I slept at work again last night; two and a half hours curled up in a quilt underneath my desk, from 11am to 1:30pm or so. That was when I woke up with a start, realizing that I was late for a meeting…But it was no big deal, we just had the meeting later. It’s hard for someone to hold it against you when you miss a meeting because you’ve been at work so long that you’ve passed out from exhaustion.

Suddenly everyone’s complaining about how unfair things are in Silicon Valley. How hard everyone has to work so darn hard, and how some people don’t get venture capital or a nice sale to Facebook or Google even though lots of other people are getting those things.

Silicon Valley is an unfair place, say all the headlines. The CNN racism documentary was just one piece of this. Another are the cries from the press that Zynga would actually consider renegotiating contracts with highly compensated employees no longer pulling their weight. Expect more articles soon about the woes of being asked to work hard at a startup. People are working so hard, they’re crying themselves to sleep!

As if all of this was new. The quote above isn’t from some overworked Zynga engineer. It was written in 1994 by Jamie Zawinski, an early engineer at Netscape. Here’s more:

I saw Ian today, for the first time in months. His first words were, “Wow, you look like shit.” He says I seem really strung-out and twitchy. I thought I had been doing ok! I got a full night’s sleep last night and everything. I have no life. I never see any of my non-work friends, and I’m wasting away my one and only youth. I ought to be out doing fun things and active things, the kind of things I won’t be able to do when my mind and body finally decay. But instead I’m stuck inside under fluorescent lights, pushing bits around inside a computer in ways that are only interesting to other nerds. I glanced at a movie listing and there are movies out that I haven’t even heard of. How did that happen? That freaks me out. I bought some wrist braces at a drug store, and I’ve been typing with them for a couple of days.

I don’t think it’s helping much; my middle finger doesn’t hurt quite as much, but my ring finger is just as bad. This job is destroying my body. This can’t be worth it.

and

Well the kids went out to get drunk, or rather, more drunk. I think they might have actually gone out to a strip club again. How classy is that?

Oh good, the kids are back, and they are well hammered. None of them can walk properly, and they keep bumping into the cubicle walls and making everything on my desk shake. Since I’m not drunk, the impedance mismatch makes it impossible for me to carry on a conversation with them, so I’m just trying to block them out. But now they’re all playing networked DOOM at top volume, so in order to concentrate, I have to wear headphones with music on at top volume, and even that doesn’t quite work. Since, as I mentioned, they keep making the mistake of trying to walk, and they’re making all the shit on my desk bounce around.

It’s a saturday night, and I’m in my cubicle surrounded by a bunch of drunken farmboys from Illinois who haven’t been more than two miles from our office in scenic downtown Mountain View in four months.

My ears are going to be ringing after this. Fuck it, I’m going home. (Check that — my ears are ringing.)

and

I’m so fucking burnt. Existence is suffering.

We’re doomed.

I’d work on my resumé, but I don’t even have anything new to put on it yet, because we haven’t actually shipped anything.

I’m going to go home and cry myself to sleep now.

Yes, there was crying. Even way back in 1994.

But then, the payoff. That fleeting moment of glory that every twenty-something overworked engineer dreams of:

The power came back on, and we put the damnable program on the FTP server, and two million people all started attempting to download it at once, before we had even posted the announcement message, and we’re done done done and I suppose now we can all live happily ever after.

We sat in the conference room and hooked up the big TV to one of the Indys, so that we could sit around in the dark and watch the FTP download logs scroll by. jg hacked up an impromptu script that played the sound of a cannon shot each time a download successfully completed. We sat in the dark and cheered, listening to the explosions.

You can imagine the same words, the exact same words, being written by the guys that created the early Zynga games. Or Google. Or Facebook. Or some startup that failed miserably and was forgotten. Maybe some of those people think that they’ve been worked harder than anyone else has ever worked in Silicon Valley. That working so hard, working all the time, is an extraordinary demand on their soul.

