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An online-video industry insider emails us to tell us that Veoh has laid off 40 percent of its staff. On Monday afternoon, LinkedIn had 94 people listed as Veoh employees; the company has raised almost $70 million in venture capital in order to produce a pale imitation of YouTube.

An online-video industry insider emails us to tell us that Veoh has laid off 40 percent of its staff. On Monday afternoon, LinkedIn had 94 people listed as Veoh employees. PaidContent says that the company laid off 15 employees from its Russian office in St. Petersburg, and is hiring stateside. Veoh has raised almost $70 million in venture capital in order to produce a pale imitation of YouTube.

Of troubled electric-car maker Tesla Motors, the shining light of Silicon Valley’s nascent clean-transporation industry, commenter quistrl writes:

I hear the company is trying to raise 100mm with Goldman acting as the banker, anyone else hear anything.

First we’ve heard. Anyone else know if Goldman is out peddling a stake in the company? If true, it must take guts on the parts of Goldman’s bankers; as trendy as cleantech is, money-losing startups are not in vogue.

Remember Sequoia Capital, the once-boisterous Google backer which has turned gloomy of late? It turns out that Sequoia’s prepare-for-the-worst message wasn’t meant for everyone. In September, Sequoia raised $1.7 billion in two new funds from its limited partners, including the $929.5 million U.S. Growth Fund. It alone accounted for 11 percent of the $8.1 billion venture capitalists raised in the third quarter. But that money is going into new startups.

Venture capital firms raise separate funds over time. Typically, investments in the same startup come from the same fund; VCs don’t invest all of a fund at once, reserving some money in the original fund for these follow-up financings.

So the new fund is a separate pool of money from the one Sequoia will use to fund its current portfolio — the companies whose CEOs were recently summoned by Sequoia to a summit meeting to hear all about the need to cut costs and become self-sustaining. This advice was the complete opposite of what Sequoia was telling CEOs earlier this year, which was to grow at all costs and emulate Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis, who freely admits his company isn’t worrying about revenues.

What Sequoia really should have been telling its startups: We told you to spend what you have, as aggressively as possible. Now we have money, and you don’t. That’s your problem.

Here’s an inventive business model: When you’re not actually making money, try making it up. The former CEO and CFO of Entellium, a software startup in Seattle, have been charged with wire fraud after an employee found the company keeping a cooked set of books for its investors. Paul Johnston, the CEO, and Parrish Jones, the CFO, resigned abruptly last month. 40 of the company’s 60 employees in Seattle were laid off, having been told that the “money ran out.” Or ran away: Authorities are trying to find where the company’s $50 million in venture capital went.

Entellium, an online customer-relationship management software company which competed — not very well, it turns out — with the likes of Salesforce.com and NetSuite, had raised that $50 million from venture capitalists, including Ignition Venture Partners, a high-profile firm founded in part by former Microsoft executives. Ignition had invested $2 million as recently as April. The company told investors it had taken in $15.5 million since 2006. The real number: $3.8 million.

Johnston, in his resignation email, said that he had started overstating revenues almost as soon as the company was founded in 2004. Barry Abraham, a former executive and shareholder, wonders why investors never conducted an audit. His explosive charge: Abraham claims the board knew of the fraud, but hoped Entellium’s real business would become someone else’s problem before it was discovered. In fact, Entellium floated talk of a sale to Avidian, another Seattle-area software company, shortly before the charges were unveiled. In the complaint filed by prosecutors, Ignition’s board members say they never would have invested had they known the real state of Entellium’s finances. Would anyone be surprised to hear that the rest of Ignition’s portfolio companies now have audits scheduled?

The good times are over, the partners of Sequoia Capital are telling the entrepreneurs they fund. Quite literally: They sent a summons to a summit meeting with a picture of a gravestone with the writing “R.I.P. Good Times,” rival venture capitalist Om Malik reports. There, partners including Michael Moritz and Doug Leone told CEOs of companies in their portfolio that they should steel themselves for a prolonged downturn, make their businesses self-sustainable, and cut all unnecessary costs.

