From The “So You Think You Had a Tough Day” Files…A Day in the Life of an Oakland Public-School Principal

Last year I joined the advisory board of a fairly low-profile, education-reform group called New Leaders. The group trains principals to work in tough urban schools, including those in Oakland. I joined the board when I was seven months pregnant and starting up a new communications-consulting business–so basically have served since then in a constant state of guilt that I’m not doing more to help this worthy organization. After our board meeting a few weeks ago, I was again reminded why.

At the meeting, four New Leaders “residents”, who will be full-fledged principals after a year of training, spoke about recent challenges at their schools and their efforts to move beyond them to better kids’ lives. It was a stark reminder of the obstacles they face–but also how New Leaders is effecting positive change in some of the roughest, most disadvantaged schools in the Bay Area. Brandi Patterson, the assistant principal at West Oakland Middle School, told us that all children at her school receive free or reduced-price lunch and breakfast. Such a high percentage of children there are poor that the school qualifies for 100% free lunch under a special federal program. She told me later that 80% of her students live with one parent, a grandparent or a foster parent. Seventy percent of the kids have experienced trauma, abuse or neglect.

Brandi is working hard to improve the school’s academic performance; West Oakland Middle’s state-measured “API” score, short for academic performance index, was a disappointing 574 last year. That was down from 616 the year before. (By contrast, the API score for my local, public elementary school in ritzy Palo Alto is 973, out of 1000.) But Brandi says the school’s instructional issues have to be addressed in a larger, cultural context: Kids have to feel safe at school, and feel that they are important and can succeed despite their often-chaotic home lives. This challenge was brought home to her early last month when one of her students–a member of the basketball team–was shot multiple times as he was riding his bicycle in the neighborhood around the school. The student was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Interestingly, Brandi notes, police didn’t respond to several 911 calls about the incident. A community member took the boy to the hospital in his own car.

The student, whose name is not being released, remains in the hospital. I’m sure focusing on instruction at West Oakland Middle since then has not been easy. Amazingly, I couldn’t find any news stories online about the shooting.

Across town, Javier Cabra is in his first year re-launching an Oakland charter school called Golden State College Preparatory Academy.  The school boasts all new teachers and staff compared with last year, and even a new physical building. But in Golden State’s case, a group of new teachers also means less-experienced teachers: Half the school’s instructors are in their first year of teaching. As with any profession, there is a steep learning curve for teachers in their first year. There also was some staff turnover this fall, although Javier—who finds time to study for an MBA in the evenings—has since managed to recruit permanent teachers to fill all the positions.

At the board meeting, Javier told us an amazing story about hiring a science teacher. The job candidate showed up at the school’s front office bleeding heavily from his face–he’d been jumped and beaten on his way from the BART station to the school. School administrators, who didn’t even know who he was at first, assumed he’d get some first aid and head out. (They even offered to take him to the hospital.) Instead, the candidate asked for the school’s after-school director, who was scheduled to interview him for the science position. He sat through the interview. The candidate–who had done pre-med coursework in college and he was a longtime substitute teacher–was hired. “We were so impressed with him willing to even sit in an interview” after what he’d been through, Javier said.

I relay these stories for a lot of reasons. But I mostly want to reinforce to people in our rarefied, upper-income tech bubble that the way we live, and our children live, is obviously quite privileged. It’s too easy to forget that the Bay Area is home to many children with all kinds of basic social, economic and educational needs. We need to help them by taking time out of our busy schedules to support the kind of work that tenacious leaders like Brandi and Javier are doing.

I have seen firsthand how New Leaders makes an impact on students’ lives. Last year, when I first joined the board of the organization, I visited Greenleaf Elementary School in East Oakland, run by New Leaders Principal Monica Thomas. Monica is a Stanford-educated veteran of Teach for America–she worked for five years in Compton, Calif.–who has the academic progress of each of her 450 students practically etched in her brain. In her office, she keeps a bulletin board she calls her “data board”. It’s filled with the name of every student at Greenleaf, and next to each name are pinned little pieces of paper listing each student’s recent test scores in language arts and math. The scores get changed around three times a year, every time the students are tested, and the names are starred when scores decline. So Monica always knows who is doing well and who needs help, and she can intervene immediately when she sees problems.

