A tipster reports high drama at LinkedIn, the business-networking site. The company is funded in part by Sequoia Capital, the Valley's new high priests of doom and gloom — and, our source claims, Sequoia has told all of its portfolio companies to cut costs by 10 percent. LinkedIn's big-hearted chairman, Reid Hoffman (shown here), reportedly doesn't want to lay people off, but he and CEO Dan Nye are said to be engaged in a power struggle over this and other issues. Layoffs could come today — possibly an exercise in cleaning house rather than a reaction to the economy, though we hear LinkedIn has been missing financial milestones. Here's the tip:

Call it Company (Red). Michael Dell is asking employees at his computer maker to take five unpaid days off and thus help the company trim costs instead of slashing jobs. Extorting your people by suggesting they take a small hit now as opposed to a larger hit later on isn't particularly original. “We’ve seen a slowdown in spending,” says a Dell spokesbot, “but the primary reason is to ... to better position Dell for long-term competitiveness.” That makes no sense: Skimping on five days of payroll may temporarily give the company's bank account a fillip, but it doesn't change its permanent cost structure. Then again, maybe Dell's strategy is to drive away employees who are capable of doing math.

Valleywag is name-checked in the New York Times today. (Page B1 if you're holding the dead-tree version.) The article talks about how companies must now pre-blog their own layoffs to beat the rumor mill. What it doesn't talk about is the problem of false positives: On the Internet, you can find layoff rumors about any company on Earth. For example, look at LayoffGossip.com this morning. Valleywag layoffs! They're coming! I can confirm that layoffs are scheduled for October 3, 2008. Credit the losers behind LayoffGossip for building every Clay Shirky talking point into their site. You can vote for the truth/lie factor of a rumor. Awesome. I clicked True on this one 76 times.

A tipster reports that Linden Lab, the maker of virtual world Second Life, is laying off its business-development department, which had cultivated ties with software makers. The move affects "9 or 10" employees," he says. A wise move, if tardy: Don't you need to have a business worth developing before hiring someone in business development?

I imagine most of you won't blink an eye if I tell you that Serena Software just laid off 10 percent of its 900-employee workforce. Layoffs have become a predictable, opportunistic excuse for poorly managed companies to conduct house-cleaning, a reflexive overreaction to turbulent markets which may well end up lengthening the recession. Serena Software is a software company whose software other software companies use to make software — right, exactly, the kind of boring company people do their best to ignore. Last year, CEO Jeremy Burton forced employees to spend an hour every Friday using Facebook. As late as June, the policy managed to garner press for the company from credulous hacks. But we think some of those employees now wish they'd ignored the Facebook diktat and spent Fridays working.

You know when a layoff's really bad? When the CEO calls Valleywag to spin it. Spot Runner's Nick Grouf rang us up to let us know he was laying off 115 of the 385 or so employees at his online-advertising concern, which helps small businesses manage the complicated process of buying TV ads. The cuts follow a round of 50 layoffs in August. Grouf is also moving some key employees from an office in Fremont, Calif., which Spot Runner picked up when it acquired local-search startup Weblistic, to L.A. Grouf says Spot Runner is getting out of the search-ads market and "exploring strategic alternatives" for Weblistic, which is corporatespeak for trying to find a buyer. When he wasn't sounding like a get-out-the-vote robocall, Grouf did a decent job of feigning optimism."I feel really bullish about the business," Grouf tells us. But he was not bullish enough to reveal any numbers — like how much of the $51 million in venture capital Spot Runner raised earlier this year still remains in its bank account, and to what extent he reduced the company's monthly cash burn through these layoffs. He was more forthcoming about Joanne Bradford, the Microsoft executive he hired, briefly, as an executive vice president. She left Spot Runner after less than six months to join Yahoo, which had long been courting her. "Tell me about it," Grouf groused when we brought up Bradford's rapid departure. "After the Yahoo-Microsoft dance was over, they needed to move quickly on their ad sales group, and they made her an offer she couldn't refuse. The shame is we reorganized the business the way she wanted it to run, and she left midstream."

