(Via http://castielmalotovedlucifer.tumblr.com/, God knows the original source)

Order us up a dish of crow, because we might get a few more angels out of this Tumblr deal than we initially suspected. Crain's has analysis of the deal from PrivCo, and if these numbers are right, the company's investors, at least, made out none too shabby.

According to PrivCo's analysis, Union Square Ventures will get $253 million--"mostly from a $400,000 seed investment it made in Tumblr in 2007." PrivCo believes USV invested less than $5 million and ballparks the firm's return at 5,000 percent. Early birds, worms, etc. Spark Capital will get $154 million, and partner Bijan Sabet takes home $77 million. Sequoia gets $176 million.

PrivCo says employees fared well, too: The report says the first 10 average around $6.2 million, the first 30 $3.3 million, and everyone else gets something like $371,000.

But before you start petitioning your Tumblr pals for personal loans--it's worth treating these numbers with substantial skepticism.

A Tumblr spokesperson told us they weren't going to comment or confirm anything besides what was in the initial release, and USV and Sequoia are keeping quiet. But a Spark Capital spokesperson "disputed the accuracy of the report" to Crain's. Also, PrivCo recently bungled a story about LivingSocial, and there were lots of questions about that Foursquare report, too.

As for employees, there are any number of factors that could render those numbers inaccurate, from vesting schedules to earn outs to handcuffs. The presentation also suggests employees get comparable amounts of stock options, which seems unlikely. Update, 8:07 p.m.: Investor Bijan Sabet, whom PrivCo has making $77 million, is also on a Twitter tear trashing the report. "That article and the corresponding privco report is complete garbage and incorrect," he just tweeted. Come on, Bijan, throw us a couple more numbers.

Fred Wilson, meanwhile, has chimed in on Hacker News:

Total garbage. There is not one fact in this privco thing that is close to right. The numbers are good but nowhere close to that good. This is the same firm that predicted Foursquare would be out of business this year which will also prove to be nonsense.

Anyway, keep a close eye on the city's artisanal coffee suppliers and twee Brooklyn furniture makers. If everything at the Flea gets bought up halfway through the day on Saturday, we'll have our answer.

"Vires in Numeris" lol (Photo: Flickr/Zach Copley)

Fred Wilson has just broken his two-year, no-investment streak. The Wall Street Journal reports Union Square Ventures is leading a $5 million round in Y Combinator-backed Coinbase, which allows you to buy, store and pay with Bitcoin. Also participating: Ribbit Capital, SV Angel and Funders Club.

These being the self-styled gentleman scholars of USV, there's some philosophizing to justify the investment. Mr. Wilson, who took point on the deal, explained the move in a blog post:

"We believe that Bitcoin represents something fundamental and powerful, an open and distributed Internet peer to peer protocol for transferring purchasing power. It reminds us of SMTP, HTTP, RSS, and BitTorrent in its architecture and openness. Like what happened with those other low level protocols, entrepreneurs and developers are now building technology on top of Bitcoin to make it more useful, more accessible, and more secure."

"We believe that we are in the very early days of Bitcoin and other digital currencies," he added.

It's the largest venture capital investment in the space to-date, eclipsing the $2 million OpenCoin round that included Andreessen Horowitz. Coinbase told the Journal the money will go to operating costs and hiring. Cofounder Fred Ehrsam explained, "We need 10 people yesterday." Earlier this week the company announced it was processing $15 million per week in Bitcoin deals, and about 300 merchants have signed on to the platform.

So if you notice more dudes trying to make it rain Bitcoins in clubs across Manhattan, you know who to blame.

(Photo: Sound Ctrl)

Everyone, it seems, has an opinion about Foursquare, the New York-based check-in and recommendations app that was the breakout darling of SXSW 2009.

Former Square COO Keith Rabois recently engaged in a very public dustup with Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley on Twitter, tweeting that only a "Hail Mary Bebo-style acquisition will bail you out." In January, data and research company PrivCo predicted that the startup will fail by the end of the year, eventually surrendering to an acquisition price of no more than $50 million (though the analysis didn't account for mobile traffic). In November of last year, the Wall Street Journal reported that investors were "cooling" on Foursquare. "The company claims more than 25 million registered users, but only about 8 million of them use the app at least once a month," it wrote.

