A few comments about Dave McClure’s Sunday post encouraging entrepreneurs under 30 to sell at the earliest opportunity, from someone who was a founder under 30. I won’t go into the full rant, since I already wrote that last year, but can’t help but comment on a few of Dave’s claims. (Dave already knows I adore his writing style–Dave, I was just telling my twin brother this morning that I wished I had your voice–even if we disagree here.)

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About two dozen companies building applications on Facebook went fishing for cash from Silicon Valley investors on Tuesday.

The companies, ranging from music discovery software to mobile virtual worlds, have all received a small amount of funding from Facebook’s fbFund, a $10 million seed fund that Facebook and two of its backers–Accel Partners and Founders Fund–dole out annually. As finalists in the annual program, the startups have spent the past 12 weeks camped out in an old Facebook building in downtown Palo Alto, building their products, scribbling ideas on whiteboards and refining their pitches. Facebook fbFund program manager Cat Lee says that the fbFund, which is funded by Accel and Founders, invested more than $800,000 in the latest group.

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As Silicon Valley’s stock-driven wealth machine sputters in the recession, technology start-ups are exploring new ways for employees to tap their holdings.

Many of the moves have been triggered by Facebook Inc., which this week paid current and former employees who participated in a program that let them sell a portion of their shares in the privately held social-networking site. Current workers were allowed to sell up to $1 million worth of Facebook stock or 25 percent of their vested shares, whichever was greater, according to people familiar with the terms.

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Silicon Valley venture capitalists–who invest in startups with the aim of profiting later when those companies go public or are sold–have found it tough to produce returns recently. Not only have the markets been largely devoid of public offerings and M&A of their startup companies, many private company CEOs also are more reluctant to take their firms public given concerns over the cost and hassle of an IPO.

Now some venture-capital firms are trying to tamp down the anxiety levels over taking a company public.

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Startup executives and employees haven’t had it easy cashing out of their private company stock since the IPO and M&A markets, which typically provide “liquidity” and a route to riches, have been relatively moribund in recent years. Spotting an opportunity, several companies have sprung up in recent months to try and provide startups with new avenues to liquidity.

Next week, another of these companies, SharesPost, plans to announce their new service, say people briefed on the matter. The Los Angeles-area based company, headed by CEO Greg Brogger, will unveil an online platform where people can list their private company shares for sale and get bids for the stock.

SharesPost is positioned as a kind of Craigslist for private company stock, connecting sellers and buyers in an online classified ads-like model, say people briefed on the matter.

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During the “Launch Pad” session, five start-ups took a grilling from developers, journalists and venture capitalists, then faced a crowd vote at the Web 2.0 Expo’s version of “American Idol.”

As attendees texted their votes, moderator John Battelle, founder of Federated Media Publishing, jokingly asked: “Want to have a dance-off?”

None were necessary. The techies in attendance were starry-eyed for all things mobile, picking Nitobi’s PhoneGap, an open-source tool for building mobile apps, as the People’s Choice winner. Life-tracking site zeaLOG was a close second.

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You’ve probably heard how much the microblogging service Twitter can help your business, or that being on social-networking site Facebook can boost your company’s profile. But what you might not have considered is the potential danger in over-relying on these start-ups that could go out of business, get bought out, or close your account if you aren’t familiar with their Terms of Service.

In terms of growth, both Twitter and Facebook are booming, with Twitter growing by 600 percent and Facebook nearly tripling in users in the past year. Both companies rely on venture funding to survive. Facebook has been bringing in revenues from advertising; Twitter hasn’t yet clarified how it will bring in money.

The brand value of both companies is rising, as you could see on TV during the inauguration when stations such as CNN were touting Twitter feeds and Facebook pages. But as more newbies pour their time and attention into these online services, can they be certain that the services will survive in the long haul?

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By the end of 2008, venture capital had been officially declared dead. Start-ups were laying people off so fast that even TechCrunch couldn’t manage to keep up. University Endowments and Foundations, the source of the “capital” in venture capital, were hemorrhaging so badly from their public company investments that many long-time believers in “alternative assets” declared a moratorium on venture capital. And the IPO market was a distant memory. Good times!

Welcome 2009. The public markets remain closed. Venture investors and the investors in venture investors remain “challenged.” Follow-on financings have become increasingly difficult, in some instances impossible. And, while there may well be light at the end of the tunnel, it would appear that we haven’t gotten far enough down the tunnel yet to see that light.

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If you could search your friends’ thoughts, interests, and activities, would that be a better search experience? In many cases, it would be. Searching for restaurants, books, or movies, would turn up recommendations from people you actually know. If you are researching a trip to Florence, Italy, you might discover 10 friends who have been there already, and could ask for advice on what to do. These scenarios have been the dream of social search for a few years, with both start-ups and search engines taking a stab at it. But so far it’s been a failed dream.

Yahoo’s (YHOO) experiment with social search, Yahoo 360 MyWeb, never took off. is being shut down. It was a rudimentary social search in that relevant bookmarks from friends showed up as search results. And search has never been Facebook’s strong suit.

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One of the differences between big companies and start-ups is that big companies tend to have developed procedures to protect themselves against mistakes. A start-up walks like a toddler, bashing into things and falling over all the time. A big company is more deliberate. The gradual accumulation of checks in an organization is a kind of learning, based on disasters that have happened to it or others like it. After giving a contract to a supplier who goes bankrupt and fails to deliver, for example, a company might require all suppliers to prove they’re solvent before submitting bids.

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It would seem we’ve got all the makings of a tech shipwreck.

In the past few days, Xerox (XRX), Yahoo (YHOO) and eBay (EBAY) each announced plans to cut thousands of jobs. Esteemed Silicon Valley VC firm Sequoia Capital is warning entrepreneurs that it’s time to batten down the hatches because the good times are over. Start-ups Adbrite, imeem, Seesmic and Zivity are each laying off at least a quarter of their employees. We’ve been here before, and it looks ugly.

Or does it? Listen to execs at some high-flying companies on the other hand, and you get a somewhat different outlook. Apple (AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs this week told investors he plans no job cuts, and he’s “not tremendously worried” about Apple’s outlook.

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We have already seen tons of things people do on Twitter to help their business–marketing people selling stuff, community managers engaging in various activities with their users, startups providing technical support, bloggers hunting for scoops and promoting their articles. But Jason Goldberg, CEO of SocialMedian–which was recently launched to the public–has found a new (and kind of unexpected) way to use Twitter for business: He is attempting to raise investment right within the microblogging service.

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