I would be more impressed if Sequoia hadn’t pulled this act before when the last bubble burst. True, they called the movement of the market. But it’s conventional wisdom today that the economy is tanking.

But what does the economy have to do with the startups Sequoia funds? The whole point of venture capital is to nurture companies that need capital. Part of the art of investing in startups is knowing when to push them out of the next. Templated cost-cutting advice, applied across Sequoia’s portfolio, is hardly a value-add.

And it’s not clear how this was bad advice a year ago. Sequoia’s portfolio should have been keeping a close eye on costs then as now. The IPO market is definitely ailing now, but it’s hardly been healthy over the last few years. Large acquisitions have been scant since MySpace and YouTube got bought. The chaos on Wall Street doesn’t change the bleak outlook for exiting startup investments profitably that existed beforehand.

So what’s really going on here? Consider two of the companies that heard Sequoia’s speeches last time around: PayPal and Google. They both spent and grew aggressively in the face of a local recession. They both managed to IPO when few tech companies were going public. And they both delivered handsome profits to Sequoia.

I’m just guessing at Moritz’s game, but here’s what I suspect is going through his head: He could have delivered a cost-cutting sermon a year ago, true. But his entrepreneurs are far more likely to listen to it now. And the rest of Silicon Valley is listening, to. He’s made his bit of noise, knowing full well word would leak out, and put a scare in all his competitors.

How convenient that this scare-tactics summit was held just a month after Sequoia raised $1.7 billion in new funds. While everyone else is hunkering down, Sequoia will cull the weaklings from its portfolio, double down on the winners — and profit before anyone realizes the good times are back. Well played, Michael, well played.

Marc Andreessen has been invited to join the board at eBay. The online auction company has been struggling of late, never mind CEO John Donahoe’s assertion that what’s bad for the American economy is good for eBay. Andreessen, probably smelling the stink blowing in from the rising tide, stockpiled enough venture capital to last Ning through a “nuclear winter.” Proving his acumen at swindling investors if nothing else — and he does know how to keep employees overworked between stints at eager, young startups like Netscape and Ning and layoff-happy AOL. [San Jose Mercury News]

Fred Wilson’s venture-capital firm, the paper of record tells us, “has built its portfolio making small bets on young companies.” That is an excellent definition of early-stage venture capital. But is Wilson, of Union Square Ventures, to be congratulated with a glowing New York Times profile merely for doing his job? Apparently so. The real thing that distinguishes Wilson from his peers are not his practices or his profits; it is his prolixity. Wilson writes a blog read by some 25,000 people a month. Newspaper reporters can relate to him as a wordsmith rather than a financier. Also, he is in New York, which makes him geographically convenient for the media capital. The news event which prompted this profile?

Wilson gave a speech last week in Manhattan. In other words, there was no reason to run the story. What’s really going on? Wilson himself explains: The Times had this piece in the works for weeks. My theory: Editors there felt it needed to run soon, before the sector Wilson favors — hipsterish Web startups like Twitter and Etsy — suffered some embarrassing disaster.

(Photo by Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times)

Union Square Ventures partner Fred Wilson has given European startup Zemanta another $750,000, raising the young company’s total to $2.25 million in early funding. What does Zemanta do? They’ve created a set of browser and blogging software plugins that automagically suggest and quickly adds “relevant” links to your blog posts, which Wilson has described as like “AdWords for content creators.” My prediction?

It’ll be catnip to the bloggers featured on Techmeme, an automated news aggregator which has attracted an obsessive following among tech bloggers, if not actual traffic worth speaking of. Instead of seeking actual pageviews, Techmeme gamers try to collect some ineffable sense of self-importance. And so they’ll inevitably start linking to Zemanta-suggested stories out of laziness. Even reporter Anthony Ha admits, “Linking and adding other media can feel like time-consuming distractions when I’m writing VentureBeat posts.”

With all the TechMeme pile-on posts drawing from the same pool of Zemanta-planted background links, the feedback loop in tech blogosphere groupthink will be turned up to 11. Honestly, with an algorithm finding your story leads, an algorithm doing your research, and an alogrithm choosing the relevant ads, why do we need human tech bloggers at all?