Andrew Conru, a geeky mechanical engineer turned porn baron who founded one of the Web's raciest personals site, made out well when Penthouse bought Adult FriendFinder. He even unloaded a $125,000 car on the operation.

Through the golden heart of every world-changing startup pulses an avaricious get-rich-quick scheme. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the billionaire-boy cofounders of Google, established this doing-well-by-doing-good myth. But Mark Zuckerberg hasn't been able to make the same magic happen for his employees. In his efforts…

Austin-based HomeAway, which operates a network of vacation rental listings, has landed a $250 million round of funding, at a pre-money valuation of $1.15 billion. Technology Crossover Ventures led the round, which you can read about at TechCrunch. HomeAway, which seems to have acquired all its competitors over the…

Eran Egozy and Alex Rigopulos, the MIT-educated creators of Guitar Hero and Rock Band, have earned a $150 million bonus from Viacom, whose MTV unit bought the game. The pair are on track to earn an even bigger bonus in 2009. (Photo by Newsweek/John Huet)

Will the CEO of Digg make up his mind on who he wants to be? I once asked him what car he drove, and he took pains to let me know he had a suburban-dad Honda minivan and an environmentalist-standard-issue Toyota Prius. Just a regular guy! But he later complained when I suggested he wasn't a "rock star." I'm thinking…

Antivirus software company Kaspersky Lab plans to sell 20 percent of the company for $100 million to investors in a private placement next year, according to Russian newspaper Kommersant. Oh, this is juicy: Founder Eugene Kaspersky owns 50 percent of the company. His ex-wife, Natalya Kaspersky, owns 30 percent. […

The great Facebook cashout now has a date: November 1. Former and current employees recently received an email from Facebook's stock administrator updating them on plans to let employees sell some of their shares, even though the company is still private. Details of the plan are expected in mid-October; one…

The whispers have started: How much money did Kevin Rose make personally by selling shares in Digg's latest round of VC funding? The talk that Rose has sold shares is driven by equal parts envy and admiration. To understand the reaction, it helps to realize that the notion of an entrepreneur selling his own shares…

We need more gushy "Internet rich dudes, they're just like us!" star profiles, don't we? The problem is, in the Valley, too few are willing to flaunt their success. Take this piece of fiction about Jim Buckmaster, Craigslist's CEO, in the Times of London: "He lives in a modest, rented apartment not far from the…

Total compensation for venture capitalists and other private-equity managers was up 32.3 percent in 2007 over 2006, a new study reports. How can this be? Private equity is just as bogged down as the public markets by the credit crunch. For the Sand Hill Road contingent, there wasn't a single tech IPO in the second…

If the Valley was like Hollywood, Hansup Yoon's story would have been the feel-good coming-of-age movie during Oscar season. Seriously, the kid makes a web forum and is able to make more money off Zune than Microsoft? Where's Sorkin on this? Lawrence, today's featured commenter, explains to those drinking the hatorade:

Turning a profit with your startup can't be all that hard. Just ask 15-year-old Hansup Yoon. He created a community discussion site called ZuneBoards in 2006 using free MyBBoard software, got 60,000 users, earned $1,000 a month from Google ads for a couple years, and then sold it for $62,000 this summer. "It is so…

21-year-old billionaires in the making? To tell the truth, the youngest Forbes has come up with in the past decade was Elon Musk at 27. That was back in 1998, with only $22 million. Musk's face is more lined, but he still isn't a billionaire, even after cashing out from PayPal's sale to eBay. Forbes at least has…

Don't feel too sorry for Ben Ling, the star product marketer who leapt from Google to Facebook back to Google in less than a year. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg — herself a Google alum — has threatened not to let Ling keep the shares he earned to date. It was a petty move that goes against Valley standards of on how…

News Corp.'s online arm, Fox Interactive Media, has struggled to attract online talent while paying them like a startup would. (News Corp. shares just don't cut it.) The solution for the unit, which includes MySpace and a passel of lesser-known websites: a long-term incentive plan, or LTIP, which offers a sort of…

ConnectU cofounders and Olympic rowers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss beat out Croatia to win their second heat yesterday, advancing to Wednesday's semifinals. Meanwhile, back on the home front, U.S. District Judge James Ware said Monday that ConnectU has until Tuesday to transfer all its stock to Facebook and comply…

The prospect of Facebook minting new Valley millionaires is too delicious a story to check the facts. For example: Has Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's CEO, actually sold shares? Sarah Lacy wrote that Zuckerberg sold $1 million in shares early in the company's history. BusinessWeek repeated the notion. Too bad it's not…

Intel is one of several companies which have quietly converted their pension plans into vehicles for financing wealthy execs' deferred compensation. The majority of the tax-advantaged assets in Intel's pension plan are now dedicated not to providing pensions for the rank and file, but to paying IOUs issued to the…

At a recent company meeting, management told LinkedIn employees they would soon be allowed to sell as much as 20 percent of their vested options at a $500 million valuation. Word leaked yesterday that Facebook plans to allow its employees to do the same. Both LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Facebook founder Mark…