Briac

* Daniel Gross: Is any job better than no job? * Lucy Marcus: Blue skies research is essential * Adam Lashinsky: Where will Mark Hurd go next? * Morning Call: U.S. futures fall ahead of Fed meeting, London loses early, European shares slide and the Nikkei drops on BoJ decision. * Coffee shops begin taking WiFi off the menu * Infosys CEO Kris Gopalakrishnan: "Lack of education, manpower will hold India back. We're seeing it in our industry." * Skype, Skype, Skype: Financial details on the settlement with its founders, the $100 million is just a placeholder amount and how Skype plans to grow its business. * Jeffrey Katzenberg blogs about his day: "Hosted the owners of largest private equity fund called TPG on campus ($20B of cash) They want us to know they're ready, willing, able to support us if there's ever anything big we want to pursue. Nothing on the horizon but good to have them in the wings and excited about dwa."

* Danny Sullivan: Let's celebrate Google's biggest failures * FT Alphaville: Can we predict a financial crisis? Does it matter? * Simon Johnson: Geithner needs to be more invested in the Volcker Rule * Morning Call: U.S. futures point higher ahead of jobs data, London rises early, European shares climb and the Nikkei flattens. * 20 questions: Dominique Senequier of Axa Private Equity * How to start a media company without experience or seed capital * Christina Romer's exit interview: "If anyone had told me that I'd come to view Larry Summers as one of my dearest friends, I never would have believed it. But I do."

We've spent a lot of time lately discussing micro-VCs, including last week's news on Floodgate ($73m fund close) and 500 Startups (new $30m fund being raised). So I spent some time discussing the phenomenon with Chris Douvos, who invests in mico-VC funds through his role as a managing director with The Investment Fund for Foundations: How long have you been investing in micro-VC funds, or super-angel, funds?? We’ve been active in this space since around 2005, and have invested over time in several of the archetypal managers. Who are those archetypical managers? Well, the main one is someone we actually haven’t given money to: Ron Conway. He’s created a fantastic ecosystem. But we’ve backed some of the people who have taken types of things he does and refined them a bit. For example, one of our earliest investments was in First Round. We think those guys have brought an aggressively thoughtful approach to the challenges of investing in seed-stage companies. I love the O’Reilly AlphaTech guys, whose differential is that they’re leveraging the larger O’Reilly ecosystem. In the case of O’Reilly or First Round or Floodgate, they’ve created brands around themselves that magnetizes interesting people. That helps them punch above their weight.

* Steve Rattner took the fifth * KKR backs off CAA investment: "The town is too complex for me." * Om Malik: Google's purchase of Slide "shows that Google not only has no idea what to do about social, but actually lacks the imagination to even think of anything worthwhile on its own." * Morning Call: U.S. futures point lower, London stays static, European shares edge higher and the Nikkei climbs 1.7%. * The SEC gets set to open up the proxy process * Brad Feld: How I think about seed investing as a VC * John Patrick Pullen: How Mafia Wars can fix the media * Keith Hennessey: How Obamanomics really compares to Clintonomics * Tweet of the Day: @timcarville If Barnes & Noble winds up on the auction block, I plan to go to the sale, pretend I'm interested in buying it, use the bathroom, and leave.

* How to win at rock, paper, scissors * Transcript of last night's Charlie Rose interview of Wilbur Ross * Rafael Corrales: "The launch of Kaplan Ventures is a clear signal that Kaplan has stopped innovating and that Kaplan has excess cash that it does not know where to put to work." * Morning Call: U.S. futures point lower, London falls early, European shares stumble, the Nikkei climbs and Hong Kong shares hit 3-month high. * Android sales overtake iPhone sales in the U.S. * Chip Hazard: The original VC investment thesis and evolution of Reveal Imaging, which is being acquired by SAIC. * The first Volcker Rule consequence? Morgan Stanley looks to unload FrontPoint hedge fund * Nick Bilton is having trouble using his e-readers in coffee shops: "I wonder if people went through the same thing in the mid-1400s as they sat in coffee shops with their pesky paper books? I can imagine a coffee shop owner demanding that a patron remove his book from an establishment that only allowed spoken communication."

