After the abrupt departure of Gabor Cselle, the talented VP of engineering at Xobni, a San Francisco email startup, talk is that CEO Jeff Bonforte might soon be out, too. At a startup, one of a CEO's main tasks is to attract and retain talent. In a comment on TechCrunch, Bonforte said Cselle wanted to run his own startup. Despite his rationalizations, there's no sugarcoating this fact: Bonforte just failed his most important test as a CEO."A quarter of the company's value walked out the door," a tipster says, and suggests that Cselle might take some of Xobni's engineering talent, including one of the founders, with him. Bonforte, formerly an executive at Yahoo, had a reputation there for being either loved or hated. At a large company, management can shuffle employees and executives around to make up for personality mismatches. At a startup, there's no room for such errors of judgment.

Xobni, led by ex-Yahoo Jeff Bonforte, has declined a buyout offer from Microsoft, finding the software giant's plans for the startup too unformed. This from a team whose product is still in private beta. [TechCrunch]

Former Yahoo executive Jeff Bonforte, now CEO of Xobni, has come up with possibly the most cynical yet useful product ever launched by a startup. Xobni, whose software tracks and analyzes email usage in Outlook, is rumored to be in acquisition talks with Microsoft. Microsoft is, to its dismay, not in acquisition talks with Yahoo. But Xobni's latest product, TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld reports, bridges Microsoft Outlook, desktop email software widely used in corporations, with Yahoo's Web-based email. "That's the kind of demo that gets deals done," Schonfeld observes. Indeed, it may make Microsoft wonder whether they need to buy Yahoo at all.

Microsoft has acquired Xobni, likely for more than its original $20 million offer to buy the company, TechCrunch's Michael Arrington reports. Xobni — "inbox" spelled backward — adds features to Outlook, Microsoft's desktop email application. As VC blogger Fred Wilson notes, the acquisition is "sort of proof that Microsoft doesn't know how to improve its own software. So they buy those that do." If Arrington's report proves more accurate than previous rumors of a sale, Xobni CEO Jeff Bonforte would join Microsoft well before his former colleagues at Yahoo, where Bonforte worked just long enough to be paid to leave.

At 10 a.m., Jeff Bonforte, the ex-Yahoo who's now CEO of Xobni, described his status on LinkedIn as "legal documents up to my ears." What could have him so submerged? Microsoft has long been rumored to be interested in Xobni, which makes a plugin for its Outlook software. Not long ago, Microsoft startup scout Don Dodge took the startup's small team to dinner, but Xobni's said to have balked at a sub-$20 million offer they viewed as lowball. If Bonforte has actually persuaded Microsoft to raise it, he'll have earned his pay. The irony, if a deal happens: Bonforte will likely end up working for Microsoft long before his former colleagues. Update: Xobni cofounder Matt Brezina tells me the legal documents are for intellectual-property licenses, not a sale. Sounds dreadfully boring — and good training for a career at Microsoft if the widely expected purchase goes through.

Severance pay and "related cash expenditures" will cost Yahoo between $20 million to $25 million, the company said in an SEC filing. Given that Yahoo laid off around 1,000 employees, crude math with these figures suggests laid-off Yahoos walked off with an average severance package of $20,000 to $25,000. Call it $7,500 a month for three months of severance pay. Annualized, that makes being a laid-off Yahoo a $90,000-a-year job.

Yahoo laid off more than a thousand people last week, including Jeff Bonforte, a vice president whose job was rendered superfluous long before he was made redundant. Now we learn that he's taken the job of CEO at Xobni, a promising email startup. Curious: Did Xobni make a snap decision to hire Bonforte? Unlikely. Instead of quitting to take the job at Xobni, he waited to extract a package from Yahoo. Yahoo's shareholders and his ex-colleagues might not share our view, but we applaud Bonforte's cynical opportunism.

Jeff Bonforte, Yahoo's vice president of "social search," was among those laid off today. Yahoo's attempts to harness its vast user base to improve search results has never borne fruit. Since Yahoo has said it's cutting back in areas not deemed critical to its future, is Bonforte's departure a sign that social search no longer matters? Unlikely, since Yahoo recently incorporated Del.icio.us, the Web bookmarking service it bought from Joshua Schachter in 2005, into its search results. And management of Yahoo Answers, another Bonforte responsibility, was moved to Europe. More likely Bonforte, ostensibly Schachter's boss, was deemed inessential to the effort. Yahoo's layer-cake bureaucracy is being sliced away.