All this year TechCrunch and others were covering the weekly SecondMarket auctions for Facebook stock. 2.7 million shares, for example, cleared in aggregate the first five auction at prices ranging from $21.01 to $28.26 per share.

The auctions have continued, but there haven’t been the dramatic price increases or decreases needed to trigger the rabid coverage. But today, for the first time I believe, SecondMarket was unable to clear any shares at all in the auction.

The weighted average offer price for this week’s auction was $33.91, roughly in line with the clearing price for last week’s auction. But the weighted average bid price was just $28.15. Zero shares cleared the market, meaning no shares changed hands.

Why? The WSJ article this week pouring cold water on rising startup valuations, and suggesting that venture cash was drying up, was almost certainly the cause. Whether or not there was much truth to the article, things like that can and do freak buyers out and cause them to step back. No one wants to buy at the top of the market.

What really matters is whether or not things pick back up next week or the week after. And whether or not sellers will take lower prices in the $20s to cash out of Facebook.

Gary Flake, a long time Technical Fellow at Microsoft, sent me an invite to his new Clipboard service today. The company has been on my radar for a while now, but they’ve kept things pretty quiet. Today was the first time I was able to see what they’ve been working on.

It’s an internet clipping and bookmarking service, sort of Delicious meets Pinterest. There have been scores of these types of startups before, but none of them were quite efficient or beautiful enough. At first and second glance, Clipboard looks like a winner.

With a click of your mouse you can highlight any part of a web page (it helps you by grabbing obvious content areas, and save it to your clipboard. The usual stuff, tagging and annotation, is available if you want. You can then make the clips private or public, share them, etc. And you can view them in a variety of ways, including a boring list or a Pinterest-style layout.

It has some real bugs still – it doesn’t grab posts from TechCrunch well, for example. And when I grabbed a screen from the MoMa website it showed a 404 error on Clipboard (meaning it’s pulling it real time from the original source, I guess, not taking a static picture of what you saw at a certain time).

But…It’s GOOD. Really good. A definite keeper. I’ve already used up most of my invites, but if you can find someone who’s using the service already, hit them up for one.

See GeekWire for their take.

Update: From comments:

Clipboard engineer here.

Clips are not just screenshots – they preserve the original markup and style. In real time, we translate the selected portion of the HTML and CSS of the source page into a self-contained unit that is both compressed and can safely coexist with other clips. For example, notice that all the links are preserved in this clip:
http://www.clipboard.com/clip/LR-B8x4FlQsi9NHM0YYHNxQZ806b3pRw61He

We even preserve embed and objects.
Youtube video: http://www.clipboard.com/clip/LR-Ipfjh4bp-vpwg2XZSaQssLBqu2A8tKdDe
Live map: http://www.clipboard.com/clip/LR-KylLO_bqPkN0m5S3BjhOSpVleZmN-925e
Stock chart: http://www.clipboard.com/clip/LR4afhOoCYqJ-LDy

Because we capture all the relevant markup and styles, a clip will persist even if the original page goes away.

The Wall Street Journal quietly enabled a personalization feature today (or at least this is the first time I’ve noticed it). Articles are now automatically sorted based on what they think you’ll like to read. It’s powered by Los Angeles based startup Gravity.

If you’re not familiar with Gravity – it was founded in 2008 by three former MySpace executives and has gone through many iterations. Originally the company was a site where people could chat with others about topics of interest. Then they turned the engine they created to determine people’s interest graph and planned on helping other sites personalize content.

CEO Amit Kapur, formerly the COO of MySpace, wrote a guest blog post on TechCrunch last year talking about his vision around the future of personalization.

It turns out that sites want this feature. Earlier this year they began talks with the WSJ and others, and they contacted me about adding the feature to TechCrunch. We were aggressively pursuing a deal as of the day I was terminated, and I had hoped that we’d be the first to launch.

That didn’t happen apparently (and I have no idea where things stand with TechCrunch and Gravity). But I’ve been checking the WSJ site to see when it would launch there.

