It's not like he needs the cash. But we don't think Joy, who joined Kleiner Perkins three years ago, as a partner in the once-storied venture-capital firm which funded Amazon.com and Google, among others, has much time to enjoy the place. Kleiner, like much of the venture-capital business, is struggling, especially with its bets on cleantech which have been battered by both the credit crunch and falling oil prices which make alternative energy sources less profitable. Better to unload it at any price — and invest in real estate closer to the office. As for Jackman, we figure the X-Men star simply knows a bargain when he sees one.

It just confirms the notion that Doerr hasn't been paying attention. Anyone who's been reading Robert Scoble's blog knows about the virtues of oversharing. It makes for great entertainment. But if there's any correlation between checking FriendFeed every 15 seconds and business success, it's lost to us. Next time, John, just mention your daughter and cry a lot. It worked wonders at TED last year.

In many parts of Silicon Valley, it seems misguided to regard the U.S. economy as reliant solely on Wall Street. The future still depends on entrepreneurs and innovations — and green-tech businesses getting “traction.” Most of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers’s ventures are long-term investments. And entrepreneurs are still bringing new ideas through the door at a steady pace. “I don’t expect the credit crunch will change that,” said partner John Denniston.

Some of the firm’s fledging green ventures are evolutionary improvements on current technologies that will soon hit the market, like the electric Think car. Others promise to revolutionize various aspects of the energy economy — solar power or biofuels — much as Netscape or Google remade the Web, or Genentech ushered in the biotechnology era.

Kleiner was not the only venture firm that had suddenly seen the future and decided it was green. But Kleiner’s past success tends to legitimize the prospects of business ideas that in many cases have spent decades on the economic fringe.

The most challenging aspect of Kleiner’s endeavor is for green tech to expand into the markets more rapidly than any energy technology has done before. Academics sometimes call this process the diffusion of technology. Diffusion can go very fast, with personal computers or Facebook. But in the field of energy, new technologies have moved quite slowly into the mainstream. It has been 54 years since the silicon solar cell was invented in New Jersey at Bell Laboratories. A front-page article in the Times heralded the breakthrough – in 1954 — as something that promised to revolutionize the world.

John Doerr: “To get solutions at scale, we’re going to have to find answers that are economic for all people everywhere. We’ve got to use policy to harness innovation to make sure that the right thing to do is a profitable thing to do — so it becomes the probable thing to have happen.”

Al Gore believes when the governments of the world assign a price to carbon—within a year or two — demand for carbon-free electricity will explode.

Partner Randy Komisar says the energy market is large and outdated: “I’m not very good at hitting the bull’s-eye. I need a big target. And this is the biggest target I’ve ever seen in my life.”

(Photo by Ausra)

Employees — now without health insurance or expenses repaid — got an email address for pay requests, but so far employees say correspondence has been all one-sided.

Asked why the company so suddenly folded, founder Kumar Sreekanti said: "Agami's board has decided to shut the company down as the efforts to raise further capital didn't materialize in time." Dan Warmenhoven, CEO of NetApp, doesn't buy the excuse — "You don't raise $45 million and then get shut down. That doesn't make sense," — and neither do we. Sreekanti has worked as the CEO of a Kleiner Perkins-backed startup before, so our guess is Sreekanti is keeping quiet trying to be a "team player" for the boys on Sand Hill road in order to stay on their roster of cooperative executives ready to work on — and sometimes unceremoniously shut down — future ventures.

We're all for not turning our atmosphere into an oven, but adolescent admonishments will swiftly grow even more wearisome than Gore's original. Children are now encouraged to scold their parents for crimes against the climate — such as using your dryer on a warm August day — with "Climate Crime Cards." Annoying, yes. But easily remedied. Just remind the offspring that bringing them into life increased the family's carbon-dioxide output by the equivalent of 620 round-trip flights between London and New York. Inconvenient youth, indeed.

Zynga makes its games easier to win for users who successfully spam their friends into signing up to play. See the above image for how Zynga does this with Attack, its version of world-concquering game Risk. The problem for Zynga and its new investors: The executives who run Facebook's platform don't like this kind of viral growth. In a blog post Monday, Facebook's Paul Jeffries explained:

Facebook is about empowering and connecting people through the sharing of information. That’s undermined if users who receive an invitation or other communication suspect it was sent for an ulterior motive, such as gaining points in a game.