She basically runs the school like a well-organized, and successful, CEO. Her school’s API scores have shot up more than 225 points since she took over. By last year, 76% of her students met state standards in math and 51% were proficient in reading. That’s up from 26% proficiency in math and 15% in reading when she started at Greenleaf in 2006. If Monica worked at a Silicon Valley tech company, she’d probably be in line for a big bonus and scads of stock options.

But Monica doesn’t work at a for-profit company. She is a public-school principal helping kids. And at this time of year, I think we all should be thinking of ways we can help courageous leaders like her. I know I’m going to take some time away from Facebook updating, business-plan writing and PowerPoint-creating next year to spend more time trying to help New Leaders succeed. I owe it to them.

E-Content Merges with E-Commerce: Or, Why One-Third of Women Check Facebook in the Morning Before Going to the Bathroom

I had the good fortune of being involved in a pretty fascinating, tech-industry panel discussion and social event Thursday night in San Francisco. The topic? How women are driving the next generation of e-commerce, online-gaming and social-gaming activity, and how online businesses can profit from the trend.

My most interesting takeaway: How the lines between content and commerce are increasingly blurring across the Internet, in verticals ranging from media to shopping. The CEOs of startups such as BeachMint, a new online-shopping company that uses celebrities and storytelling to help market products like jewelry, and Zulily, a daily-deals site focusing on kids’ clothing, talked at length about how they “curate” their online shopping experiences to appeal to women. These companies don’t expect customers to just open up a browser to look at a pair of earrings, or a cute baby dress, and then press “purchase”. Beachmint’s staff spends a lot of time writing up descriptions of the company’s products, describing the inspirations for, and origins of, each piece; similarly, Zulily’s Darrell Cavens said his company employs a staff of 25 writers. (Similar, I guess, to Groupon’s strategy of focusing on well-written deal descriptions, as described in this New York Times story.) Fran Hauser, president of digital for Time Inc.’s Style & Entertainment and Lifestyle groups, said her publishing company’s editors are curating content as well, and that women rely on a triad of friends, tastemakers and experts to help them make buying decisions online.

There was also plenty of discussion about how women shop and behave online differently than men. They apparently respond to advertising better: According to Trinity Ventures Partner Patricia Nakache, who organized and hosted the event, 45% of women said in one recent survey that they “sometimes” engage with online ads, versus just 24% of men. (Separately, Nakache had the best statistic of the night—that about one-third of women aged 18 to 34 check Facebook in the morning before they go to the bathroom.)

Facebook executive Katie Mitic, who was also on the panel, talked a lot about how women are more naturally communicative online, just as they are offline. That explains why women comprise just 40% of Facebook users but make 60% of the comments and posts, she said (which was news to me). And even though Google is trying to encroach on Facebook’s turf with its new Google + initiative, Mitic and Google’s Stephanie Tilenius, also on the panel, refrained from any trash-talking. (I get the feeling they may actually be friends.)

But women’s brisk use of social networks has big monetary implications, according to Nakache. It means that traditional, word-of-mouth marketing can be tremendously amplified: With a social network, you can tell hundreds of people about your latest shoe purchase, or mini-accomplishment in some social game, instead of just the one or two friends you met in person today for coffee. And that all creates a sort of virtuous economic circle. Women buy more things online and play more games on the Web these days. And when they talk about all this on social networks, they see more advertising and other incentives to shop more and play more games. Ka-ching, for the companies smart enough to capitalize on this. (Nakache expounded on some of these things last year in a smart op-ed for Forbes, my former employer.)

And finally, speaking of former employers: My former Wall Street Journal colleague Geoff Fowler did a great job moderating the discussion, throwing in references to “Man Jose”, the biggest, engineering-centric city in Silicon Valley, and even a “Funny or Die” satire video poking fun at potential online privacy incursions. The video, called “GMale”, is about the perfect boyfriend—a guy who listens to you intently, picking up “key words”, and anticipates things like your mom’s birthday and an upcoming baby shower. Says a faux Google spokeswoman at the end of the short video: “How can we give you everything you need, if we don’t listen to everything you say?”

