"Investing $5 million in a company that gets bought out for $25 million isn't going to get me into the VC Hall of Fame," Mayfield Fund VC Allen Morgan told Wired in 2006. "That's not why I got into this business." But that is why he's getting out of the business. Morgan was a champion of the Web 2.0 movement, suavely predicting that now-forgotten startups he funded like Pluck and JotSpot would soon go public in splashy IPOs. He bet that the spread of broadband would resuscitate business ideas which failed in the 1990s.

The digital barbarians are at the gate. Harbinger Capital Partners, a private-equity fund which owns 4.9 percent of the New York Times, has written a letter to the newspaper's management suggesting that it buy more "digital assets." Scott Galloway of Firebrand Partners, an affiliated investment firm, is proposing an alternate slate of directors for the next board election. The newcomers include Galloway himself, a founder of RedEnvelope and aprofessor at NYU who graduated with an MBA from UC-Berkeley; Gregory Shove, a former AOL executive; and Allen Morgan, a venture capitalist at the Mayfield Fund. Since the Sulzberger family controls the Times through a two-class stock structure, it's unlikely that Harbinger's efforts will succeed. But even the notion of the Times having its Internet strategy dictated to it by technocractic outsiders has to be galling.

Microsoft executive Don Dodge captures a moment from the TechCrunch40 conference. Or, more specifically, after the conference, in the limo ferrying VIPs from the TechCrunch40 VIP dinner to the after party at Fluid. Pictured, from left, Mayfield Fund VC Raj Kapoor on the floor of the limo; Allen Morgan, also from Mayfield, throwing gang signs; DanceJam cofounder MC Hammer; and angel investor Ron Conway, looking bewildered.