Yesterday, Jeffries' thoughts became rules for the Facebook platform. According to Inside Facebook,

Applications are no longer allowed to “create artificial or inappropriate incentives to use Facebook features (including, for example, sending requests and adding profile boxes).

In the past few weeks, Facebook has temporarily banned apps by top widgetmakers Rock You and Slide, and has punished other popular app makers too, making it clear that widgetmakers which break Facebook's ever-changing platform rules — "crack its code," so to speak — don't get away with it anymore.

That is, unless they're announcing funding from Kleiner Perkins on a day dedicated to convincing Facebook developers that such a sweet deal could happen for them, too.

When President John F. Kennedy challenged our nation to land a man on the moon and bring him back safely in 10 years, many people doubted we could accomplish that goal. But 8 years and 2 months later, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the surface of the moon.

Is Gore just a wild-eyed optimist with a compelling end-of-days sermon who truly believes with enough of our Yankee moxie and knowhow we can accomplish this lofty goal? Maybe. But he's more Joseph P. Kennedy than JFK. More likely, he just realizes that if Kleiner Perkins's investments in cleantech don't pay off in 10 years, he and buddy John Doerr won't be able to threaten, "One of these days, to the moon!"

Several Valley investors who monitor startups tell me they don't bother sending Web-oriented entrepreneurs to pitch Kleiner anymore; they say the firm just doesn't seem interested.

Why would these gamblers leave the table where just a few years ago they were winning big?

For starters, broadband penetration in the developed world has nearly reached the saturation point, meaning that new Web services are increasingly competing for share in a market of fixed size. Sure, bandwidth demands are increasing because the media and tools being developed are getting richer, but those are ultimately incremental plays, and barrier to entry is much, much higher than it was for Google. The fact that there hasn't been a significant Web IPO since Google, or another acquisition the size of YouTube, tends to make me think less that Kleiner Perkins has lost its touch and more that they've smartly shifted focus to areas where big dollars make a difference.

The market that is growing worldwide is mobile, because mobile devices are less expensive than traditional computers and deploying wireless data networks is much cheaper than building out fixed-line access. Hence, in developing markets in Asia, South America and even Africa, there's a hunger for killer apps besides voice and text that will fit into your pocket — hence the $100 million iFund. Even if the money is nominally for development of iPhone applications, there's no reason to think that a good product and business model for that device can't be translated for devices running Palm, Windows and Google's Android as well.

But the key lies in John Doerr's missionary zeal for cleantech. In An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore (now a KP partner) wrote the following about global warming:

What are the opportunities such a crisis also offers? They include not just new jobs and new profits, though there will be plenty of both. We can build clean engines; we can harness the sun and the wind; we can stop wasting energy; we can use our planet's plentiful coal resources without heating the planet.

The fact is, no matter how big Crpstr.com gets, the upside falls short of the profit potential in energy and transportation by at least three or four orders of magnitude. As Lashinsky points out, the size of the energy market is $4 trillion.

It's important to remember that long before California was where you went to start your social networking startup, the primary industries driving the economy were mining, oil and defense, roughly in that chronological order. Transportation and communications technology merely allowed capitalists in the state and beyond to extend their reach in these fields around the world without leaving the comfort of their Atherton or Upper East Side home.

Telling are both KP's investment in oil exploration firm Terralliance and Gore's cheerleading for clean coal technology. While finding new and better ways to arrange for some nookie with your iPhone while wandering up and down Valencia may seem like a good investment to horny geeks, KP is looking beyond placing small bets at Faro and looking to buy the table — because the house always wins, and in global capitalism, the energy market is the house. (Photo by AP/Marcio Jose Sanchez)

It was only a few years ago that Decrem was threw an open bar party on Nob Hill for Flock, and now he's rumored to have tapped Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff for a first round at an $8 million valuation. Pinch Media, for its part, is being backed by Union Square Ventures. And that doesn't even count the $100 million Kleiner Perkins has set aside for an "iFund." What's the prize? $1.2 billion in business that a Piper Jaffrey analyst is estimating the Apple iPhone application store will generate. And that doesn't include the money 111 Minna will make hosting parties for wantrepreneurs to celebrating their good fortune on Sand Hill Road hustling the latest flavor of the month business model. (Photo by Ian McKellar)

