Bad times have hit sunnily optimistic northern California. Does it matter if the mayhem on Wall Street had any real connection with the tech-powered Silicon Valley economy? Some of the region's most influential power brokers believe it will — and by pushing others around, they can make perception reality. A helpful…

The good times are over, the partners of Sequoia Capital are telling the entrepreneurs they fund. Quite literally: They sent a summons to a summit meeting with a picture of a gravestone with the writing "R.I.P. Good Times," rival venture capitalist Om Malik reports. There, partners including Michael Moritz and Doug…

Leland Stanford, Junior University has released lecture videos, transcripts, handouts and assignments for ten undergraduate engineering courses including computer science and artificial intelligence. Stanford Engineering Everywhere, as the program is called, is being funded by Sequoia Capital. While a few…

Comedy-video startup FunnyorDie, a project cofounded by yuksters Will Ferrell, Adam McKay and Chris Henchy with Sequoia Capital's Mark Kvamme, has sold an equity stake to HBO of less than 10 percent. (FunnyorDie was valued at $100 million after the last round of funding; the new valuation, and HBO's exact…

Remember Serge Faguet, the fired CEO of Sequoia-backed startup TokBox? He's got a startup in stealth mode, according to LinkedIn, but from the looks of this photo sent by a tipster, he's not working especially hard. (Faguet's at left, pointing, in the blue shirt.) Can you suggest a better caption? Do so in the…

Sequoia Capital never invested in Facebook. But Sequoia partner Mark Kvamme said at an ad conference today that the venture firm did take a meeting with founder Mark Zuckerberg early on. Problem was, according to Kvamme, Zuckerberg had forgotten about the appointment and woke up just before it started. So Zuck…

After reading our take on VC blogger Fred Wilson's advice that entrepreneurs need to learn how to "ask for the order," Persai cofounder Ted Dziuba commented: "Methinks Fred Wilson doth blog too much." We disagree, if only because Wilson is such a fruitful source. But at a venture capital conference in San Francisco…

Early last month Sequoia Capital fired TokBox founder Serge Faguet as CEO. An engineer who spoke with Faguet for a job interview tells us his firing "comes as no surprise." The tipster, perhaps sore that his job interview didn't go so well, characterizes Faguet as "rude and arrogant" and argues that the original…

Sequoia partner Mark Kvamme just plunked down $31 million on a company he also chairs, called Searchme. It's an image-based search engine. Search is a crowded field but Searchme CEO Randy Adams thinks there's room for innovation. "Search," he told BoomTown, "is still largely a text and list experience." True, but…

Sequoia Capital is famous for firing founder CEOs. Its latest victim: Serge Faguet, who's out as CEO of TokBox, we hear. The video-chat service raised $4 million from Sequoia last year. (Photo by Noah Berger/New York Times)

Is Plaxo going to Google, as some rumors have it? Possibly. We hear Joe Kraus, a Google executive knee-deep in its effort to catch up in social networking, skipped the company trip to Disneyland this week so he could finish a deal. But other insiders say Google's not doing a deal with Plaxo. Another plausible bidder…

"Are you a leader in Silicon Valley who has been unfairly left out of this work of art?" asks a project proposal on Strayform."Much like patronages offered by the leaders depicted in historical works, your patronage can earn you the recognition you deserve."

HealthCentral just announced $50 million in funding. The round included a major investment from IAC and smaller contributions from prior investors Sequoia Capital, Carlyle Group and Polaris Venture Partners. HealthCentral operates several health-related websites, including the long-troubled DrKoop.com, which was once…

A tipster spotted the female half of Gawker's (and Valleywag's) favorite ex-couple, Julia Allison, leaving a CES party in Las Vegas with venture capitalist Mark Kvamme of Sequoia Capital. Kvamme, who was a frequent target of Valleywag emeritus Nick Denton, is responsible for Sequoia's investments in promising…

It's curious that rumors of a Plaxo sale exploded at the same time that Robert Scoble got his Facebook account suspended using a secret, unreleased tool for extracting data from Facebook. Curious, too, that Plaxo is so eager to milk the incident for good PR. While a battle of words takes place in public, we hear that…

Travel search engines Kayak and Sidestep will merge to form a new company, according to reports. As part of the deal, Kayak raised another $196 million from current investors Sequoia Capital, General Catalyst Partners and Accel Partners as well as from Sidestep investors Norwest Venture Partners and Trident Capital…