They’re wrong. This is what startups are made of.

If you work at a startup and you think you’re working too hard and sacrificing too much, find a job somewhere else that will cater to your needs.

But if deep down you know that you’re part of history, that the things you are building will be written about and thought about forever, then maybe after that good cry after a short sleep under your desk you’ll pull yourself together and remember. That you are a person in the Arena. A Pirate. That you are here to make a dent in the universe.

You might be sad that you work long hours and that sometimes your boss yells at you when tensions run high. But you also know that there is nowhere on earth like Silicon Valley. Nowhere else that is structurally designed to help you make whatever you can imagine into reality. Nowhere else where there are so many like minded people who are willing to sacrifice and work hard to create something new.

There’s so much money in Silicon Valley now that a lot of non-like minded people have rolled in. Looking for easy stock options at a hot startup. They start whining when they realize that they have to give so much to make it all work. This happens periodically, and I wrote about it back in 2007. Then a downturn happens and suddenly everyone left is just thankful they’re still here.

But if too many people like this roll into town, a tipping point will be reached. And the magic will be gone.

It feels like we’re getting there. That not too long from now people will be talking about maximum working hours, minimum numbers of engineers assigned to complete a given task. And, shudder, unionization of startup workers.

I really hope that doesn’t happen. If it does, all the really necessary people will just leave and do their thing somewhere else.

Work hard. Cry less. And realize you’re part of history.

Update: Zynga “colleagues broke down into tears.” FFS, the place has free acupuncture and an organic cafeteria.

Update 2: Evil, bad, horrible Zynga

Breaking this morning: Ebay will announce the acquisition of New York based startup Hunch, say sources. The price tag will be somewhere around $80 million.

Hunch was founded by Chris Dixon, Caterina Fake (who left last summer to start a new company but remains an advisor), Tom Pinckney and Matt Gattis. The company has raised just under $20 million in funding.

The Hunch recommendation technology will be used by Ebay to revamp their own ecommerce recommendations. Dixon will take over Ebay’s existing 50 person recommendations team, and start a new office in New York.

That New York office will eventually grow to some 200 employees, I’m told, who’ll focus on recommendations. But the team will also analyze lots of Ebay data, and perhaps productize some of it or otherwise release it. As an example, Ebay purchase and sale data may help predict inflation or a looming recession better and sooner than any data the government can get their hands on.

It’s been a long journey for Hunch. The company was founded in 2008. In early 2010 I interviewed cofounder Fake, you can watch that here. In mid 2010 there were whispers that Google was taking a long look at the company as well, although I haven’t heard anything to suggest they were bidding against Ebay this time around.

Congrats to the team, and to investors General Catalyst Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, SV Angel and Khosla Ventures.

The first thing most people think about when they hear “evite” is “ad spam attack.” For years we all hated the service, but we used it anyway because it’s free and everyone else used it.

These days Facebook events has replaced evite for a lot of us. Facebook events doesn’t exactly scream “classy,” but at least people don’t cringe at the thought of using it.

For the last few years, though, a small startup called Paperless Post has emerged that lets people create beautiful event invitations online. Paperless Post isn’t free. In fact, that seems to be part of the attraction. You have to pay to use it, and just like certain trophy virtual goods that you can buy on Zynga games, the fact that there’s a real cost seems to create perceived value.

There’s been very little tech press about Paperless Post, but they get plenty of other attention. The NY Times has written about them at least twice, for example.

The company has sent some 50 million invitations, has raised $6.3 million in funding and is break even with 35 employees in New York and San Francisco. Marissa Mayer uses Paperless Post for her events. Metropolitan Museum of Art, The White House executive branch, The National Gallery and even The Prince of Wales have all used the premium invitation service.

It’s a fascinating case study against the notion that people will always choose free over for pay online services.

Evite Clones Paperless Post With Postmark

Copy/Paste innovation is certainly nothing new in our world. Evite has even defended itself in years past against services, including threatening a lawsuit against Socializr for creating a “confusingly similar” service.