Some more digging turned up another suit in San Mateo County courts, but in this one Tesla is the defendant, with original transmission manufacturer Magna suing the company, demanding $5.6 million in outstanding payments. It was the development of a transmission that has been widely cited as the reason for the company's slow march to market with an actual product. Looks like cleantech is like any other emerging industry — the real winners aren't the VCs or the entrepreneurs, but the lawyers. (Photo by Alexander van Dijk)

*Wikimedia Foundation Receives $500K Donation*

''Vinod and Neeru Khosla, innovators in educational outreach, provide financial support to the Wikimedia Foundation.''

San Francisco, CA - March 24, 2008 - The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization behind Wikipedia, is delighted to announce it has received a $500,000 donation from philanthropists Vinod and Neeru Khosla.

"We are thrilled and very grateful," said Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation. "Vinod and Neeru share the Wikimedia Foundation's vision: a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. Today, they have moved us closer to making that vision a reality."

"Vinod and I are proud to help Wikipedia, a valuable global educational resource," said Neeru Khosla, co-founder and chair of CK12, a non-profit organization supporting the worldwide creation of "flexbooks," collaborative, open-source textbooks. "Wikipedia proves that mass collaboration works, and that small investments can reap extraordinary returns. We are happy to be a part of it."

The gift comes at a critical time in the history of Wikimedia, which has just relocated to San Francisco to be closer to Bay Area technical talent, like-minded non-profit organizations, and educational and research institutions.

"Moving to San Francisco was an essential step in the maturing of the organization," said Gardner. "Now that we are here, and have built a great team of smart people, we're well-positioned to make significant progress."

Wikipedia, the world's largest encyclopedia and one of the 10 most popular websites world-wide, is written, edited and maintained entirely by a global community of thousands of volunteers. It was founded in 2001 by Jimmy Wales. The Wikimedia Foundation, founded in 2003, has a staff of 15, and provides organizational support for Wikipedia and eight other collaboratively-created information projects.

In coming years, the Wikimedia Foundation plans to launch outreach projects designed to encourage contributions to Wikipedia from targeted groups such as academics, speakers of small languages, people in developing nations and older people. It also plans to increase the distribution of material from Wikipedia and its other projects in non-web-based formats such as DVDs and books, to provide information for people who are not online.

KPCB's iFund is a $100M investment initiative that will fund market-changing ideas and products that extend the revolutionary new iPhone and iPod touch platform. The iFund is agnostic to size and stage of investment and will invest in companies building applications, services and components. Focus areas include location based services, social networking, mCommerce (including advertising and payments), communication, and entertainment. The iFund will back innovators pursuing transformative, high-impact ideas with an eye towards building independent durable companies atop the iPhone / iPod touch platform.

[...]

The iFund will be managed by KPCB Partner Matt Murphy in collaboration with partners Chi-Hua Chien, John Doerr, Bill Joy, Randy Komisar, Ellen Pao and Ted Schlein. Apple will provide KPCB with market insight and support.

When I joined the board, the company was spending $5 billion a year on R&D and the board was oblivious. So we established this committee. It met the day before the board meetings and got into the strategic aspect of HP. Made it possible for Carly [Fiorina] and Mark [Hurd] to take risks. HP had had a very liberal technology licensing policy, actually paying out $100 million a year in royalties. At the first meeting of the technology committee we changed that. I insisted that every single license had to be signed by Fiorina. The second thing we did was get serious against Dell Direct. But the most important thing was we encouraged the company to redirect a lot of purchases of microprocessors to AMD from Intel.

Tennessee has no state income tax on wages, while California's levy tops out at 9.3 percent. To minimize his tax bill, Gore has every interest in minimizing the appearance that he's spending a lot of time in California. I'm sure that we'll be hearing lots of convenient reports about Gore videconferencing his way through weekly partner meetings. (Photo by Sarah A. Friedman/Fortune)

KP is hiring a new partner to invest in "consumer Internet" companies, VentureBeat reports. A leaked job description (Word) indicates the firm is very much still interested in the Web. The new hire will focus "wireless, network and IT infrastructure and consumer Internet activities." But the job isn't for everybody.