“Anyone who isn’t prepared for ads to go down 40 percent is crazy.” That's what Valleywag publisher Nick Denton blabbed to the wantrepreneurs at an event in New York last week. AllThingsD reblogger Peter Kafka rolled up Denton's irrational gloom into a big-picture gloom post this morning. There's some good news buried in the middle of Kafka's post:

Cisco, the San Jose-based networking-equipment giant, is closing its free campus gyms — and replacing them with a new, larger one for which employees will have to pay $20 a month. In explaining the change, Cisco's HR team has claimed it's subsidizing the price of the gym, as well as other health facilities at the same site by 90 percent. So, what, the gym would actually cost $200/mo. at market rates? Must be some gym. Check it out in this video a Cisco source smuggled off-campus, and read Cisco's memo, which touts the loss of free gyms as bringing a "positive return on investment for Cisco." If you're feeling brave, crash the gym's grand opening on Monday.

In tough times, overcommunicate, says Kleiner Perkins partner John Doerr, doing an inadvertent impression of so-sharey-he's-scary videoblogger Robert Scoble. One Kleiner portfolio company has gotten the message: Google! Kim Scott, the company's director of online sales and operations for AdSense, the company's system for placing ads on other websites, has sent a mass email to Web publishers who use the product. The letter refers to "recent economic turmoil" and reassures publishers that the company is "continuing to invest in innovations" — as opposed to, say, milking publishers for everything they're worth. The question Scott's letter really raises: Who's Google afraid of?Surely not Yahoo. Microsoft and AOL don't even play in the AdSense market; of Google's rivals, most have large pageview minimums which smaller publishers won't meet. Perhaps Scott is worried that small Web publishers will simply throw in the towel? Her memo:

Gideon Yu is flying back from Dubai today, we hear. His coworkers at Facebook are surely anxious to know what gifts he's bringing back — and we don't mean the duty-free kind. TechCrunch reports he was there on a fundraising mission. The Persian Gulf's sovereign wealth funds are swollen with petrodollars. But Yu's assignment was tough. Maintaining the $15 billion valuation Facebook obtained from Microsoft and Hong Kong investor Li Ka-Shing in the face of a declining advertising market will require a lot of Yu's demonstrated slickness. But if Yu can squeeze cash out of Bill Gates, surely he can navigate a Middle Eastern bazaar.The bad news: The company needs the cash. TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington has a detailed estimate of Facebook's expenses:

Click to viewProfessional annoyance Kara Swisher, the BoomTown blogger, went to a how-to-survive-the-downturn gabfest, and all she got was this lousy video. Captured on her Flip camera: Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis, who didn't predict the downturn; Nirav Tolia, the Epinions cofounder — an entrepreneur — who hasn't laid anyone off since the last bubble burst and is surely rusty; Google investor Ram Shriram, who has way too much money to care about such mundane affairs as a recession; and Fast Company videoblogger Robert Scoble, who is cheerfully clueless as ever. The bright side: If Scoble is saying companies need to conserve cash, perhaps we've hit a market bottom.

Tesla Motors, the automaker which is Silicon Valley's best hope to build an electric-car industry, will run out of cash in three months if it does not raise new financing. CEO Elon Musk has confirmed Valleywag's report that it has spent most of its customers' deposits and is running low on cash. In an interview with Reuters, CEO Elon Musk conceded that the company only has $9 million in the bank, as a concerned Tesla employee told us yesterday. Tesla's contract with customers specifies that deposits can be used for "working capital" — but last I checked, "working capital" means liquidity available to a company. It does not mean "money that has gone out the door." So Tesla may arguably be in breach of contract with the 1,200 customers who have put between $5,000 and $60,000 down for its Tesla Roadster. Tesla has only delivered 50 cars.Musk has previously said that Tesla will be able to turn cash-flow positive in nine months, if it receives new investment. He now says he's seeking an additional $20 million from Tesla's current investors, and expects to get it next week. Do the math: If Tesla has $9 million in the bank, and requires another $20 million to get to positive cash flow over the next nine months, then it is burning at least $3 million a month. And that's after it laid off 24 percent of its workforce and announced plans to shutter its Detroit office.