Middle East Peace–Through Tech

Silicon Valley is full of conferences and “summits”, but this week I dropped in on a pretty unusual one: A confab at the Rosewood Hotel that brought together Israeli and Palestinian entrepreneurs and VCs.

It wasn’t exactly a peace summit—though techies from all backgrounds did gather in the same room together and collectively nosh on tuna, deli meats and hummus at lunchtime. The main idea, according to conference organizers, was simply to introduce these people to one another on neutral turf (sadly, thousands of miles away from their homes and businesses) and give them some ideas about how to better do business together. In the Middle East, after all, many Palestinian and other Arab entrepreneurs live just miles from the tech hotspot of Tel Aviv. But many can’t easily travel there, or participate in the kind of industry networking that is often so essential for startups to secure funding.

Consider the case of one ground-breaking startup, a software company called G.ho.st that kept offices in both Jerusalem and Ramallah. When employees in different locations had to talk to each other in person, they were forced to trek to a café at a gas station along the Jerusalem-Jericho Road, basically in the middle of the desert. Despite funding from Benchmark Capital (which has an office in Israel) and other investors, the company didn’t make it. Who knows if the company’s special political and geographical issues played a role—though obviously startups of all stripes can have a rough time standing out in their respective markets.

This week’s summit, sponsored by several VC firms and organized by Kleiner Perkins and Bessemer Venture Partners, tried to give Middle Eastern entrepreneurs more ammunition to keep their companies afloat and growing. Huge Valley names like LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, Google’s Omid Kordestani and Yelp’s Vivek Patel all spoke during the event and offered their thoughts on tech trends and specific business issues. Hoffman spoke about how to integrate social functionality into enterprise businesses, while Patel addressed the issue of making Web sites more international—a big issue for entrepreneurs living in smaller, regional markets. Another presenter, IMVU co-founder Eric Ries, discussed the hot “lean startup” movement and offered practical tips for convincing potential recruits of the value of stock options, versus straight salary. Kleiner Partner Bing Gordon, a board member of popular online-gaming outfit Zynga, discussed incorporating game dynamics into online businesses. Finally, Ted Schlein of Kleiner and David Cowan of Bessemer spoke to attendees about general startup issues and how to develop a positive board of directors.

Clearly, plenty of these topics cross national borders, making the discussion relevant for all the entrepreneurs who traveled thousands of miles to attend. Maybe next time the Middle East’s political reality will have improved enough for everyone to gather closer to home.

NVCA Confab: It’s Action Packed

At last year’s annual confab of the National Venture Capital Association, VCs decried a dire “capital markets crisis” that was torpedoing their business. At this year’s meeting—now going on at the airport Hyatt hotel in Burlingame—the theme is “Time for Action: A Deciding Moment for the Future of Venture Capital.”

This business is starting to sound like a big-budget Hollywood movie. I half-expected Jason Bourne to come crashing into yesterday’s general session, guns blazing amidst all the guys in sportcoats.

I don’t disagree that the venture business is in a fair bit of trouble. Returns are terrible for many firms, the IPO market remains languid and many LPs are ratcheting back their venture allocations. VCs this year seem particularly vexed by public-policy developments—the threat of stepped-up regulation, an activist FDA and, of course, higher taxes on their profits. (Strangely, they seem to like health-care reform: More insured people apparently means more buyers of drugs and medical devices made by VC-backed companies, I heard yesterday.)

But I hope attendees took particular interest yesterday’s panel on IPOs. On it, three buy-side fund managers spoke fairly candidly about the state of VC exits, and suggested that some of the troubles plaguing the market—or at least the dampened values of those companies that are going public and getting bought—may link back to VCs themselves.

Paul Wick , the lead portfolio manager for the Seligman Communications and Information Fund, said that in pricing deals, “VCs always want too much,” making the deals less attractive. Later, he said venture firms often hang onto big stakes in companies whose stocks shoot up after they go public but tank after they miss their earnings. Seligman said he likes to short those stocks.