To see it in action go the the WSJ and scroll down to the part of the site where there’s a grid of topics with stories underneath (or just search for “personalized” and you’ll see it right away – “The sections below are personalized for you. Learn more >.”

WSJ News Personalized for You
The articles and sections in this area of WSJ.com have been selected based partly on the stories you have previously read on the site. We take your privacy seriously and while this personalization feature uses cookies, it does not connect your WSJ.com reading history to your name or other personally identifiable information.

If you prefer not to see personalized content on WSJ.com, please click here to opt out. To learn more about our privacy policy, click here. This personalization service is powered by Gravity, a WSJ.com partner. Please click here to see Gravity’s privacy policy.

There’s more here on the Gravity site about the partnership. That’s also the place where you can opt out of the service if you want to.

As you read stories on the WSJ site, and then share those stories or “like” them, Gravity is watching. Try clicking on a bunch of sports stories, for example, and you’ll see the sports section move up to the top and the top stories will be related to the things you’ve clicked on (I clicked on a bunch of NBA stories, for example).

For now it looks like the WSJ is just using Gravity in that one area of the home page. At TechCrunch we were planning on rolling it out on the site as a whole. Important stories (determined by us) would still be positioned on top. But if you only seem to read stories about Apple, there’d be a concentration of those stories, too.

Gravity is charging a fee to publishers to use the service – a quite steep fee. But the data that you get back on what individuals like is a potential gold mine. You can then use that data to hyper target ads to those people. The person who only reads Apple stories, for example, would get a lot of iPad and iPhone 4GS ads.

That combination of features – providing users with a more interesting website, and getting back a ton of interesting data about those users, made it a no brainer from my perspective.

One of the things the press is fascinated with – and have asked me repeatedly since the CrunchFund was announced – is exactly how venture capitalists differentiate themselves to provide a competitive edge.

The question sounds smart. But for anyone who’s been an entrepreneur it makes about as much sense as asking a baseball team how the colors of their uniforms will help them win the world series.

Entrepreneurs really just want a couple of things from investors. Money, obviously. The brand/marketing benefits of associating their brand to yours. And directed, specific help exactly when they need it.

The worst kind of investor is the one that’s in your business all the time. These are generally the freshly minted MBAs who joined a big venture firm and are trying to impress everyone at board meetings. They like to do things like fire CEOs and bring in “seasoned managers.” Or “lay off half your staff and sell this loser to whoever will pay at least enough that we get our money back.” Mostly they’re just insecure, have no idea what they’re doing, and want to try to hide that by talking a lot.

Far better than that is an investor who does absolutely nothing beyond giving you money. The “first, do no harm” principle should apply to venture capitalists just as much as it applies to doctors.

The perfect investor, though, knows when to leave you alone but also knows when to help in a directed, high value-add way. Most of the time they only help when you’ve specifically asked them. Occasionally if things are going really sideways they’ll step in with advice, too.

In an interview a couple of weeks ago Vinod Khosla spoke with me about how he helps companies. The first way is to be “brutally honest” with them – see my post here.

The second way, he said, is through targeted help that adds incredible value. He was currently spending a lot of time trying to recruit a single person for a startup he’d invested in. This person was being recruited by another big venture firm to start a new company. But Khosla’s company wanted him too. And so Vinod spent time meeting with this person directly to try to convince him.

When he spends time directly recruiting like this, he said, he has a very good success rate. He thought it was likely he’d convince this guy to join his company. “Sometimes the right person can make a young startup 2-3x more valuable than it would be without him or her,” he said, “recruiting these people is a great use of my time.”

If Vinod invests in your company, don’t expect to spend hours on the phone with him every day becoming bestest friends. But when you need a big gun, you’ll have one.

Ron Conway has the same philosophy. He spends almost all of his time helping startups raise money, recuite people and eventually sell. I’ve probably heard at least two dozen stories about how he helped a company pull a victory from the jaws of defeat. Unfortunately almost all of these stories involve him leaning on some CEO or board member of a big public company and will never be told publicly. The most amazing thing is how often he’ll do big favors for startups he hasn’t even invested in.