It’ll take a little verbal dancing for evite to defend it’s latest move, though – an outright rip off of Paperless Post’s business. Evite’s Postmark hasn’t officially launched yet, but they promote it on the evite home page and people have noticed it.

“Evite’s Postmark looks like someone hired a programmer and told them to copy every aspect of Paperless Post,” says the person who pointed it out to me. And that’s true. The business model is identical – charge for every invitation sent, plus optional fees for specialized designs and other customizations. The pricing is nearly identical.

And the product itself is almost exactly the same as well. Compare the design and opening animation of a Paperless Post invitation to an Evite one, for example. Here’s a video:

Evite has also copied the exact look and feel of a number of the Paperless Post invitations as well.

Of course, Paperless Post could hardly have hoped that no one would ever copy their product and business model. But the hypocrisy of Evite is pretty comical here. I particularly like the line they use at the bottom of the Postmark website – “The comfort from knowing that Evite Postmark is as reliable, effective and innovative as Evite.”

Innovative, indeed.

And I certainly don’t weep for Paperless Post. In fact, this is great for their business. As much as Postmark has retreated from the stain of the evite brand on its website, most people will still understand where this service came from and remember the years of horror using the evite service. My guess is Postmark will just raise awareness of Paperless Post, and even more people will flock to the service when they want to send a premium event invitation.

Liz Welch at Inc. Magazine interviewed me in 2010 as part of her regular “The Way I Work” series. I had just moved to Seattle as part of my overall goal of (occasionally) detaching myself Silicon Valley.

In the article I talk about my erratic sleep patterns and my overall weight gain – some 50 pounds since I started TechCrunch in 2005.

In the year since I visited a sleep center and began focusing on getting enough sleep at regular hours. After a year of that my life has changed dramatically for the better. But the weight just kept creeping up. In the late summer 2011 I was a good 70 pounds heavier than I was when I started TechCrunch. And probably 90 pounds over my ideal weight.

Basically, I’m fat.

Being fat sucks. I’m not talking about the way I look. I’ve always been fairly comfortable in my own skin. But there are a whole bevy of health issues that fat people have to deal with. You don’t live as long as you should, and your quality of life is diminished substantially.

I’m trying to take control of this issue in my own way, and for the last several weeks I’ve been experimenting with a complete shift in lifestyle. So far, so good. And since a lot of people in our world deal are dealing with weight gain and health issues resulting from sitting in front of a computer for 16 hours a day, I thought I’d share.

The lightbulb went off in my head as I was reading Neal Stephenson’s new book Reamde (buy it here). In the book a character works at his computer from a treadmill, stationary bike or elliptical machine.

That prompted me to research “treadmill desks” and read about people’s experiences with them. Some people can’t stick with it, but a lot do. And the benefits are staggering. You’ll burn an extra 150 calories or so per hour. Most people say that they’re significantly more alert during the day, and they sleep much better at night.

So I jumped in. I elected not to buy a $5,000 unit (there are a couple out there), and building one myself seemed like too much trouble. Instead I bought a “TrekDesk” on Amazon and a cheap treadmill. I’ve been walking at 1.5 mph for 7-8 hours a day on average over the last few weeks. Some days I’m logging over 15 miles walking.

That’s not all though. I’m also using a Withings wifi scale to track my weight, and I’ve shared it with friends so they can keep an eye on it. The scale itself works great. The software is terrible but it does the job.

The final product I’m using is a Jawbone Up device. It’s a pedometer (very handy), it tracks sleep and it has a vibrating alarm feature to wake me up – much like the Lark device that I love so much. The only complaint I have about the Jawbone Up is that it doesn’t track steps very well on a treadmill with my hands up at a keyboard. But from what I can tell all pedometers seem to have this problem.