Similarly, Henry Ellenbogen, a portfolio manager with T. Rowe Price, said too many companies are still trying to go public with “mid- to late-cycle margins”, and not enough investment in research and development to fuel future growth. Panel members said VC-backed startups also should try to take more control over which investors get big chunks of their offerings, ensuring that long-term holders get bigger allocations of deals so they can better support the stocks.

Finally, the panelists pointed out that a few, good deals are still getting done; it’s not as if nobody’s going public, or all deals are pricing below their expected ranges. And there are some good IPOs in the pipeline, and waiting in the wings: The conference also featured a speech by Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of big-idea, venture-backed LinkedIn, a stellar company that will no doubt have a successful IPO at some point.

Still, Ashim Mehra, of Mazama Capital Management, agreed that “there are less small-cap growth managers” willing to buy smaller, VC-backed companies today. There are also fewer research analysts willing to follow those companies, since securities firms can’t make much money buying and selling those thinly traded stocks.

Those types of structural, market issues do represent a real impediment to an IPO-market recovery for VCs. The financial crisis certainly hasn’t helped matters either. But they’re not the only factors hindering exits. Some VCs who raised huge funds in years past have also pumped a lot of cash into mediocre companies with too many competitors. So many firms have a backlog of IPO or M&A candidates that are less than stellar. VCs shouldn’t be surprised, then, when they don’t make supersized profits off those deals. It ain’t the 1990s.

But good companies will find a way to get out. And if they have trouble with their bankers, they can just call Jason Bourne.

Levensohn VP Throws in the Towel. Who’s Next?

I got some not-so-surprising news in my email inbox this morning: Levensohn Venture Partners, a boutique firm based in San Francisco, has decided not to raise another fund “for the forseeable future,” according to firm founder Pascal Levensohn.

Levensohn’s firm is pretty tiny, to be sure. Its last fund, raised in 2004, was only $70 million. Pascal and his partners also have had some incredibly bad luck in the personnel department lately: Partner Keith Benjamin, a wonderful guy I’d known since my days as a finance reporter in the late 1990s, died after a sports accident in 2008. More recently another Levensohn partner has been battling unrelated, serious health problems. I’m sure those tough staffing issues contributed to the firm’s woes.

But it’s also true that Levensohn is stuck in a larger, very tough business predicament—and one that may torpedo the fortunes of many other VC outfits unless they take action to differentiate themselves in this rough climate.

The IPO market is still tepid, making it hard for VCs to take their portfolio companies public and realize big returns. That’s put a damper on M&A, since acquirers can offer less money for startups, knowing those companies don’t have an IPO option. The financial crisis was the final straw: Some big institutional investors flipped out as the value of their liquid investments shrank, leaving them over-allocated to risky alternatives like buyouts and venture capital. Now, many of those big institutions are looking for less risk. And that means less money being funneled to venture.

Smaller firms without decades-long track records and large scale—or a successful, laser-like focus on one investment area, a la First Round Capital and Web 2.0–may be the first ones to take the hit.

Institutions “are not really interested in hearing how great your portfolio is, and how much money you’re going to make with it” in the future, Pascal told me by phone this morning. “They want to see it done.” What’s more, he says, “they’re looking back at their 10-year (venture) returns, and they’re not so good.” Pascal stressed to me that he and the firm’s three other partners would continue managing their current investments and serving on those companies’ boards. He says the portfolio still has the potential to achieve “significant results.”

Pascal, currently a board member of the National Venture Capital Association and a prolific blogger on corporate-governance and other issues, will now keep busy expanding his existing institutional and family-office advisory business, Levensohn Capital Advisors. He is merging it into Presidio Financial Partners, a wealth-advisory firm.

He also gets kudos for actually writing a thoughtful letter about his firm’s situation, and its reasons for stepping back from new, early-stage investing, and sharing those thoughts with a few journalists. Normally VC firms on the bubble deny they’re bowing out of the business even when it’s pretty clear to everyone else they won’t be able to raise another fund. (See this Wall Street Journal story from 2006, which noticeably lacks much comment from most of the firms mentioned. It followed a related story I wrote a month earlier, containing one of the best quotes a VC has ever given me: “I know what we have distributed to our investors over the last six years, and it’s damn little.”—Paul Ferri, founder of Matrix Partners.)