In fact, he may be doing too many favors. Here’s an email that David Lee (he runs SV Angel, the fund Ron founded) sent out recently about Ron:

From: David Lee
Sent: Monday, October 10, 2011 9:10 PM
Cc: SVA Partners
Subject: Understanding Ron’s Role at SV Angel

CONFIDENTIAL – DO NOT FORWARD

Friends and Colleagues,

I want to clarify Ron’s role at SV Angel and how he works with us. This is very important because many of you still email Ron on most business matters, which is causing unnecessary bottlenecks.

Ron is not involved with day-to-day operations of SV Angel. He is not a General Partner in SV Angel. He is the (largest) limited partner in the fund. He directs all of his deal flow to us and we have access to him and his resources. The team and I are responsible for all day-to-day activities such as evaluating deal flow, making investment decisions, meeting business partners and helping portfolio companies at inflection points such as financings and M&A.

Ron focuses on highly-sensitive inflection points – special projects for portfolio companies that have unusually high impact. The SV Angel team and I focus on all other inflection points. We use the following analogy: Ron is the “brain surgeon” and we are the “primary care physicians.” The physician is the point person for all matters and can handle 95% of them. The brain surgeon handles the ‘delicate’ stuff.

We have been using this approach for the last few years and it’s been successful in leveraging Ron’s strengths. I am writing this email because many don’t understand our system and still email Ron only.

Please understand that Ron forwards EVERY SINGLE EMAIL HE RECEIVES to me and the SV Angel team. The only exceptions are those that are highly confidential or sensitive.

If you think it’s urgent, please feel free to cc Ron but keep in mind that we will bring it up to him anyway so ccing him won’t necessarily expedite things.

Also, please keep in mind that he is also very active in philanthropy so he is at full capacity all the time.

To be clear, this email doesn’t mean we are changing a thing. Ron is still as active as ever – as the brain surgeon. But I want to clarify our approach to you so we can continue to provide responsive follow-up and service, which has been Ron’s trademark over his 15 year career as an angel investor.

CONFIDENTIAL – DO NOT FORWARD

-David

The difference between Ron and Vinod is just one of scale. Khosla Ventures invests in far fewer companies than SV Angel, and so Vinod doesn’t have as many people asking him for help. SV Angel invests in 4-5 companies a month. They have a lot of active portfolio companies, a lot of them are really young, and all of them have pressing needs.

This is exactly how we operate at CrunchFund (and to be clear, all the best angels and venture capitalists do, too). We don’t meddle, but we’re there for entrepreneurs when they need us.

So back to that first question in the first paragraph above that the press loves to ask. How are we different? Well, we focus on having a very, very deep network that we can call on when we need to help our startups get something they need. Putting together a round of financing with like-minded investors. Hiring a team, particularly talented product, design and engineering people. And, eventually, helping them with liquidity events.

There’s one last thing that entrepreneurs need, too. Your support. Starting a company is a lonely thing, and there are usually people in your life who think you’re crazy for doing it. Sometimes an entrepreneur just needs to know you actually believe in them to keep their morale up during the tough times. I talk a lot about this in my “Are You A Pirate” post on TechCrunch

My knowledge of hurricanes is limited, mostly, to watching Anderson Cooper on CNN standing in the wind and rain. It never seems all that bad.

But as I sit here at SFO waiting for my much delayed flight to The Lobby conference being held near Puerto Vallarta this week, I can’t help but notice that Hurrican Jova is expected to become a “Category 4 hurricane” (no idea what that means exactly), with winds reaching 131 mph. And it’s touching down at…Puerto Vallarta:

Hotel employees were taping up windows, cleaning out water channels to avoid flooding and were planning to pull in all beach furniture later today as Jova gets closer.

The hotel’s approximately 90 employees are planning to take shelter in an interior ballroom if things get ugly.

