Below is an e-mail that Moritz sent out to some of his business associates.

Dear [xyz],

We have always tried to be straightforward with you and, in that spirit, I need to share something. Unfortunately, I have been diagnosed with a rare medical condition which can be managed but is incurable. I’ve been told that in the next five to ten years the quality of my life is quite likely to decline. Right now I feel fitter than ever and I hope that I’ll be one of the lucky ones who can live a full life and defy the statisticians. But there is no way of predicting this with certainty and thus for me, life has assumed a different meaning and I am making some adjustments.

I am going to extract myself from the daily management of Sequoia Capital, a task that has consumed a large part of my time for the past sixteen years. I will become Chairman of Sequoia Capital and will be deeply involved with nurturing the fresh investments, ideas and relationships that can be of significant long-term benefit for all of us. I will also work very closely with some of our younger and newer members, will continue my role as Managing Member of existing funds and maintain all my current company responsibilities. I will use twelve to fourteen weeks – sprinkled throughout the course of each year – for various pursuits, diversions and trivial indulgences.

Nothing about this should cause much of a change because everything that has been achieved at Sequoia Capital has resulted from the teamwork and contribution of many people. Our overall business is in the best shape it has ever been and we are better positioned than at any time in our forty year history. Doug Leone will assume full responsibility for coordinating the business we have gradually developed over the past couple of decades and almost everything else remains entirely the same.

Thanks for your support,

Michael Moritz

NOTE: This post has been corrected for accuracy. I received clarification from Mr. Kovacs.

Sivaramakrishnan used to be lead information scientist at AdMob. She holds a doctorate in Information Theory from Stanford University.

The scammers were falsifying credit card numbers and stealing them from real consumers. Then they wholesales them into China where they were used on Taobao to buy all sorts of items including virtual goods on games. When virtual goods in games are purchased, the ranking of the app increases. However the game doesn’t earn any revenue from the transactions because Apple discovers the fraud and refunds the transactions before paying it to developers.

“We are truly sorry about what happened to these people,” stated Hoolai’s overseas operations head Xiang Lin. “Our game is not yet even launched in English or Spanish but we do want to keep the door open there. We hope that U.S. audiences and the media can understand the truth.”

This was Jive’s revenues for the years ending:
2008: $16.9 million
2009: $30 million
2010: $46.3 million
First 9 months of 2011: $54.8 million

This was Jive’s net losses for the years ending:
2008: $11.3 million
2009: $4.8 million
2010: $27.6 million
First 9 months of 2011: $38.1 million

Traffic increased to 13 billion page views per month. There are now 30 million blogs that have been created using Tumblr. Across these 30 million blogs, 40 million posts are being generated per day. About 623 million minutes per month are being spent by people looking at Tumblr blogs.

“Tumblr has come far since we began our journey,” said Mr. Karp. “From the early users signing up to easily share all of the things they cared about, to the global community today where creators have an incredible opportunity to reach an audience of hundreds of millions, it’s been a remarkable four years.”

Investors in this round include WI Harper, Silicon Valley Bank, Sequoia Capital, IDG-Accel, Foundation Capital, Foxconn, SAP, Bertelsmann, Motorola, Autodesk, and pension funds in the U.S. and Canada. Ron Conway and Yuri Milner was also in this round of funding. Executives from Google, Facebook, YouTube, Amazon.com, and Yahoo! also participated in this round. The incubator previously raised $115 million.

[TechCrunch]

However the company has been reporting losses between 2008-present. The losses have been increasing too. The company lost $27.6 million in 2010 and $30.6 million this year. The company said that they are putting revenue back into their own infrastructure and marketing.

Jive is in the process of transferring their customer data centers from a third party to a co-located facility managed by Jive’s own operations team. Jive has about 635 enterprise customers, which includes T-Mobile, SAP, HP, and UBS. The company has about 358 employees as of right now.

Jive plans on using the money raised from the IPO to pay outstanding loans of $20 million and for potential acquisitions.

Jive has raised a total of $57 million from Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, and a few other investors. Sequoia owns over a third of Jive’s equity. Kleiner Perkins owns about 14.24%.

[TechCrunch]

Digital textbook startup Inkling has raised $17 million in funding to grow their company, which works with textbook publishers to create interactive iPad versions of their books. The funding comes from Tenaya Capital, Jafco Ventures, Sequoia Capital and Pearson Education. Inkling is already working with publishers like McGraw Hill and Pearson. [GigaOM]