"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.

You'd think LinkedIn management, which has made no secret of its plans to take its automated schmoozefest public, would be trying to avoid trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Not so. They're aggressively marketing the company's latest moneymaking scheme, LinkedIn Research, to hedge fund managers. The premise: Traders can use LinkedIn to find "experts" with "unique input" on public companies in their portfolio. What LinkedIn marketers delicately phrase as "input," SEC investigators might well call "inside information." And the only thing actionable about the whole affair might be the insider-trading charges that result.

With four different CFOs in only five years, Rackspace has had to take a fine-toothed comb to the books in advance of the server farm's IPO. According to documents filed with regulators, the company disclosed a "material weakness" in its accounting. But if you believe IPO Boutique analyst Scott Sweet, this is all very typical and the deal is still very much in demand. Investors like Sequoia Capital could probably care less whether or not Rackspace cooked the books — once it goes public, they're liquid and Rackspace's spotty uptime, customer dissatisfaction and financial office revolving door is no longer their problem. However Chairman Graham Weston, pictured here, should probably keep that hard hat on just in case. (Photo by Robert Scoble)

"We think we could go public on our numbers," LInkedIn founder Reid Hoffman tells Tech Ticker's Sarah Lacy in a video interview (excerpted below). But the company, which just raised $53 million, won't IPO because it would rather reinvest its profits and because the U.S. public markets are too turbulent right now. Hoffman says LinkedIn will use the money in part to buy "good, small tech teams." In the clip, Hoffman says the race with Facebook toward an IPO isn't much of a race. It's more like, "No, you go first," he explains. Hoffman and his handpicked CEO, Dan Nye, shouldn't grow too cautious. Hoffman himself helped PayPal go public during the last downturn, so he knows a strong company can thrive in a poor market. But more importantly, for a professional's social network like LinkedIn, we can't imagine much better free marketing than the nonstop coverage CNBC would give consumer tech's first major IPO in years.

Naveen Jain, InfoSpace's sole founder (and don't you forget it), is back in business and angling for another IPO with Bellevue, Wash.-based Intelius. The consumer-information broker's business practices are pretty scammy according to details unearthed by TechCrunch's Michael Arrington — and the unsavory parts of its business are the only ones growing appreciably. But where Arrington goes wrong is in thinking that news of the racket will dissuade investment bankers and traders from doing business with Jain.

One place Google is losing the battle for Web search market share is in Russia, the ancestral homeland of Google founder Sergey Brin. The company has developed better Russian word and language processing, but still trails Yandex, which is planning an IPO on an estimated company value of $3 billion. Why doesn't Brin just embrace his inner oligarch and buy Yandex? That seems easier.

RealNetworks' games business grew revenues 33 percent since the first quarter of 2007. CEO Rob Glaser thinks it could grow even faster on its own. RealNetworks announced today it plans to spin off the casual games business and "may precede the spin with an initial public offering and sale of up to 20 percent of the shares," according to a press release. RealNetworks will also buy back $50 million worth of stock.

Managed-hosting service Rackspace has filed with the New York Stock Exchange to raise $400 million in an initial public offering. Investors Norwest Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital and company chairman Graham Weston stand to profit from the exit. Rackspace reported $18 million in 2007 profits on $362 million revenues. We called the IPO in January, but we're not sold on its merits.

Shares of San Francisco-based Visa jumped more than 30 percent today in the largest initial public offering in U.S. history. Visa issued 406 million shares at $44 each to raise almost $18 billion. More than half of the IPO take is going to its shareholder banks, which include Citigroup, Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase. Convenient: While the IPO has long been planned, the cash will come in handy right now. (Photo by AP/Richard Drew)

Financier and CEO Marc Bell plans to take Penthouse Media Group public in a $250 million IPO. If investors take the bait, it'll likely be on the strength of Adult FriendFinder and the rest of the Web properties Penthouse bought from Andrew Conru last December for $500 million. After the acquisition, Penthouse projected its 2007 revenues would reach $340 million — most of that from Adult FriendFinder. Some of the proceeds from the IPO, if it succeeds, will go to pay off debt from the acquisition.