Things are just getting started. But the fact that I’m sleeping properly and have revamped my diet with my doctor, combined with actually walking miles and miles a day, has already had a profoundly positive effect on me.

I’ll update in a couple of months with any progress. If all goes well, in a year or two my body may have forgiven me for the TechCrunch years. We’ll see.

All of us have made a collage at some point in our lives – probably at school, where we patiently cut out cool pictures from a magazine, applied elmer’s white glue or rubber cement, and then took it home to mom and dad to put up on the refrigerator.

Just think how much fun it would have been to pinch or expand those images, copy parts of collages from friends, and skip the paper cuts. And do it all on an iPad.

That’s Mixel, a new startup that is launching now. They’re also announcing a $600,000 first funding round that CrunchFund is participating in along with Polaris Venture Partners, Betaworks and Allen & Company. The company also took $100,000 from a TechFellow Award in 2010.

See TechCrunch for more details, and check out the overview video on the Mixel home page.

Grab images from a search, or from Mixels created by others, or your gallery, crop them (with your finger), rearrange and resize it, and then add more images on top of or below it (or anywhere). Then publish and share.

It’s a ton of fun.

The company behind Mixel, Lascaux Co, was founded by Khoi Vinh (former Design Director for The New York Times) and Scott Ostler (dump.fm).

Update: See more stories about Mixel on GigaOm and NYTimes.

It looks like Simple Geo may have made a solid bet after all. Last week the company was acquired by Urban Airship. That transaction – all stock – was actually part of a much larger financing, Urban Airshp’s Series C round of funding.

The new round brings in $15.1 million from new strategic investors Salesforce and Verizon and existing investors Foundry Group and True Ventures. That brings the total capital raised by Urban Airship to $21.6 million.

Urban Airship also issued Series C stock to Simple Geo stockholders as part of the acquisition. That stock was issued in addition to the $15.1 million on cash raised by Urban Airship, CEO Scott Kveton told me today in a phone interview.

Urban Airship helps mobile developers send notifications to users, and they’re now sending a billion notifications per month to users on 300 million devices. They also assist developers with virtual good sales and app subscriptions. They charge a modest fee for all of these services.

Simple Geo will add location awareness to the process, helping developers send more relevant notifications. “We’ll tell ESPN that Sunday afternoon is a great time to send users a fantasy football message,” says Kveton, “but we’ll also tell Groupon to perhaps hold off during that period.” Both ESPN and Groupon are Urban Airship customers.

Knowing where a user is at any given time will help them refine messages further. Kveton says that the company will offer products including Simple Geo’s services early next year.

Former SimpleGeo CEO Jay Adelson was also on the call and seems enthusiastic about Urban Airship’s business going forward. “We considered raising new venture money to grow the company, or selling SimpleGeo for cash, but the biggest opportunity for shareholders was through a merger with Urban Airship,” he said.

I’m very happy to announce today that CrunchFund has invested in Gogobot, the innovative travel recommendation startup that launched in 2010.

The new round – $15 million from Redpoint Ventures, CrunchFund and previous investor Battery Ventures – will let Gogobot hire more people (they’ve done an incredible amount with just 6 engineers and designers to date). Gogobot also gets access to Redpoint’s Satish Dharmaraj, who’s joining the Gogobot board of directors. See TechCrunch for more details.

Researching travel online remains a mess, and Gogobot wants to fix that. There is a lot of data on Tripadvisor, and that’s the de facto place people go to write and read travel reviews today. But TripAdvisor is extremely old school, there’s no social component, and their extreme focus on monetization and SEO leads to a terrible user experience.

Gogobot lets you see recommendations based on your social graph, from people you know, or people who know people who you know. Like many other industries being disrupted, travel recommendations is one of those things that is just a perfect fit with social.

Gogobot is also just a lot more fun to browse than TripAdvisor or other sites. Everything’s packaged nicely and photos are always front and center. And I love how the site automatically picks up Foursquare checkins (with my permission) and then asks me later to leave a review about the places I’ve been. They also have an excellent mobile application, just released for iPhone.