I think the VC industry is becoming increasingly bifurcated between the haves and the have-nots. The gap between firms that can raise more money and those who can’t will only widen in the next few years, absent a big change in the capital markets. Firms will have to work hard to stand out and prove to LPs that they deserve the right to manage their cash.

Medical Device Malaise

And you thought tech startups had problems in this market.

Makers of medical devices are smarting, too, I learned this morning at a conference put on by law firm Cooley Godward Kronish in San Francisco. Deals involving medical-technology companies raised just $13 billion last year, down from $35 billion in 2008. (Those figures include only disclosed deals of more than $100 million.) And of the top five med-device IPOs since 2007, all priced significantly below the midpoints their original, expected range, according to Jon Hammack, a Morgan Stanley executive director who addressed the group. Only one of those companies is now trading up. “2010 is going to be another slow year” for device IPOs, Hammack said.

There were plenty of healthcare VCs milling about the confab, including Dana Mead of Kleiner Perkins. Mead confirmed what most people in the Valley already know about the VC fundraising situation: It’s tough out there. He said one Kleiner LP, an endowment, recently told Kleiner it has investments in 35 different venture firms but wants to pare that number back to 15. “We hear a lot of dialogue like that from LPs,” Mead said.

Jonathan Norris, of Silicon Valley Bank, said there traditionally have been about 50 venture funds very difficult for new investors to penetrate; now, there are perhaps 15.

More interesting was the striking vitriol expressed by many panelists and attendees against the Food and Drug Administration, which approves new devices. Dan Lemaitre, the CEO of White Pine Medical and a longtime industry executive, called the FDA’s view on some new regulatory changes “insulting”. I’m assuming he meant the agency’s major review of the so-called 510(k) decision-making process, which allows the FDA to fast-track the approval of certain devices—without major clinical trials–if they are similar to earlier, existing products.

That process came under fire from Congress last year, particularly after a Wall Street Journal story detailed political influence and possible conflicts of interest surrounding the approval of a knee device called Menaflex, made by ReGen Biologics.

At the Cooley event, one attendee stood up during a Q & A session and urged others at the conference to work with industry lobbying and trade organizations to push back against the FDA and promote device companies’ interests in Washington. Others had a more measured view. Ferolyn Powell, who heads cardiac-valve repair company Evalve, now owned by Abbott Laboratories, said the FDA’s mandate should be changed to improving the public’s health, instead of simply protecting the public.

Perhaps. But I still think the FDA still has an important role in protecting people from bum devices. The recent stories in the New York Times about error-prone radiation machines used to treat cancer patients were simply chilling, in my view. Operator error caused some of the horrific problems experienced by patients. But doctors quoted in the articles also raised concerns about software glitches in the computer-controlled devices.

ReachLocal: A Canary in the IPO Coal Mine?

Not to get obsessive about tech IPOs again . . . but one deal now in registration, that of Internet-advertising company ReachLocal Inc., could be a predictor of whether the lackluster market for new tech deals will perk up soon.

Seven-year old ReachLocal, backed by outfits including VantagePoint Venture Partners and Rho Capital Partners, racked up $203 million in revenue last year. The Woodland Hills, Calif. company helps small- and medium-sized businesses get more out of their online-advertising buys, using a direct sales force to drum up most of its business.

The company also posted a $10 million profit last year, compared with losses in each of the previous four years—making it look, at first glance, like a pretty robust tech-IPO candidate in these tough times.

But there’s a catch: ReachLocal would have been unprofitable in 2009, it seems, if not for a one-time, non-cash $16.2 million gain from a recent acquisition. In fact, the company says in its latest S-1, filed with the SEC this week, that “we expect to incur net operating losses for the forseeable future.” (A company spokesman declined to comment, citing the regulatory quiet period surrounding the deal.)

