Roundup: Yu’s wild ride, StumbleUpon, dot-bomb travails and more

Here’s the latest action:

The fast rise of Gideon Yu — Gideon Yu has reportedly become a junior partner at Sequoia Capital, one of Silicon Valley’s most respected venture capital firms. What a ride he’s had: He was a Yahoo treasurer until September of last year, when he was scooped up by YouTube to be their chief financial officer, a month before the acquisition by Google, where he apparently played a major role. When negotiating the sale to Google, Yu admitted to Time that he told Google different things about YouTube’s budget than he was telling his own team at YouTube. That’s the sort of brass-knuckles Sequoia likes. Thus, he follows the path of Roelof Botha, chief financial officer of Paypal, who did something similar before joining Sequoia. (Via Valleywag). We’ve requested confirmation from Sequoia.

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Google releases Web History; you getting scared yet? — We almost skipped over this news when it was released Friday, thinking that Google was simply relaunching its search history feature, which has been around for a while. But Web History lets you track everything you do on the Web, not just search. From now on, you can carry around your entire surfing identity — so that when Google finally creates that chip in the brain, you will be a perfect, intelligent, non-forgetful machine human being.

Microsoft couldn’t get DoubleClick, despite being willing to spend the cash — How did Google make off with DoubleClick, a major banner advertiser that strengthens Google’s positioning considerably? How did they do it while spending less money than Microsoft was willing to pay? Questions are still unanswered, but John Battelle has post on this, and promises a follow-up. He’s got a summary of Microsoft’s argument that the GoogleClick merger goes against antitrust laws, because it can now control ad pricing. (Also, merger document here).

Stumble while on your favorite site — StumbleUpon recently released a new feature that lets you stumble from specific sites, without leaving them– called StumbleThru. More here and here.

How much is Second Life worth? — Half a billion? A venture capitalist told us Friday evening that he’d heard from “three independent sources” that the virtual world company is close to raising a new venture round valued at $450 million or greater. Now, he’d been drinking some wine, and perhaps he was thinking of a virtual funding round — because Second Life is officially adamant that it’s baloney: “Utterly untrue!” says Second Life spokeswoman Catherine Smith, after checking with management. She said such a funding would “go against everything the company has been talking about for the last six months,” which itself is a clue. At which point she shut up. What do you think? Is it about to be sold?

Key online advertising industry group blasts comScore and Nielsen — The Interactive Advertising Bureau, a grouping of major publishers and online advertising networks has criticized the two major Internet audience measurement services, comScore, Inc. and Nielsen/NetRatings, asking them to submit to a third-party audit of their measurement processes. It referred to their “outdated measurement methodologies,” including a panel structure that was “developed in the 1930s and still relied on today.”

Dot-bomb chronicles still playing out today — David Hayden, the entrepreneur behind the dot-com darling Critical Path, the boom-era email provider, went from thinking he was worth $200 million to a nasty lawsuit with bank Robertson Stephens threatening to leave him $38 million in debt. “If we lose, we’re done,” he tells the NYT. We talked with Hayden a year and a half ago, when we wrote about his latest company, Jeteye, the future of which is also in question.

Institutions are increasing their hedge-fund holdings — …while the smart people are getting out. Are they smelling trouble ahead?