Remember Sequoia Capital, the once-boisterous Google backer which has turned gloomy of late? It turns out that Sequoia's prepare-for-the-worst message wasn't meant for everyone. In September, Sequoia raised $1.7 billion in two new funds from its limited partners, including the $929.5 million U.S. Growth Fund. It alone accounted for 11 percent of the $8.1 billion venture capitalists raised in the third quarter. But that money is going into new startups.Venture capital firms raise separate funds over time. Typically, investments in the same startup come from the same fund; VCs don't invest all of a fund at once, reserving some money in the original fund for these follow-up financings. So the new fund is a separate pool of money from the one Sequoia will use to fund its current portfolio — the companies whose CEOs were recently summoned by Sequoia to a summit meeting to hear all about the need to cut costs and become self-sustaining. This advice was the complete opposite of what Sequoia was telling CEOs earlier this year, which was to grow at all costs and emulate Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis, who freely admits his company isn't worrying about revenues. What Sequoia really should have been telling its startups: We told you to spend what you have, as aggressively as possible. Now we have money, and you don't. That's your problem.

Mama, don't let your babies grow up to be Wall Street quant cowboys. My alma mater, northern Virginia's Thomas Jefferson High School for Science & Technology, is in the papers for offering advanced postcalculus math courses. (Yeah, yeah — tell me something I didn't know in 9th grade.) Why is this news, two decades after the school first offered such classes? Robert Sachs, a college professor who also teaches complex variables at the school, suggests that his students' math skills have potential for good or evil. Some graduates pursue careers in science or engineering, he tells the Post, while others "become the math financial people who aren't getting good press these days."

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Click to view"You better have a year’s worth of cash and a revenue model or you’re toast." There, now you don't have to sit through Kara Swisher's long, boring lunch with angel-investing mastermind Ron Conway. Swisher is one of tech's best reporters, as she never stops reminding us. She tidily quotes Conway's public story, "The game in this environment in survival until conditions change." That means a year's worth of cash and a revenue model. Swisher's own secret message: "I had lunch with well-known Silicon Valley investor Ron Conway." And we didn't!

"Venture Capitalists: Don't blame us" is the title of an 800-word essay at The Deal. This kind of headline always has an obvious, hidden meaning: Yes, VCs are to blame. Let's skip to the end and see how they did it:

Seesmic has laid off 7 employees — a third of its staff. Never heard of Seesmic? You must be doing something right with your life. The startup was ridiculous from its very conception as a tool for embedding videos as comments on blogs. Only to people who spend all day reading and commenting on blogs did that sound like a good idea. But that's exactly the kind of people Loic Le Meur attracted to himself — the groupthinking commentards of Silicon Valley, a self-appointed A-list of the blogosphere. To anyone conducting serious business, Le Meur's bloggy pals were an A-list, all right — "A" as in "avoid." Predictably, Le Meur and his investors — a group which includes Michael Arrington, a frequent promoter of Seesmic on his TechCrunch blog — are spinning the layoffs as a result of the recent economic unpleasantness.Nonsense. Seesmic wasn't just a bad idea; we hear from insiders; it was poorly executed, to boot. The company was in the midst of a top-to-bottom rewrite of its code. In the Seesmic video in which Le Meur announced the layoffs, he alluded to cuts in engineering — people "working behind the scenes" on the product. What that tells me: Le Meur has given up on this horrendous waste of time and effort, and is just biding his time until he can offload it on someone. He has a good track record of doing that; Six Apart, whispers have it, regrets spending the money it paid for Le Meur's Ublog, a French blogging service. Unfortunately for Le Meur, these are less bubbly times. Will the $6 million he raised in Seesmic's last round see it through next year without an acquisition? That's the only way in which Seesmic's fate is connected with the real economy: The suckers who would normally pony up for Le Meur's latest overpuffed adventure are hiding under their desks. Buying Seesmic is just another disaster they can put on their A-for-"avoid"-list.

You'd think times of financial chaos would be helpful, at least in the short term, to law firms. Not always so. Heller Ehrman, a large law partnership which began dissolving last month after failing to find a merger partner, has laid off 100 employees. Heller has had a large presence in the Valley since it bought Venture Law Group after the last bubble burst.

As Wall Street's mistakes continue to spill over into the tech sector, nervous managers are scrambling for proven ways to cut their budgets. Tough times call for old solutions to new problems. But you need to package them as new solutions to old problems. Here's a translation guide to analyst house Gartner's pricey advice — or at least to Gartner's advice as rewritten by a bunch of journalists at ZD:

Roundtrip tickets to Larnaca, Cyprus: $1,300. Lodging at your pal's dad's pad on the Mediterranean: Free. Getting your goofy video turned into a symbol of generational excess: Priceless. I'm starting to feel some sympathy for the Camp Cyprus 20, the crazy Internet kids who filmed themselves cavorting poolside at Wall Street big Bob Lessin's gleamingly white vacation home, to the tune of Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'." The charge: That they lacked self-awareness. Hence, for example, this remix of the video set to "Highway to Hell."Are you kidding? These guys had two hours a day of poststructuralist textually-agnostic confabulism theory before lunch in college. On the surface, "Don't Stop Believin'" sounds like an anthem of cluelessness, a party song to get your frat-rock dance on. Listen closely, though, and you'll see that it's actually a nihilistic, no-future tale sung by a senselessly addicted gambler. The schadenfreude crowd is bent on telling these happy-go-lucky Facebookers and Googlers and Blip.tvers and Drop.ioers how they're gonna sing the blues. Guess what, guys? These Cyprussians have figured out that some will win and some will lose. Here are the lyrics to the song, annotated to further your understanding of the video's wit; deconstructionist comments welcome, but only if you're showing your wasted liberal-arts education to best effect.