Then there’s the broader, pesky issue of how ongoing economic turmoil will affect customers’ willingness to spend money on online marketing. ReachLocal says in its filing the recession hurt its business in 2009. Indeed, annual revenue growth has slowed recently, to 38% percent last year; revenue more than doubled in 2008. In early 2009, the company stopped hiring salespeople, it told the SEC, though it resumed hiring three months later. But it was at “more modest level” than in 2008.

Oh, and the company also disclosed that as of Dec. 31, it had “significant deficiencies” in its internal controls, according to its accounting firm. Apparently the problem has to do with how ReachLocal capitalizes costs for internally developed software..

So why does all this matter? Because it makes ReachLocal a bit of a reach (sorry) to actually stage a successful deal. At least one prominent Silicon Valley banker tells me he views the company as a “canary in the coal mine” for future tech IPOs. If ReachLocal, an essentially unprofitable Internet outfit, can actually get out, the offering could open the floodgates for other tech deals. There is certainly a backlog of tech companies in registration that are anxious to go public. But if the deal stalls, other startups will have to hang back.

The market’s recent dive certainly isn’t helping matters. For years now, though, only the highest-quality Internet companies have been able to stage successful IPOs—something ReachLocal should keep in mind.

One postscript: My previous missive on the lack of high-profile tech IPOs, posted Dec. 18, seemed to strike a chord with BusinessWeek. Peter Burrows followed my story with a similar one in the magazine on Feb. 4. He cited Yelp as another company opting to raise money privately, for now, and even quoted my friend Lise Buyer.

Does your husband vacuum? Two Silicon Valley power women tell us how to make it happen.

In their new book “Getting to 50/50: How Working Couples Can Have It All by Sharing It All”, two Silicon Valley professionals argue that working women don’t need to hop on the “mommy track” or opt out of fulfilling careers once they have kids. Many can keep fast-tracking it at work–if their husbands pick up the slack at home and companies stop demanding constant face time at the office and unnecessary business trips.

You’d think this hot-button book would be sparking lots of national discussion. It seems particularly relevant now, as the recession puts more of a spotlight on the benefits of two-income families (see this piece in the New York Times on Sunday, and this more incendiary one from San Francisco magazine last year). If one spouse loses a job, it’s pretty helpful if the other remains employed.

Judging from the popular reception to “50/50”, though, age-old stereotypes about women’s roles die hard. The book’s core thesis–that women’s jobs are not inherently less valuable then men’s, and dads can do just as good a job at home as moms, if given a chance—hasn’t really caught on in a big way.

The idea “goes against this Venus/Mars plotline,” and the entrenched cultural conventions about marriage and motherhood so many people take for granted, says Sharon Meers, a former Goldman Sachs managing director who left the firm in 2005 to write the book. I met her in December at a high-octane cocktail party for Silicon Valley women in technology. Guests included hotshots like Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg and Accel Partners’ Theresia Gouw Ranzetta—two women who also happen to have small children. (Did anyone ask their husbands, after they had kids, “So, are you going to stay home now, or work part-time?”)

The occasional role model aside, it’s clear the 50/50 domestic situation promoted in the book is not reality for most working women. And that inequality has a cascading effect, Meers and co-author Joanna Strober say: Employers see women shouldering most of the childcare and household burdens and assume that even top-performing women can’t focus on their jobs they way men can. The book points out that if a woman only stays home half the time a child is sick–or goes to half the soccer games that start at 5 p.m.–she’d be available more often for that offsite meeting or deadline work. Dads can step up.

Meers and Strober, a private-equity executive now with Sterling Stamos Capital Management, say some women unwittingly promote the old-school mindset. They crack jokes about how their husbands can’t change a diaper or get the baby to bed on time when they’re out. (More Venus/Mars.) Women wind up bossing their husbands around when they do try to help out, assuming moms are the masters of the domestic universe and no one else can figure out how the household ticks. That makes men less enthusiastic about vacuuming and picking up the kids from school. Lesson: lighten up, ladies.

The press attention to the book thus far is revealing. Meers and Strober seemed to stun “Today” show anchor Ann Curry when they appeared on the program last February, shortly before their book went on sale. Curry almost fell out of her chair at one point as she asked incredulously, “You mean there’s no evidence that children are damaged because their parents are not at home?”