"The successful candidate," reads the job description, "will likely spend substantial time with Ted Schlein, Ray Lane and Matt Murphy." To stand that trio, it's no wonder the new hire will need to be "humble," possess a "sense of humor," and — crowdsource my coffee now, pledge!

(Photo by tracy the astonishing)

Take one drink when Doerr does any of the following:

• Mentions the environment
• Mentions his daughter
• Says the phrase "This is bigger than _______"
• Enters the session on a Segway
• Refers to Al Gore, or mentions the Nobel Prize

If you see tears, take two drinks and offer the man a Kleenex.

If he somehow manages to explain, convincingly, that Kleiner Perkins' recent investment in Chinese shirt factories is really environmentally-friendly, finish your flask.

As I walked into the swank backyard of Marc Bodnick, the Elevation Partners managing director who is, unlike private-equity colleagues Bono and Roger McNamee, not a rock star, I was instantly handed a mango margarita and surrounded by men with mustaches. "What is this? The Edge?" I thought to myself. But it turns out that the Castro-conformist facial-hair regime wasn't the result of the gay mafia; no, it was just one of those Silicon Valley workplace motivational schemes gone horribly wrong. iLike CEO Ali Partovi abstained, but twin brother Hadi, the company's COO, joined in. He's in the upper left of the above collage, joined by various employees.

Snacky but control-freaky PR doyenne Brooke Hammerling tried to stop me from taking pictures, but I snuck away, whipped out of the camera, and went crazy documenting the iLike team's unfortunate facial hair. They even offered to supply a disposable razor and shaving cream so I could convert my goatee to the preferred look. I declined.

The party was ostensibly for iLike, but there was a big contingent of Facebookers, pumped from their second ultimate-frisbee win against Google. Founder Mark Zuckerberg showed up, and we made small talk about his sister Randi's burgeoning online video career. Then I sat down to dinner with Ron Conway, the angel investor, who affected a lack of concern about the meltdown in the markets. He did seem a bit distracted, though. Could the rumors be true that he just lost a big local deal to out-of-town venture capitalists?

Speaking of power VCs, as I was talking to Conway, VentureBeat blogger Matt Marshall pointed out semiretired Kleiner Perkins partner Vinod Khosla to Eric Eldon, one of his writers. It was a really good turnout — especially considering that Bodnick and iLike were competing with a private, but well-attended, August Capital event just down Sand HIll Road. I'd tell you more, but much of the night was off the record. Good thing, too, as I had one too many mango margaritas.

We're told that Accel is looking at investing in Facebook app developers. Naturally. Breyer's $13 million investment in Facebook two years ago was seen by some as a sign of a building bubble. Now with estimates of Facebook's value ranging in the billions of dollars, of course, rival VCs like Bay Partners are jealous.

But Breyer can't possibly be content with just one home-run investment. It stands to reason that he wants to build a keiretsu — a network of startups which partner with each other to build their businesses and boost their common investor's returns. John Doerr and his colleagues at Kleiner Perkins did this in the 1990s, with AOL, Netscape, Amazon.com, Intuit, Excite; Michael Moritz, at Sequoia, likewise, parlayed his firm's investments in Cisco, Yahoo, and Google into other moneymakers. Breyer's only real '90s hit, meanwhile, was RealNetworks — a thin reed on which to lay a keiretsu.

You have to admire the evil genius of the plan, if true: Breyer, a Facebook board member, can cherry-pick only the most successful app developers before rival venture capitalists have even heard of them. And Breyer, too, can guarantee favored startups something no one else can — protection from an abrupt decision by Facebook to block or cripple their apps. That power — implied, never spoken — also would bear a concomitant threat: Startups who don't play along with Accel, and accept the valuation they're given, may suddenly find Facebook an unfriendly place to write software.

So, Facebook developers, report in — is the rumor true? Has anyone gotten an offer they can't refuse? A hard sell from Accel? Drop us a word.

Friendster isn't Siegelman's first hot product. At Microsoft in the 90s, he was employee #1 of the MSN division (which, granted, is already dying a decade later). Then he launched the snappy magazine Slate (which was hemorraging money until its sale to the Washington Post).

So if our source is right, the burnout master will be off Friendster's board and job-hunting soon. Watch for him moving into biotech, energy, or mobile apps.

Bio: Team: Russell Siegelman [Kleiner Perkins]