The deep mystery of the Camp Cyprus 20: What were they thinking? The most common theory floating around is that the 20 or so Internet-employed twentysomethings who filmed themselves cavorting by the Mediterranean, even as the markets imploded and Silicon Valley shuddered, were simply drunk. Oh no, my friends: This was planned. The beer cans were expertly placed props. Think about it: The Cyprus vacation home of Wall Street power broker Bob Lessin screams "music-video set." His son, Sam Lessin, invited a number of people, including his girlfriend, Wall Street Journal reporter Jessica Vascellaro. She and the other bathing beauties all brought identical black-and-white checkered swimsuits. A single-take video like this doesn't just happen; in fact, it's something of an art form. It doesn't require the cinematic talent of a Welles or Scorsese, but it does require a stunning amount of free time. Here are three videos which likely inspired the Cyprus hill gang:Vimeo, the IAC-owned video-sharing site, is widely believed to have popularized the form. Here's their single-taker:

A longtime reader sent me this classic post-layoff notice in response to our plea for more crowdsourced content. Instead of just telling me a story in text, he gave me a Word document mailed to all employees, so I could screencap it for you. This would've been an awesome post ... in July, when the doc is dated. Yahoo did everyone a favor by including Valleywag in its training video All Hands, the Movie. The lesson? Tipping us isn't about whether or not you get caught. It's about watching how long those idiots in HR take to figure it out.

At today's annual meeting, Oracle's top dog told shareholders, "Acquisitions that we have been looking at for some time may now be more attractive." He wasn't any more specific than to say he meant small, growing companies rather than large, public ones. Ooh, I know this great little blog network. Does Oracle have dental?(Photo by AP/Paul Sakuma)

Times are tough all over. That's the excuse bosses are now using for cleaning house, making hard decisions they were too timid to execute in bubblier times. We've just heard that Mansueto Ventures, the publisher of Fast Company and Inc. magazines, is laying off 20 people. Inside the company, it's being spun as an "economic move" — but if it's a financially motivated maneuver, why is Fast Company magazine being left untouched in the layoffs?Most of the cuts are hitting Mansueto Digital, the company's Web arm, previously the fiefdom of executive Ed Sussman. Sussman is leaving the company, and control of Fastcompany.com is now being handed to the magazine's editor, Bob Safian; traffic had fallen by about half on Sussman's watch, while rivals like Wired saw visits to their websites grow quickly. Robert Scoble, the self-obsessed managing director of Fastcompany.tv, will still be employed as of Monday, though he now reports to Safian. Darn!

Was Seth Sternberg, the CEO of Meebo, not in attendance at Sequoia Capital's recent summit for all of the venture capital firm's startups? In its now-famous "R.I.P. Good Times" presentation, Sequoia's partners scolded the entrepreneurs the firm has funded to cut all unnecessary costs. The online-chat startup's apparent response: Listing all of the free food and drink it buys employees. The one concession to frugality: They don't buy chocolate milk, because it's too expensive. (Chocolate soy milk, on the other hand, is deemed an affordable luxury.) Any bets on how long it will take for Sequoia's Roelof Botha, the lead partner on its Meebo investment, to tell Sternberg to stop paying the grocery bills? (Photo by ifindkarma)

We've got our first layoff-memo story — and it's actually about a layoff conducted without a memo. Read on, and don't forget to send in your own:

Silicon Valley is obsessed with a presentation by Sequoia Capital, the backer of Google, titled "R.I.P. Good Times". The venture capital firm's partners delivered it to its portfolio companies at a special meeting, predicting a long, painful recovery and advocating immediate cost cuts. We'd gotten notes from an attendee, but VentureBeat got its hands on the actual PowerPoint deck:

"Slash expenses, cut deep and keep marching. You can't be a general if you turn back." — Sequoia Capital partner Eric Upin at a mandatory all-CEO meeting on Thursday. For you, just remember that creep in the corner office isn't happy as your CEO. He wants to be a general.

It's official: "We're in a recession," begins the latest update from hipster dating site OKCupid. There's a lesson in messaging for marketers and salespeople everywhere: Yes, you're afraid, but you can still get laid. Now more than ever!

Bad times have hit sunnily optimistic northern California. Does it matter if the mayhem on Wall Street had any real connection with the tech-powered Silicon Valley economy? Some of the region's most influential power brokers believe it will — and by pushing others around, they can make perception reality. A helpful insider has provided notes from a recent meeting of Sequoia Capital, a backer of Apple, Cisco, and Google which has risen to become the Valley's preeminent venture-capital firm. Michael Moritz had summoned CEOs of Sequoia's portfolio companies to tell them to prepare for a long, hard downturn. The bottom line: All startups must become cash-flow positive — in other words, earn more than they spend. Or in other, other words, act like the real businesses they always should have emulated. Here are what our tipster claims are notes from the meeting, apparently forwarded by one of the attendees:

Nothing brings out a boss's penchant for doublespeak and obfuscation like a layoff. Take, for example, eBay PR boss Alan Marks's instant-classic "simplification" memo. Cutbacks are sure to continue as companies agonize over just how deep this recession will go; so, too, will the self-contradictory jargon and false logic which only makes bad news worse. Send in the worst layoff memos you've seen, and we'll publish them here.