Actually, that’s true: A massive, 2006 study by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, cited in the book, found that children who were cared for solely by their mothers fared no better, in terms of cognitive skills, language and behavior, than kids in outside childcare.

A book review in the Financial Times last year derided Meers’ and Strober’s advice to divvy up household chores more equitably, saying alpha males will be alpha males and women should just hire a cleaning lady. (To be fair, the book got more sympathetic mentions from Time, USA Today and Elle magazine.)

I do think “Getting to 50/50” glosses over some of the immense challenges families face caring for young children while both spouses hold down demanding jobs, even in marriages where men do dishes and midnight feedings. The stress involved in that lifestyle can be overwhelming at times, particularly for people who can’t afford domestic help. Many women simply prefer to stay at home with their kids, a choice Meers and Strober say they respect.

The book makes the argument that working women can find smart ways to petition bosses for more flexible work environments—opting out of silly meetings and client dinners, for example. Men should put bosses on notice that they, too, reject a 24/7 work cycle as compatible with parenthood. Those changes would go a long way toward easing two-career family stress. True enough. But while Meers says the principles in the book apply to women at all economic levels, I have to think job flexibility is probably a little easier if you’re a partner at a law firm than a waitress at a diner.

The “have it all” tagline in the book’s title also seems misleading. “50/50” offers lots of anecdotes about women who have kept their careers on track by working reduced hours for a few years, until their kids were older. Clearly, job sacrifices sometimes have to be made. But the book’s message—that women shouldn’t be the ones making all the sacrifices—is a salient one I think many people are still hesitant to address.

Corporations seem to understand this problem. Meers told me most of the sales of “50/50” have come from companies and academics. “Big companies know they have a big challenges,” she says, because they are losing too many talented women once they become mothers. She’s been asked to speak to packed crowds at companies like Google and Microsoft, where more than 50% of the audiences have been male, she says.

Maybe more flexible and family-friendly workplaces will prod more men to do their share at home, and encourage women to let them. As the rocky economy continues to upend so many families and torpedo jobs, couples may have little choice but to rethink traditional roles and approach work and family more equitably.

Tech IPOs on Hold?

So what’s up with the supposedly brisk 2010 tech-IPO market?

I asked myself that question this week after social-gaming phenom Zynga raised a gargantuan amount of money–$180 million—from Russian investor Digital Sky Technologies, the same outfit that recently bought a chunk of Facebook. Fast-growing Zynga was supposed to be one of the standout, venture-backed IPOs going out next year.

Now, Zynga looks less likely to take the plunge. In an interview, company CEO Mark Pincus confirmed to me that the new funding represents a possible “alternative” to an IPO. “We thought, even in the next six quarters, it was really premature for us from a business standpoint,” he said of going public. Also this week another talked-about IPO candidate, clean-tech firm Silver Spring Networks, said it raised $100 million from investors. That means it could afford stay on the sidelines as well.

Surely some strong Silicon Valley companies will sell shares publicly next year, taking advantage of the (very) nascent economic recovery and investors’ willingness to take some risk again. But I wonder if the big dogs will hang back for a while. The other names mentioned as blockbuster IPO deals for 2010, along with Zynga, have been Facebook and LinkedIn—but I’m not sure either of them is in much of a hurry, either.

Lise Buyer, a former stock analyst, VC and tech-company executive who now runs an IPO advisory firm called Class V Group, agrees. “I think all three of those guys could have very successful IPOs,” she said of the Zynga/Facebook/LinkedIn troika. But “they’ll get there when they get there,” she says. “To the best of my knowledge, none of them have any reason to have to race.”

More marginal companies may be anxious to squeeze through the much-ballyhooed “IPO window” (whatever that is), since investors may be less willing to gamble on their prospects. But Facebook, which is now a Web-culture icon? Zynga, which is profitable and says it has 300 open job positions? They can probably set their own timetable.

That may not please the area’s venture capitalists, many of whom are starved for liquidity and would love a nice juicy exit to show off to their LPs. But even those investors would probably rather get the best deal possible, and have stocks perform well in the long term. Pincus claims his VCs, a gold-plated list including Kleiner Perkins and now Andreessen Horowitz, are all on board with his wait-it-out plan.