The site is growing rapidly – more than 10x user growth in the last six months – but it has a long way to go. I’m excited to be part of this journey with them.

Advice from friends and mentors has been clear: just stop talking. And yet the tweets, emails and other messages just keep rolling in, featuring some of the most hateful stuff I’ve ever read. They range from the fascinating “I don’t think you’re a racist!” to “I don’t think you’re a racist, you’re just stupid,” to “yeah, you’re a racist, so shut up.” Plus, the CNN documentary that is the source of all this mess hasn’t been aired yet, and I haven’t seen it, and all of this is going to pop up again then.

And it’s not just CNN being CNN any more. I wrote about how CNN interviewed me in July, supposedly about startup accelerators, but really about the lack of minorities in Silicon Valley. And by minorities CNN meant blacks and hispanics, because Asians, who have disproportionate success in Silicon Valley, don’t count.

I wrote about it all here.

The problems with the interview:

– I was told by CNN it was about startup accelerators, not minorites.
– CNN then created a clip that highlighted me saying I didn’t know any black entrepreneurs, even though later in the conversation I corrected myself.
– CNN then wrote two articles, one of which was the top story on CNN last week, focusing on my race problems.
– Only a very few people have seen it. I haven’t, and I’m in the absurd position of not having seen it myself (to know how they edited the long version) and defending myself from people who also haven’t seen my interview.

Soledad O’Brien responded to my post, stating that her team had in fact notified someone at AOL a few days prior to the interview that minorities might be discussed. She presents an email which is almost identical to the first one, but which has an inserted fourth paragraph:

From: “Babbit-Arp, Kimberly”
Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2011 11:41:10 -0400
To: Kelly Mayes
Subject: CNN Interview on Friday, July 29, 2011
Hey Kelly,

Thank you again for setting up this interview with Michael for Friday July 29th. Soledad has set up her schedule to fly from the east coast to meet and chat with Michael – so we are very much looking forward to this opportunity.

As we indicated in our earlier email for the past several months our team at CNN been working on what we think is the first major broadcast news documentary to focus on the ‘accelerator phenomenon’ and the booming start-up culture in Silicon Valley. In this culture, Michael Arrington is God and TechCrunch is the bible.

The main thread of our story, reported by Soledad O’Brien, will be the experience of a group of digital entrepreneurs who are spending the summer in Silicon Valley chasing their startup dreams.

The group of entrepreneurs we are following are participating in the Newme accelerator. The first accelerator of its kind set up specifically for entrepreneurs of color. Their inspiring stories will be the focus of this CNN Black in America documentary and various profiles produced for Money.CNN.com.

Obviously Michael is extremely knowledgeable about the valley/start up culture and the rise of accelerator programs, as chronicled minute by minute in Tech Crunch. We would like Michael to share some insight into the allure of tech entrepreneurship… Is now a good time to be a tech entrepreneur? What drives people to pour their blood, sweat and tears into these startups? Who succeeds? Who fails? and why?

This CNN documentary is scheduled to air in November.

Any last minute questions – please let us know.

Thank you for everything!!
Kimberly

Kimberly Arp Babbit
Producer

And from that, presumably, I should have known to come prepared for a race war. Despite the fact that the email wasn’t sent to my assistant (the previous one was) and I certainly wasn’t copied on it. I never read it, heard about it, or otherwise knew about it. And even if I had read it, I would not have come prepared to defend myself against an angry interviewer who wanted to throw away 45 minutes of reasonable discussion to grab a few nice out of context soundbites.

But what’s worse, as I said before, is that the one statement I made is now the primary trailer for the documentary. Nothing else I talked about for 45 minutes, including revising that statement.

It was a “gotcha” and that’s that.

No explanation of the broken promise to put up the entire interview and transcript with me on CNN.

No explanation around why, if CNN is as proud of their work as they say, they deleted one of the posts they wrote about me.

