7,535 sq. ft. 7 bd/6.5 ba. 3-car gar. Wet bar. Wine cellar. MUST SELL NOW. Okay, that last bit isn't part of the listing for Tom Perkins's palatial home in Belvedere, across the Golden Gate from San Francisco. But the fact that Perkins wants to sell his house, in this real-estate market, is disturbing. He is one of the founders of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and is fabulously wealthy. He has already started hawking his $187 million megayacht, the Maltese Falcon. What this looks like: Perkins is liquidating his worldly possessions. Let's assume he's not doing this because of financial straits. The only alternative conclusion: Perkins thinks he should sell now, before things get much, much worse.

Mark Zuckerberg's college-spawned startup is supposed to hire its 1,000th employee sometime this year. I don't think that's going to happen. If Zuckerberg isn't talking about layoffs behind closed doors, one of his executives must be brave enough to bring it up. I don't think the company is going to issue pink slips. But I do think its headlong growth in employees will come crashing to a halt before the end of the year.Here's some back of the envelope math on Facebook's burn rate. Figure the company's operating expenses are divided roughly half in labor, half in operations like running its servers. Count $100,000 in salary per employee, and double that in benefits and other overhead; double that again to account for the company's non-labor costs. You end up with an annual cost structure of $400 million. Facebook's revenues for this year are projected to be $300 million to $350 million; if the company isn't already operating in the red, it's headed there fast. Microsoft's $240 million investment? Most of that is already gone towards buying servers — and it's not like Facebook can stop buying servers as usage of its site continues to boom. Publicly, Zuckerberg has talked about the company making growth its priority. But a $400 million a year ship can sink fast, especially if the advertising market faces a hard contraction and media buyers cut back on their more experimental ad buys. And none of Facebook's new ad formats have proven to be a breakout hit, as Google's AdWords was earlier this decade. That's why I think Facebook's braintrust is talking about whether they can afford to keep hiring — and whether they need to cull their existing ranks. Here's where Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, the law-and-order type Zuckerberg hired from Google, comes in. She's already made hiring considerably more bureaucratic, instituting new requirements straight out of the Googleplex, like a 3.5 GPA from a top school. Getting strict on recruiting is just the start. Facebookers should expect to see more rules, rules, rules. And even the slightest violation will prove cause for firing — especially for employees who are within weeks of vesting their first batch of stock options, which only come after a year on the job. Sandberg's very savvy about keeping up appearances. Google thrived in part because, in the darkest days of the dotcom crash, from 2001 through 2003, it was the only company hiring. Until it bought DoubleClick, Google had never done a layoff. That's part of Google's image, and I'm sure Sandberg wants it to be part of Facebook's image, too. So we won't hear about a Facebook hiring freeze. We certainly won't hear about layoffs. Whatever happens will be quiet: Candidates won't get called back about jobs they applied for. Managers will find their hiring requests tied up in bureaucracy. And employees will quietly box up their things and go. The sad thing is that those Facebookers will think they screwed up. They won't even have the saving grace of a layoff — the corporate kiss-off that says, "Hey, kid, chin up — it's not you, it's me." A layoff would be the honest thing. But it's the one cost-cutting move Facebook can't afford.

As a startup, you are now, officially, on your own. You can't count on your VCs saving you or some magical offer from Yahoo or Google showing up to bail you out. Taurus has laid off Fondue. You need to rewrite — no, not your business model. Your business plan. Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis, in his latest private email, offers this advice:

A wave of layoffs is sweeping startupland. But why? "Today is my last day at Revision3," writes Damon Berger, one of the victims, in a mass email. "Due to budgetary cutbacks that are a direct result of the economic meltdown, I will no longer be employed at the company." Revision3, an online-video startup, has slashed five Web-video shows from its lineup, and with it some unknown number of employees. But are we to believe that collateralized debt obligations killed "Internet Superstar"? Of course not.Yes, online advertising is headed for a slowdown — but signs of problems were present in the market well before Wall Street went into crisis. An explosion of usage had created a supply of space for ads that far outpaced marketers' demand. A recession will further temper demand. Berger, and countless like him at ad-supported enterprises, would have ended up on the street regardless. (Which is a pity, since I've met Berger, and he strikes me as personable, clever, and eminently employable elsewhere.) Revision3, best known as the home of Digg founder Kevin Rose's beer-chugging Diggnation podcast, has always been the kind of lovably goofy startup one hopes does well despite itself. Anyone who suffered through "Internet Superstar" knew the show was going down. It failed on the merits, not because of distant economic forces beyond anyone's control. To paraphrase Tolstoy: Successful startups are all alike. But every unsuccessful startup is unsuccessful in its own way. And so with all the startups whose managers have jumped on the firebus. If they had run their businesses efficiently, they wouldn't have needed to fire anyone. They are laying people off now not because of an economic imperative, but because they have a convenient excuse to cover their mistakes. Revision3 should always have concentrated on its main shows, and found cheap ways to experiment with new shows, as it's doing now. Helium.com should have figured out that there's not much money in user-generated content before laying off a third of its 110 employees. And Seesmic? Well, Seesmic should never have launched at all, good economy or bad. I'm declaring the layoff window shut. Big companies lay people off because of economic conditions; startups lay people off because their managers have fundamentally misjudged some aspect of their business. Any startup CEO who lays people off, from here on out, should be held accountable for his own mistakes. Blaming the economy for your cuts? So mid-October 2008.

When Wall Street fails, Silicon Valley must step up. So goes the hubristic thinking here. Debt greases the wheels of commerce, and the sale of servers and software is no exception. And that part of the credit industry has hit a rough patch, too, with defaults on equipment loans nearly doubling in the past year. As with other credit markets, this had made traditional lenders nervous. So cash-rich tech companies are venturing into lending themselves. IBM has long had an in-house lending arm, with $24.5 billion in loans outstanding. Cisco lent $4 billion to customers last year. Even eBay is getting into the game through Bill Me Later; it acquired $550 million in consumer loans in conjunction with the purchase of the payments startup.We know how this ends — with tech-company shareholders footing the bill. Cisco wrote off $900 million in bad debt in 2001. It will surely claim to have learned its lessons since then. But as others rush in to help customers acquire their wares, some will surely get burnt. As will investors, who may think they're buying shares in a tech company, only to discover they've put money into a bank.

"At Seesmic, a video blogging service, the day of reckoning — when it runs out of the $6 million it raised in May — will come in three years. To make the money last, Loïc Le Meur, the chief executive, recently laid off seven employees, or one-third of his staff, and cut all projects not directly related to the video service." Great messaging, Loic. Now for the bad news: No video blogging service will get its picture in the NYT until Web 3.0.

I've always thought Scribd, the online document-posting startup, was set up mostly so its investors had an excuse to throw parties. They may not have that excuse much longer, if FuckedStartup's report that Scribd is running out of money is accurate. At a time when any number of startups are running out of money, why fret about Scribd's bank-account balance? Because Scribd was manufactured in angel investor Paul Graham's Y Combinator startup factory.Graham, who sold a company to Yahoo in the '90s, had become microfamous for Y Combinator, which provided both a social club and seed-stage funding. The summer (and winter) camp for young entrepeneurs spun off any number of companies, which then got venture-capital financing, and then a quick exit courtesy of Google or Yahoo's shareholders. In the bubbly years when Yahoo and Google were snapping up startups freely, Y Combinator's offspring thrived, or appeared to thrive. Got an online PowerPoint clone? Google will buy it! Graham still seems to be living in his someone-will-buy-it dreamland; he recently proposed that companies hire "chief acquisition officers," to specialize in consuming the fare he dishes out. But the giants of the Web have put acquisitions on hold, and few others are stepping up to the plate. Is Scribd, once described as Graham's "greatest success," in trouble? We don't know that for sure. We do know that hiring 20 people to create software that lets people post PDF documents to the Web always seemed silly. Having a cocky 20something Harvard grad as CEO may work for Facebook, but we don't think Trip Adler is the next Mark Zuckerberg. But Scribd itself isn't the real story. It's whether Paul Graham's magical startup machine is grinding to a halt.