Zynga, of couse, faces some other business challenges that could affect a possible deal. It was recently caught up in a mini-scandal over some of the special online offers it uses to entice people to buy things in its online games, for instance. Pincus claims such offers, which Zynga has temporarily suspended, make up on only about 10% of its total revenue, though competitors have speculated the figure is higher. The company’s use of some questionable offers doesn’t make it a less desirable IPO candidate, Pincus says. Zynga has also been extremely aggressive in filing copyright- and trademark-infringement lawsuits against competitors—suits Zynga says are perfectly valid. But rivals gripe they are designed to stomp out competition, and say the flurry of litigation demonstrates that the lightweight games Zynga makes can be easily copied. (I wrote about some of these issues in a story in Forbes in October.)

Other possible deals to look for next year, bankers and VCs say, include Newegg, a profitable online-electronics distributor that filed an S-1 earlier this year, and Chegg.com, which lets students rent textbooks over the Internet.

A final note: I wanted to send a special shout-out to my friends at WordPress, specifically Raanan Bar-Cohen. In recent weeks they’ve gone the extra mile to help fix some technical problems I had as I set up my blog. So thanks again guys! I think the new format looks very spiffy, and I hope my readers do, too.

Straight Talk From a Tall Man

Attendees at Tuesday’s AlwaysOn VC conference at the swanky Rosewood Hotel in Menlo Park were treated to some unexpected straight dope about the state the venture industry.

Bill Gurley, the lanky Benchmark Capital partner, kicked off the event with a fairly dire assessment of the industry’s prospects. He laid out the case for decreasing, future fund flows into venture, mainly due to the lingering liquidity crunch facing many top LPs. Showing some before/after weight-loss photos of two really overweight guys, Gurley told the standing-room only crowd that he expects the VC industry to shrink by 30% to 50%. (He didn’t reveal who will take the prize as Sand Hill Road’s biggest loser, but I’m sure that will play out over the next couple of years.)

Gurley’s thesis isn’t new. He discussed it at length in an August post on his own blog, abovethecrowd.com. I touched on many of the same themes in my reporting at Forbes, including a Dec. 2008 story titled (somewhat sensationally, in retrospect) “Venture Capital’s Coming Collapse.”

The basic idea is that university endowments, foundations and others poured too much money into illiquid, “alternative investments” like venture capital over the last decade or two. Many were trying to emulate the market-beating returns of David Swensen, the Yale endowment finance chief who looked like a genius when his bets on private equity, real estate and other non-traditional assets paid off big during the market boom. Now, post-credit crunch, he and his followers are saddled with portfolios that have lost a quarter or more of their value. Universities and foundations are in a panic, with philanthropic donations and state aid spiraling downward, too. There have been plenty of articles about the impact this is having on universities like Harvard, which has laid off staff members and curtailed (the horror) hot breakfasts in student dorms.

Still, Gurley’s talk Tuesday was a stark reminder that Silicon Valley—despite the rah-rah, “recovery is here” talk from many VCs and corporate leaders these days—may still face more pain from the economic dislocations unleashed by the financial crisis. Less money coming into venture means fewer firms and fewer deals being funded—though Gurley insisted there would always be plenty of cash to back breakout companies like Google. He also predicted the Valley would see more “stranded angel” deals, or companies backed by angel investors that would be unable to move up to a series A round.

On the plus side, Gurley said some investors could actually decide to be contrarians and double down on their VC exposure, making up for the cash leaving the industry.

Gurley’s frankness was refreshing, I thought. He ended his talk by telling the audience, specifically, how other VCs would try to put a positive spin on the industry’s woes. Then, in the next panel at the conference, a group of VCs did exactly that. Institutional Venture Partners’ Todd Chaffee quoted back one of Gurley’s lines almost verbatim when he said the failure of some VC firms would be a “healthy shock to the system.”

Right. Funny thing is, I have yet to find a VC who thinks he’s going to be the one to close up shop when this whole thing shakes out.