Now, Businessweek reports that Foursquare has raised $41 million in loans and convertible debt from Silver Lake Partners, a private equity fund, as well as Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures and others. The influx of capital, Businessweek notes, will allow Foursquare time to grow as it tussles with low revenue (a source tells BW that the company only made $2 million last year) and works to launch a new ad program that will allow all of its merchants to serve mobile ads.

Foursquare's latest update to its iOS app brought search and recommendations to the forefront; sources also told Betabeat that the company has toyed with the idea of a recommendations app not equipped with check-ins, which speaks volumes about where the value of the app lies. A new mobile ad strategy, which would most likely serve ads to users based on their location, could help to greatly increase revenue at the company.

Taking on debt instead of raising a new round also helps Foursquare avoid a dreaded down round and what would undoubtedly be a fierce public debate about its valuation. The Series C in 2011 brought the company's total capital to $71 million at a valuation of $600 million, but the novelty of a check-in app seems to have worn off since then, and that coupled with thin yearly revenues could lead to a lower valuation.

One source told Betabeat that the company is “frustrated with lack of hype/momentum/growth," and that company culture has transitioned from “uplifting” to “oh shit."

Investors in this debt round are patient, allowing Mr. Crowley the time he needs to expand the business. But others, like Greylock's John Lilly, declined to participate--according to BW, he simply thinks Foursquare's $600 million valuation is too high.

Behance, which raised $6.5 million in a funding round led by Union Square Ventures earlier this year, said in a blog post that the company's mission remained unchanged:

All too often, a company is purchased for its technology and is subsumed into a corporate headquarters, losing its identity and autonomy—and exchanging its mission for some new business objective. On the contrary, Behance is joining Adobe to advance our mission and shared vision with Adobe. Our place within Adobe ensures that Behance will remain in NYC, focus on our community, and continue building out the platform—open to all—with a certain set of tenets that we’ve held since day one.

Should be a happy new year.

Another precautionary measure: Seven months after raising $6.5 million in a funding round led by Union Square Ventures, Behance has been acquired by Adobe Systems. Behance said that it would remain in New York in a blog post discussing the deal. [Behance]

Zynga confirmed that it's shutting down its Japanese operation at the end of next month. If we get there. [TechCrunch]

Three Google executives were cleared by an Italian appeals court, which reversed a lower court's findings that the execs violated a child's privacy by failing to remove a bullying video. [Reuters]

NASA is going to keep blogging that the world isn't really ending until the sidewalk opens up and swallows its communication team whole. [NASA]

Mr. Watson, left, and Mr. Pease (Photo: Twitter/bwats and USV.com)

Union Square Ventures just capped a nine-month search for fresh blood, announcing not one, but two new investment analysts this afternoon. New York City's best known venture capital firm welcomed Alexander Pease and Brian Watson, bringing its total investment team up to nine staffers, including its newest partner Andy Weissman, who was poached from Betaworks back in October.

In an introductory post, Christina Cacioppo called the young men "extremely-qualified candidates," which is why USV opted to hire both.

Mr. Pease, who goes by Zander, first joined the firm a year ago as a hackNY fellow. He recently graduated from Princeton with an A.B. in Physics and a thesis covering quantum information for practical use--no doubt a light-hearted romp. He may already have a leg up on some of the founders in USV's portfolio. He knows how to code, worked as a social games developer for Vostu*, did a turn at MIT Media Labs, and founded MetroGenome, interactive music education iPad app.

Mr. Watson also hails from the Ivy League. He recently graduated from Columbia with a B.S. in engineering management systems, which he describes as "a degree that remixes traditional industrial engineering with economics and computer science." (Did we mention how eager the Alley's been to brush up on its techie cred?). Mr. Watson also comes on board with startup experience. As an intern, he analyzed social data for Trendrr, worked on user acquisition and community engagement at Gilt Groupe, as well as helping JPMorgan build Chase Community Giving.

Considering USV's emphasis on "web presence" for potential hires, it's no surprise that both analysts will follow Fred Wilson's footsteps with their own blogs (here and here). If you're looking to get their attention, perhaps throw in a sneakerhead reference. Mr. Pease did some freelance work for Phineas Barnes' side project, Today's Kicks and Mr. Watson admits to "sometimes blogging about cool sneakers" in his free time.

*Disclosure.