Organizer David Hornik says everything’s going to be fine. My former boss Heather Harde, who’s already there, says not to even think about getting on a flight: “definitely don’t fly…no rain or winds here yet, but the sky is completely overcast and rather ominous looking.”

Screw it. Let’s do this.

What happens to Apple now that Steve Jobs is gone? Check out this 2009 post from Chris Dixon that compares Apple and Steve Jobs to Sony and Akio Morita titled MAN AND SUPERMAN.

Akio was famous for slamming focus groups, instead focusing on building things that consumers didn’t know that they want until it already exists. Steve Jobs felt the same way. Few consumer electronics companies have that kind of courage.

Reprinted in full below, with his permission:

MAN AND SUPERMAN

There are two broad philosophical approaches to explaining the forces that drive world events. The first one is sometimes called the Great man theory, neatly summarized by the quote ”the history of the world is but the biography of great men.” This view was famously espoused by the philosopher Hegel and later Nietzche, who called such great people Ubermenchen (“supermen”).

The alternative view argues that history is largely determined by a complex series of societal, political, institutional, technological and other forces. This view argues that great people are more a product of their time than the times are a product of them.

You can apply these theories to companies, in particular to the founders of technology companies who keep their companies great long after their “natural” life cycle. Most successful companies start with one great product and ride its growth but fail to pull off a second act.

The companies that defy this natural cycle are invariable run by “supermen” (or women). Akio Morita founded Sony in 1946 and was a very active CEO until 1994. At the time he left, Sony had a $40B market cap. Today it is valued at $28B. Akio had an incredible run of hit products: the first transistor radio, the first transistor television, the Walkman, the first video cassette recorder, and the compact disc. Akio ran Sony based on his intuitions. For example, he ignored focus groups that hated the Walkman, saying:

“We don’t ask consumers what they want. They don’t know. Instead we apply our brain power to what they need, and will want, and make sure we’re there, ready”

Steve Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976. He was pushed out in in May 1985 when the company was valued at about $2.2B. He returned in 1996 when Apple was worth $3B. Today it is worth $169B. Jobs famously micromanages every product detail and like Akio makes decisions based on intuitions.

Bill Gates was the co-founder and CEO of Microsoft, building it to an astounding $470B market cap. Under him, Microsoft had multiple acts, among them: DOS, Windows, Office, and enterprise server software. Since Steve Ballmer became CEO, the company’s value has declined to $223B. I’m sure Steve Ballmer is a smart and passionate guy, but he’s no superman.

Some observers like the author Jim Collins think great companies are all about culture, not a singularly great leader. Collin’s “built to last” case study companies included Circuit City and Fannie Mae, both of which have been catastrophic failures. His “portfolio” has underperformed to S&P.

It is convenient to think you can take greatness and bottle it up and sell it in a book. In fact, life is unfair: there are geniuses and then there are the rest of us. When great leaders go away, so does the greatness of their companies.

TechCrunch Disrupt champion Shaker, an Israeli virtual world startup, has closed a $15 million round of financing. The round was led by Shervin Pishevar at Menlo Ventures. CrunchFund was already an investor in Shaker, and participated in this new round as well.

Other investors in this round include Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, Troy Carter and Rami Beracha from Pitango.

Here’s the TechCrunch post about Shaker winning Disrupt last month, and here’s their launch post and demo video.

The company was founded in Israel but recently opened a San Francisco office, which will be the new company headquarters. Shaker was founded by Ofer Rundstein, Yonatan Maor and Gad Maor.

Pishevar has a serious crush on the company. I asked him to tell me why he invested, and how he first met the team. In his own gushing words:

I was blown away by talent of the Shaker team. I’ve been searching for many years for what only Shaker has accomplished. We at Menlo Ventures are excited to be leading this major investment in Shaker. Shaker is the human serendipity engine. Shaker is going to touch and transform human connection and entertainment worldwide.”