What I think I said in the interview

I remain in the unenviable position of not being able to see the interview, or the final clips for the documentary (where they’ll remove anything remotely reasonable I said). However, what I think I talked about was how few black and hispanic entrepreneurs we see in Silicon Valley, and how eagerly we tried to put them on stage (this was pre-CrunchFund, I was just talking about press via TechCrunch). It went a lot like the whole 2010 women in tech debacle

While it’s easy to look around Silicon Valley and see very few (non Asian because they don’t count!) minorities and then conclude “you’re a bunch of racists,” I don’t think that’s productive. What I do think is productive is to get more minorities, and women, and everyone, focusing on math and science and computers in school, as early as possible.

Once they’re here they are welcomed with open arms.

The top ten, or so, reasons I’m a racist”

Unless their ideas suck. And even if they do suck a little, at TechCrunch we’d write about it anyway to give exposure to these entrepreneurs. That’s another source of endless criticism.

Or the coverage wasn’t good enough.

Or that putting people on stage who didn’t strictly deserve it is racist because it makes people think that they’re only on stage because of their race.

But either way, unless we cover more minorities, we’re racist.

And, screw it, we’re all just racists anyway, says white guy Mitch Kapor. “The operation of hidden bias in our cognitive apparatus is a well-documented phenomenon in neuroscience. We may think we are acting rationally and objectively, but our brains deceive us.”

Statements like that, by the way, scare the hell out of me. They can be used to justify almost anything. Like how we’re all racists. I wonder if Kapor could argue that he himself is rational and objective, even though no one else is.

So just to sum up, if I say the race problem in Silicon Valley is caused by too few blacks, hispanics and women showing up to even get in the game, I’m a racist. And if I say that we covered virtually every minority and women founded startup on TechCrunch, I’m a racist. And also, I’m just a racist period, per Kapor’s post.

One critical author wrote about great startups like Bitcasa, which has a black founder and CEO. And somehow didn’t see the irony in calling me out even though the picture used was Bitcasa on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt, as a finalist. And they apparently don’t know that I’m an investor in Bitcasa as well.

What I gave Bitcasa is a bear hug. But it had nothing to do with what color the founder is. The young startup could become huge one day.

And also, why am I even talking about this? See “But having someone who is not a woman or a minority make grand pronouncements about how beneficial being a woman or a minority is while raising money is patronizing, disturbing, and insulting.”

There were lots of tweets like this as well, summed up as “How dare Arrington talk about race” …even, I guess, when he’s sitting in front of a camera being asked for nearly an hour about race.

I’d respond that the only reason I dared talk about race was because I was set up, but I’m not sure anyone’s listening any more.

The White Guys Who Get It (And Milk It)

But you know what I find offensive? That fact that I can’t talk about it, unless I say what I’m supposed to say.

And what I’m supposed to say is this. “I’ll assert that racism is alive and well in the U.S. I’ve seen it many times, including in Silicon Valley…When you see racism, don’t tolerate it. Take action. And don’t deny reality.”

This is what investor Brad Feld wrote about all this, while getting his jabs in on me.

To universal high fives as a white guy who gets it, and cares. But wait! Don’t forget white guy Kapor’s universal law that we’re all racists even though we don’t know it because Kapor says we are.

And that includes Feld. The guy who writes the crowd pleasing words, apparently, so that his venture firm can stay more…let’s say racially pure. And the list of mentors at his TechStars accelerator program – well let’s just say they did manage to get a token black man and a token black women on to that list of hundreds of mentors, but it sure doesn’t look like “take action” to me.

There are some hard truths about race in Silicon Valley that none of these people care to address:

– There are very few minorities here. When they are here, they get hired much more easily than their white or asian counterparts. There is no conscious or subconscious desire to keep minorities out, at least not in the groups I run in, which include all major VCs and accelerators. It’s the complete opposite. Kapor may say we’re closet racists, whatever, but out in the real world this bias just isn’t there.