* Scott Brinker: Data as a new marketing channel * Colin Barr: Ben Bernanke's nest egg bounces back * Chris Dorr: Why Babe Ruth and Michelangelo would have loved the iPad * Morning Call: U.S. futures point higher, London rises on banks, European shares climb, the Nikkei gains on earnings and Hong Kong shares hit 3-month high. * Would-be Facebook owner says his claim was born of an arrest * Goodbye to The Big Money, one of First Read's regular first reads... * Coca-Cola doesn't have a corporate VC arm, but it does have something similar * David Stockman: "If there were such a thing as Chapter 11 for politicians, the Republican push to extend the unaffordable Bush tax cuts would amount to a bankruptcy filing." * Toby Lewis: "Banks are finally getting tough with private equity. They have taken control of almost €50bn ($65bn) of private equity-backed companies in Europe since the beginning of 2009 as a result of those companies defaulting on their debt."

* Jeff Cox: How Wall Street will beat the new financial regulations * Lee Hower: Social games have been institutionalized (deal with it) * SEC charges the Wyly brothers with insider trading fraud that reaped $550 million * Morning Call: U.S. futures slip ahead of GDP data, London falls early, European shares keep slipping and the Nikkei loses 1.6%. * For Apple followers, it's a matter of faith * Tony Hayward is a narcissistic nutjob * Ratings agencies voice concerns about take-privates * Paul Graham says that traditional VC round structures are going way. In related news, Paul Graham seems to keep forgetting that not every startup is an IT startup. * Ben Smith: "Peter Orszag may have had the shortest tenure of any member of the Obama Cabinet, but in an administration dominated by a powerful White House staff, he left as deep a mark as almost anyone in it."

* What the %#$&? Goldman Sachs bans swearing in emails * James Ledbetter: Why doesn't job retraining work in America? * David Whelan: Three storylines to follow on the upcoming HCA IPO * Morning Call: U.S. futures point higher, London rises early, European shares climb and the Nikkei retreats. * Congress rethinks its ban on Internet gambling * More thoughts on deal syndication in micro-VC land: Roger Ehrenberg and Josh Kopelman * Digital Sky Technologies, the Russian company that keeps investing in U.S. Internet companies like Facebook, may go public next year. * Rep. Darryl Issa (R-CA) introduces legislation to repeal a part of Dodd-Frank that would exempt the SEC from most FOIA requests. * Ford plans to discontinue to Crown Victoria, meaning that NYC streets will never look the same. * Tim Congdon: Niall Ferguson is wrong to put the banker Siegmund Warburg on a moral pedestal.

* John Carney: We are all Milberg Weiss now * Allan Sloan: KKR is living the tax dream you can't * Pamela Samuelson: Why software startups decide to patent... or not * Morning Call: U.S. futures point higher, London rises early, European shares slip and the Nikkei climbs 2.7%. * Six questions for Bruce Bartlett * Marc Faber: Sit still, this is gonna hurt * Doug Banks is tired of the East Coast vs. West Coast tech innovation debate * Forget those negative nabobs on the Old Spice ad campaign; company sales rose 107% last month * LinkedIn is now valued at $2 billion, based on recent share purchase by hedge fund Tiger Global Management... When's that IPO?

* The past decade's top-paid CEOs * David Beisel: Micro-VCs are all BFFs... forever? * Philip Mirowski: The mortifying (and ongoing) response of economists to the financial crisis * Morning Call: U.S. futures point higher, London rises early, European shares hit 5-week high, the Nikkei falls and Shanghai stocks snap win streak. * Henry McCance: Four things great VCs do and four ideas to guide them * CB Insights finds serious shrinkage in the size of seed-stage deals in Boston and New York. * Meeting marker: SEC chair Mary Shapiro will speak this morning on implementing new financial regs * McKinsey & Co.: U.S. multinationals represent less than 1% of all U.S. companies, yet they accounted for 23% of U.S. private sector GDP in 2007 * Peter Morris: “Calculating returns on private equity is not a trivial issue. The most widely used measure, the IRR, is misleading and often overstates realised returns. This creates room for uncertainty, at best, and, at worst, manipulation.”