Mike, so here’s the crazy story of how I met them. I was working on scouting a Jedi Council retreat in Cabo. I met these amazing guys from Mexico at Summit Series who are were working on an entrepreneurs resort. I began mentoring one of them, Bear. He wanted to learn how to become an investor and VC in the future. My advice was to go forth and travel around the world scouting for amazing startups and bring it back. I didn’t expect to hear from him for months. Instead, a mere 3 weeks later he had traveled to Egypt and Israel, and I flew into Burning Man. He said, “Shervin, I listened to you! Thank you! And I found this amazing startup, Shaker. And they are flying into the Playa tonight and they are competing in Techcrunch Disrupt!” That night I met them and was very impressed with them and their vision. But with no connection I had to wait until the following Tuesday to get the demo at a Samovar in San Francisco. Within a minute, I knew what I saw was the future. I had been looking for this for years. Their product execution was nearly flawless. A very hard feat to accomplish given the vision. The next day I brought them in to meet the rest of the Menlo partners. They agreed and we were off! Meanwhile, while we tried to come to an agreement on an investment, Shaker won Disrupt! I actually got the term sheet done and signed from the streets of Haiti the following weekend while I was volunteering in Haiti for jp/hro! Hopefully, there will be karma in that and all of the serendipity that brought us together.

I am very excited that Shaker is my first major investment at Menlo! Go Shaker!

Why’d we invest? Like Airtime, Shaker addresses the difficulty in meeting new people on the Internet:

“We are trying to address the problem of what has happened the last 10 years of social media,” says Parker, who was also the founding President of Facebook. “Your social network has become more rigid and constraining.” Airtime, it seems, will be more about meeting new people. “Facebook is about identity, the people you already know,” says Parker. “It has little to do with people you don’t know.”

Shaker is a virtual world where you can meet new people using your Facebook identity (picture and basic information). It’s strangely addictive. And we’re very excited to be investors.

…which you can only get if you have a blog and replace the header logo with the Apple logo 🙂 . Or you visit an Apple store three times. A nice surprise, I didn’t even know it existed (here’s more on it).

This was a real checkin, even though most of my Foursquare checkins are part of my fantasy life. Just bought a shiny new Macbook Air.

Nuance has acquired Seattle-based startup Swype for something more than $100 million, says a source with knowledge of the deal.

I’m a big fan of Swype, and this is a brilliant acquisition by Nuance. Swype first launched at a TechCrunch conference in 2008. It’s software for mobile devices, and helps people input text at far faster speeds than through normal methods. It will soon be on over a hundred million devices.

Nuance already has T9, a predictive text application first developed in the 90s, and T9 competes directly with Swype. Oddly enough, the cofounder of Swype, Cliff Kushler, also founded T9. Check out this CNN article earlier this year on Kushler.

I have no idea how this acquisition affects the existing Nuance T9 product. I assume we’ll hear more about that in the future from Nuance.

Sidenote – Swype didn’t win the launch competition at the TechCrunch event. They came in second to Yammer. I wrote an article last year on why the best company doesn’t always win, even when the judges jump out of their chairs to try it out. From that article:

And like UJAM, Swype stole everyone’s hearts. People wanted to try Swype themselves, and you can see all the judges getting up from their seats after the demo to try it themselves. People were jumping up and down in the audience. Etc. Watch it all here.

Swype also had amazing founders, and since TechCrunch50 has gone on to do amazing things. Their software is now being built into tens of millions of mobile handsets a year, and they collect a fee for every install.

But at the time they just weren’t far enough along to win the show. Their first big licensing deals were ahead of them, and the judges felt more comfortable with Yammer as the winner. And like UJAM, a lot of audience members were really angry that Swype didn’t win it all.

Congratulations to the founders and executives (Mike McSherry, Cliff Kushler, Aaron Sheedy, Loreen Milbrath and Mark Illing), employees and investors (the company has raised just $14 million). I loved this application from the first time I saw it. Hopefully this acquisition will let the team continue to create even better technology to help us with those damned tiny keyboards. If this was a company that I met today for the first time, I’d invest aggressively in it (yes, I know, hindsight, etc. But you know what I mean).

You lived. You really, really lived.