Tesla Motors, which finally shipped its first electric car earlier this month, hopes to raise $250 million in equity and debt to fund its mass production push, over the next two years. Chairman Elon Musk wants to conduct an IPO in New York or London, raise money privately and apply for a loan guarantee from the Department of Energy to build a U.S. production plant for Tesla's forthcoming electric sports sedan. Tesla has raised $145 million in venture capital, including a $40 million round that closed last week. Elon, don't spend it all in one place.

So much for the notion of cheap, user-generated content. Current Media, the operator of the Current TV cable channel and Current.com, hopes to raise $100 million in an IPO. Last year, the company, cofounded by Al Gore and Joel Hyatt, had revenues of $63.8 million and lost $17.1 million. Current's website isn't generating significant advertising, and the company makes most of its money in an old-fashioned way: fees from cable providers. The company is desperately short on cash; as of December 31, it had $2.2 million, and this month, it opened up a $50 million line of credit from JPMorgan Chase, in exchange for the right to take the company public. But the most puzzling thing in the prospectus is this: Current spent $31.4 million on programming and production in 2007. Isn't it supposed to run entirely on submissions from viewers?

Besieged managed hosting service Rackspace will go public "sooner rather than later," an anonymous poster claims on Web Hosting Talk. The source cites "a close friend who is neighbors with one for the bankers working the deal" so the source is rock solid. Or actually its not. It's gossip. Which is what we do around here, 'kay?

LinkedIn is off the block, cofounder Reid Hoffman told the Sydney Morning Herald. "We have had (buyout) conversations with all the usual suspects, but I think an IPO is by far and away the most likely outcome," Hoffman said. He suggested, however, that such a public offering might not happen for at least another year or two. One ex-LinkedIn exec said that's much too long a wait.

BusinessWeek columnist Sarah Lacy has more details on Slide's new funding round: Max Levchin's Web widget factory is now valued at $550 million, after raising funds from the likes of Fidelity Investments and T. Rowe Price. While the company is mum on IPO prospects, such big institutional investors typically come in during a so-called "mezzanine" round — a company's final private financing before a public stock offering.

Travel search engines Kayak and Sidestep will merge to form a new company, according to reports. As part of the deal, Kayak raised another $196 million from current investors Sequoia Capital, General Catalyst Partners and Accel Partners as well as from Sidestep investors Norwest Venture Partners and Trident Capital and new investors Oak Investment Partners and Lehman Brothers Venture Partners. The merger will create the fifth largest online travel destination. That sad boast might make you wonder, how'd they get so many VCs on board?

The SEC's website is the new location of the New York Times' corrections page. NetSuite stock is up 12 percent today after its $26-a-share IPO debut, a long-awaited victory for the Larry Ellison-backed software company, as the Times noted earlier this week. But it appears that the paper got several things wrong.

NetSuite, the online business-software company based in San Mateo, has priced its IPO, selling 6.2 million shares at $26 a share to raise $161 million. Its first trading day may not see a big pop, however, as the company has warned: Its auction-based offering sets the price, in theory, at what the market will bear. Conventional IPOs are typically underpriced, allowing for more of a rise. NetSuite has already seen a boost: Expectations were for an IPO in the $16 to $19 range. [Reuters]

Web software provider NetSuite's IPO, set for this Friday, should be one of the last of 2007. Despite losing $20.6 million on $76.8 million in revenues — wait, isn't Web software supposed to be more profitable than desktop software? — expectations are running high. Get-rich-quick artists may be disappointed.

United Online is withdrawing its proposed IPO of Classmates.com, perhaps the world's most annoying social network. An FTC probe, a weak stock market, weaker financials, and even weaker comparisons to the current crop of social networks means the discount ISP will need to find another way to unload its $100 million purchase. Our suggestion: Just close it down. [CNNMoney]