– If more minorities arrive, more minorities will get funded, and a virtuous cycle can be created. This is what’s going on with various successful Asians in Silicon Valley, who help the next generation win too.

– The fact that some minorities are not here may be because certain minorities don’t see Silicon Valley as a place for them, and that is something that we need to change. Which many of us are doing by going a little easier on minority candidates.

– Still, not every black entrepreneur deserves to be funded, or exceed. The vast majority of them should fail, and will fail unless the government starts a program to fund every black entrepreneur and then require public companies to buy each and every one of these startups. If that happens, most of us will be out of here pretty darn quick.

– When a black entrepreneur tries and fails, she should not immediately think that racism was the cause. Since nearly all startups fail, it’s very likely that the startup would have failed no matter what color the person was who started it.

– The way to fix this problem is to try to get more very young minorities interested in business, science and math, and create a culture that celebrates these interests in the same way that being good at sports is celebrated today. All we need is one huge success story to plaster all over news sites and magazines, and the ball will be rolling.

– That will start with people like will.i.am, who’s trying to do exactly this in Los Angeles. I wrote about this in my previous post. As far as I know he’s not in the interview, but the man is doing more to get minorities into tech than anyone on earth, and probably more in a day than O’Brien will do in a lifetime.

– Finally, Asian “minorities” can’t simply be ignored. Many of Silicon Valley’s biggest success stories are from Asian entrepreneurs who came here with nothing, sometimes, illegally, and found a way to win. And back when the early pioneers were doing that, bias was definitely built in to Silicon Valley. They succeeded despite that. To ignore this is to throw away valuable data, and I don’t see any good reason to do that.

I am willing to have a civil discussion about my views on this. I’m open to the idea that I may even be wrong. But the people who see things differently from me on this seem content to either scream at me, or use big words to show that I’m racist no matter what I do to try to hire and promote minorities and women.

If these are the people who truly speak for the underdogs, absolutely nothing is going to change. Feld will keep saying nice politically correct things but won’t be hiring any black people because there’s no pressure on him. Others will follow what he’s doing, because, hell, that worked out great. But there will still be very few black entrepreneurs here to actually fund, or write about.

I, in contrast, don’t say politically correct things. But I have educated ideas about how to begin to fix the problem, and I’m willing to both speak my mind and listen to others (but only if they don’t scream at me, or throw me under the bus to write niceties about doing more while doing absolutely nothing). And in the meantime I’m funding, promoting, hiring and generally doing what I’ve always done to help out women and minority founders.

Many of us are taking solid strides forward in Silicon Valley. I wish that all the people up on their pedestals trying to get credit for saying the right things about race would just get down, get to work, and make things happen, too.

SimpleGeo, the once promising location startup, has been acquired, I’ve heard. The buyer is Urban Airship.

This is an all stock acquisition apparently, totaling around $3.5 million in value. Since SimpleGeo has raised nearly $10 million in venture capital, it’s likely that all or nearly all of the acquisition price would go to the last round investors due to their liquidity preference.

It’s a soft landing for SimpleGeo. But at least the service may live on.

Urban Airship has raised $6.5 million.

After 42 successful weekly auctions of shares of Facebook stock, SecondMarket hit a snag – they weren’t able to make a market between buyers and sellers in the 43rd, and no sales were closed. The same thing happened in the 44th auction, no sales.

Things have changed this week, though. And it was the sellers who folded, not the buyers.

The weighted average offer (sell) price in today’s auction was $32.37 (down from $32.42 last week). The weighted average bid (buy) price was $28.47, unchanged from last week. The clear price was an even $30 per share.

And just 14,000 shares closed ($420,000 in aggregate). About 130,000 shares, nearly 10x the volume, were purchased in Auction 42 three weeks ago.

See also: FACEBOOK WILL PROBABLY BE MORE PROFITABLE THAN AMAZON THIS YEAR