Dear Mike: Love your site. But Ted Dziuba and I would like to see one little enhancement to your TechCrunch Layoff Tracker. It doesn't list false positives. That is, if someone spamblasts everyone in the tech media on a Saturday night with an email that says "Elance laid off 20% of its staff on Friday," I want to be able to search the Layoff Tracker for Elance and find out if your ace reporting team has broken the story or not. I don't want a match on "freelancer." I want "Elance: TechCrunch has not yet broken the news on Elance layoffs." It's what, ten lines of PHP? I can pop down to Atherton and type it in. No wait: Have Ted do it. He needs something to do in between his new weekly columns for The Register. Watching Pressflip run out of money gets old.

Michael Arrington is a has-been, and he knows it. When the smoke clears after the crash and burn of the money machine behind today's tech startups, there's one word no one will ever write into a business plan again: Web 2.0. For Arrington, whose TechCrunch blog was born with the mission of tracking what he called "Web 2.0" startups, that's a problem.He's made Web 2.0 as much as Web 2.0 made him. Now, Arrington needs to cut his name loose before he becomes just another has-been journalist with a trade magazine. There's only one way to do that: Quit TechCrunch. Back away slowly. Keep coming into work now and then — preferably to a real office, rather than commuting from his bedroom to his living room, as he still does today. Post some of the biggest scoops. Talk up the next conference, party, or other cobranded event with Calacanis and Om. I don't do predictions. I'm always wrong. But Mike, this is true: I used to get tips all the time that "Michael Arrington is doing some vaguely dishonest thing. I know, because I know someone. Run with it, Valleywag! Keep digging! Follow the money!" Today, Friday October 24, 2008, with everyone freaking out over money, with tech employees looking for the truth behind the phony all-Is-well messages coming from their leaders, Valleywag gets more tips than ever. I've noticed one undeniable trend: The number of rumors about TechCrunch I get has peaked. It's over. Michael Arrington may end up on Charlie Rose again. Michael Arrington may get called "kingmaker" again. Michael Arrington, kingmaker! But TechCrunch? Mike, that's so Web 2.0. (Photo by Joi Ito)

No one gets fired by surprise. Your boss always gives away the plan, even if he or she never says a word. The game in tech boardrooms right now is: Fire the deadwood. Cull failed products and projects. Reprogram the spreadsheets to say you've got a year of cash and a revenue plan. Then, type up a phony layoff memo: Tough times, tough decisions. It's exhilarating, if you're the CEO told to make it happen. For the rest of us, here's the best checklist I've seen yet of verbal cues to watch for.

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Web-video-for-guys startup is "laying off" 11 people, but hiring another 11 with different skills, according to its CEO, Keith Richman. Dude, that's not a layoff — that's a classic nutshot.

In a briefing with journalists, Dell CEO confirmed the completion of his company's 8,500-people layoff. He was not demonstrably saddened, as is normal founder practice when discussing layoffs. But he did point out a recent IDC report showing Dell "outpacing" the rest of the PC industry. If Dell's falling stock price is any indication, the company might be outpacing everyone to the poorhouse. (Photo by eschipul)

Got layoffs? Don't spend hours crafting the perfect "Hard Times, Hard Choices" blog post for your leader. Here's how to hack the media to deliver your message:

