on changing the world, and been-there-done-that execs who know how to focus teams and leverage the best opportunities,” said Urban Airship CEO Scott Kveton in a statement.

“We get a little bit of both with Chris, and he will be a phenomenal addition to the leadership team.”

Dean began working at Skype in 2008. Prior to that, he help biz dev positions at tech companies such as FaceTime Communications (now Actiance, geospatial data company Analytical Surveys, tech investment firm Epoch Partners, and SmartAge, a dotcom consultancy that was acquired in or around 2000.

Late in 2011, Urban Airship acquired SimpleGeo, a San Francisco-based startup focusing on providing data to mobile developers. Since that’s very much Urban Airship’s home turf, the acquisition made a lot of sense.

“Urban Airship has the opportunity to take the leadership position in a new and important category of products critical to companies that are now interacting with customers on mobile devices,” said Dean in a statement.

“The team is a blend of the very best technical, marketing and creative talent I’ve seen in a long time, and I’m excited to be part of it.”

Urban Airship provides tools for mobile developers to make money and engage users will their apps. Clients include Warner Bros., Groupon, Yahoo any many others. The startup says it is responsible for more than 250 million app installs.

UA was founded in 2009 and has taken $21.6 million in funding to date, around $15 million of which came from last year’s round from Salesforce and Verizon. The company reported that it saw a 600 percent year-over-year revenue growth in October 2011.