The latest casualty of the credit crunch: BART's in-progress rollout of Wi-Fi on its trains. “People won’t loan risk capital until you have a contract,” says an executive for Wi-Fi Rail, the startup tagged with the job. Commuters were promised "ten times faster than DSL" access on BART trains within the next two to three years. A test program had already wired four stations in downtown SF, and 13,000 riders had registered for the service. But BART's schedule was contingent on Wi-Fi Rail raising $20 million, which in itself was contingent on BART signing a contract. Now, of course, even a signed contract won't unlock the big bucks. For BART riders, that means no Internet access during your commute, not for years. Good thing you're getting laid off. (Photo by The Examiner/Cindy Chew)

Brian Sugar, cofounder of San Francisco-based blog network Sugar Inc., sent two ominous Twitters this afternoon: "Sad day." "First rain, will last for 5 months." Was he just talking about the weather? Less than an hour later, he'd gathered his staff into a conference room and told them he was laying off nine employees, mostly in editorial — 11 percent of the company's 80-person staff. What's worse: More layoffs could come over the next two quarters, if ad sales don't improve.Sugar's CEO may have aimed to put employees on notice, in hopes of motivating them to perform. But leaving a shoe to drop is the worst mistake one can make in cutting employees, the meltdown's self-appointed layoff pundits agree. Sugar Inc.'s real problem may be self-inflicted: It took ad sales in-house from partner and investor NBC this summer, leaving it with a sales force still in development, right as the online-advertising market got a lot tougher.

A giant datacenter on 800 acres of land in Pryor, Oklahoma, won't start operating until 2010, Google spokesbots now say. The $600 million datacenter was supposed to open early next year, employing 100 people. Local and state officials had bent over backwards to attract Google to the site, even passing a law which made Google's energy bills private, lest competitors determine how efficiently it was running. (Photo by David Jones/GTR Newspapers)

Yet another contender in the FuckedCompany 2.0 sweepstakes, Screwdd — launched in February, I think, but suddently more bookmarkable — is a site about layoffs that's more built out than the newer FuckedStartups. At least the ads are. Nice touch: a 408-area voicemail line for tipsters wary of Internet TCP/IP connections. The quasi-anonymous "we" behind the site has already learned the dirty secret of gossip blogging: "Our most viewed story to date also had the least amount of details. If Digg could engage in a round of layoffs, we’d be golden."

This is the layoff that matters. Motorola has already conceded to a demand by investment overlord Carl Icahn to spin off its money-losing mobile phone unit. Today's news is no surprise, but still: Motorola will ditch about 3,000 people through several agonizing waves of layoffs. Co-CEO Greg Brown is telling the press that Moto will save $800 million in 2009. In a conference call today, Brown's peer Sanjay Jha said Moto had been too focused on "bright, shiny objects." Now, the company will focus on dim, dull profits.Update: AP's photo library actually gave us a photo of another Greg Brown altogether, taken for a story on voicemail etiquette. Having looked at all of the corporate headshots of Motorola's Brown, we're sticking with this guy — he'd probably do a better job running Motorola, too. (Photo by AP/Alan Diaz)

The cheery stock photos on YouSendIt's sleek website send a signal: We're all business. The four-year-old file-transfer service has been trying to reinvent itself as a corporate "content-delivery solution," without much success. The company has laid off 20 percent of its 70-person U.S. workforce, as well as slashing its ranks of overseas developers, a tipster tells us. The company's VP of marketing has also vanished from the website's executive bios page. We can't wait for the memo from CEO Ivan Koon telling employees how troubled times require stern decisions. What Koon will almost certainly not say:

One sure thing worse for morale than a layoff is a multiple-stage layoff. Jason Calacanis told you not to do that. Valleywag's publisher sacked everyone early, and at the same time in multiple timezones. So the old saying was true: "If you don't know what's going on by now, it means you still work here." I get to sweat it out for Owen for another quarter. A Yahoo employee — for now — tells us it's the other way around there. The scariest part of the job, says our tipster, is not knowing whether to work or go jobhunting.

Eight years ago Philip Kaplan, aka Pud, turned his anonymous rumor site FuckedCompany into a modest advertising business. Today, Kaplan is chief something-or-other at AdBrite, a Sequoia-backed startup whose CEO has dutifully slashed its payroll down to profitability. By contrast, sloppy typist "FS Crew" at FuckedStartups has already thrown in the towel. "We have incredible pipeline of rumors and tips," promises the For Sale post atop the site. "We have other projects and don’t have the time to focused (sic) our 100% attention on this project." What FS Crew really means is: "Fuck, this is hard. Someone please pay me to quit." Sorry, but on Web 2.0, it's the other way around: Your customers quit you, for free.