Food is at the center of Google's corporate culture, a sign of the company's Pollyanna worldview and the outsized financial success which enables this largesse. So why is Google is closing a café? Off The Grid, one of Google's 18 in-house eateries at its headquarters, abruptly shut its doors this week. Employees are being told the cut is "temporary," but workers are removing the café's fixtures, which suggests a permanent closure. What this means: Despite CEO Eric Schmidt's protestations, Google is being hit by the recession. And the blows are harder than the company has admitted to shareholders or employees.Off The Grid's closure is the harbinger of more cuts, a source within Google's kitchens we've nicknamed "Deep Fried" tells us. The building, 2350 Bayshore, is also having its "micro kitchen" snack stations closed. A large number of workers in the building were contractors, Deep Fried says, some of whom are losing their temporary jobs at Google. The closure also leaves a large area of Google's campus without breakfast service. Food is just one area where Google is slashing costs; under recently hired CFO Patrick Pichette, Google has been having a series of meetings about eliminating expenses, and Googlers have been implementing the cuts with the same slapdash speed with which it rolls out new websites. Google executives gave food-service operator Bon Appétit sharp budget cuts this year, which has only worsened the already troubled relationship between the companies. Google eliminated dinner at one café earlier this year. But the closure of Off The Grid was sudden, coming after a meeting between Bon Appétit executives and Derek Rupp, the café's executive chef, Deep Fried writes:

Oh, what fun! David Hornik, the feisty financier who organizes The Lobby, a conference which gathers a self-appointed Valley elite on the Big Island of Hawaii, organizes group expeditions as part of the boondoggle's bonding rituals. We hear he's hired Shinteki, an activities coordinator popular in the Valley, which has in turn created a fake "treasure-recovery services" outfit to lead Lobbyists on a treasure hunt. With venture capital growing scarce, why not just label the exercise "Find Your Own Series A"? After the jump, a spoiler on the treasure hunt for anyone who wants to play along.Check the "treasures" listed on Heritage International's site. They spell out "Google Earth." What happens when you play with the GPS coordinates listed?

Who is this joker? Why, it's venture capitalist David Hornik, the pocket-sized B-lister who has invited some of Silicon Valley's shallowest thinkers for a company-paid vacation. The three-day, mostly agenda-free funconference has opened tonight on Hawaii's Big Island, with attendees Twittering about drinking mai tais and dancing the hula. What, work?Why, that's for employees, not founders. The employees that Lobby-goers didn't lay off before boarding a jet to jaunt across the Pacific, that is. We hear some of this year's attendees, concerned with the appearance of attending such an ostentatious waste of time and money, tried to cancel. Hornik told them there would be no refunds. You know times are tough when a VC is being this tight about $3,000.

Jason Calacanis is a master storyteller. Like most writers, he needs an editor. Here's a summary remix of Calacanis's secret insider mail, sent a few hours after Mahalo's layoffs were expertly leaked to everyone but me, thanks pal.

In a Craigslist post titled "R.I.P. Good Times? Save Money by Sharing our SoMa Office," a San Francisco startup seeks a cotenant to defray its monthly lease. It's an allusion toVC firm Sequoia Capital's times-are-tough presentation, which called on startups to cut their burn rates. What the ad doesn't say: The fact that this startup has space to spare means it rented an oversized office, likely in the hopes of making more hires, and now realizes it can't fill it. Any guesses, based on the details in the ad — a top executive named Justin, an office at 7th and Mission — who it is? Leave them in the comments. Here's the ad, with more pictures:

Normally I don't screengrab reader mail and publish it. Paul Ogle at Tippit summarized the current zeitgeist so well, though, that he deserves a hit. "How can I save my job?" That's the only question on any Google engineer's mind right now. I'm starting to get why two Stanford grad-school dropouts hired an army of Ph.D. degree holders. Right now, you Googlers are saving your jobs like there's no tomorrow. And in academia, as I learned as an MIT sysadmin, there is no tomorrow. Publish or perish, people. Thank God you have America's CTO to handle the big issues, like which of you gets fired.

The last time Apple announced earnings, Steve Jobs's health was a hot topic on CNBC. Why wasn't he on the earnings call? CNBC's Silicon Valley bureau chief Jim Goldman had to slap his fellow pundits down, reminding them that Apple's CEO never, like never participates in the ungodly boring quarterly ritual. Guess what? Steve Jobs is on the Apple earnings call right now. Which means he really, really wants to reassure Wall Street about Apple's prospects, even after the company announced predictably boffo earnings. Strangely, that is not reassuring.