(Photo: www.successstories.co.in/)

Some may tsk-tsk the "learn to code" meme, but that hasn't deterred New York-based Codecademy from sticking to its vision of teaching all of us to code. Today, cofounder Zach Sims announced on the company blog that the startup has raised $10M in series B funding from VC firms Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures and Union Square Ventures, as well as angel investors Yuri Milner and Richard Branson.

Folding London-based Index Ventures into its investor portfolio has a lot to do with Codecademy's future plans. Mr. Sims said that Codecademy is a "global movement," and that the company is looking towards international expansion, having already hired people from countries like Jordan and Finland. "We want anyone, anywhere to have access to an education that can change their lives," wrote Mr. Sims.

Old school, meet new school. (flickr.com/friarsbalsam)

Just last week, the publishing industry got the Wall Street Journal treatment for having sidestepped the disruptive effects of digital privacy. But everyone gathered on the far west side for Book Expo America might want to hold off on the high fives, because the Internet isn't done taking aim at their business. And one Union Square Ventures-backed, Toronto-based upstart, Wattpad, just raised a $17.3 million Series B.

USV joined this latest round, which was led by Khosla Ventures. Other participants include Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang and Toronto's Golden Venture Partners. The company will use the money for hiring, new features, and community growth.

Wattpad is both publishing platform and social network. It's a kissing cousin to Amazon's self-publishing platform, but the concept will feel most familiar to anyone who spent time on early platforms like fanfiction.net--complete with concerns about copyright, by the way, though the company has introduced piracy-fighting features. The modern twist: Over 70 percent of the site's traffic comes from mobile devices.

Founder Allen Lau insisted to Betabeat that Wattpad doesn't have any real competitors, and contrasted the company's model with the traditional publishing process and with more accessible paths like Amazon's self-publishing platform. "On Wattpad, people [publish] chapter-by-chapter, so for example a lot of people will upload chapter one, then instantly he or she will get feedback," he said. Then they can upload each successive installment as its written. "It's a very different interaction environment."

Their numbers aren't too shabby, either. "In terms of user base, we have 8 million monthly unique visitors, we have over 5 million stories uploaded and each month there's another half a million stories uploaded," Mr. Lau said.

But success isn't as simple as making the content available. For one thing, as anyone who's poked around the Kindle store lately can attest, volume is no guarantor of quality. There's a reason publishers shell out for editorial salaries, and it's not just because they've always it that way. Plus, there's a ceiling on writers' willingness to work for free.

The company previously raised a $3.5 million USV-led round in September of last year. Founder Allen Lau explains they made several hires and "we thought it would be enough to continue to enhance the product, but what's happening is the traffic has been growing so fast that we need to spend more time scaling the infrastructure, and that takes away valuable time in enhancing the product," he says.

Asked what interested USV about Wattpad, managing partner Albert Wenger pushed back against Mark Meeker's latest digital trends slideshow, which described Amazon's Kindle as the re-imagining of the book: "The Kindle is more traditional books in a new delivery vehicle. We think that Wattpad is really more the re-imagining of the book in the digital age." It's a network process rather than a traditional, hierarchical process, and it's an interactive process, he said. "It's just a completely different way of thinking about how a story is told."

So far, the site isn't really competing directly with traditional publishing (except in the sense that everything on the Internet competes for our attention.) "Today it's sitting in almost a parellel universe," he said, adding, "I think whenever you have a big innovation that does something fundamentally different, you get usage in areas that previous usage didn't exist." For example, many of the people writing on Wattpad are those who aren't published anywhere else, and there's a substantial amount of Wattpad usage in countries where books are less accessible, such as in the Philippines and Vietnam.

But Mr. Wenger is confident about the platform's potential: "Ultimately this kind of network model is going to very large and can maybe not ever subsume the old, but can rival the old in scale and in importance."

Not pictured: Fitbit and Withings scale. (via @Naveen)

Don't call it a startup--at least not yet--but Foursquare cofounder Naveen Selvadurai dropped some hints about an upcoming personal project at an event at Union Square Monday evening, as Erick Schonfeld revealed on Twitter.

The de-Crunched tech blogger was at the VC firm for an event about "Networked Health," and Mr. Selvadurai's proposition, taken straight from the Quantified Self rule book, sounded like it fit right in:

Former 4SQ founder @naveen talking about "personal analytics" and how observation c@ Union Square Ventures instagr.am/p/KoAA2XJHlN/

— Erick Schonfeld (@erickschonfeld) May 14, 2012

How @naveen hacks his body: No alcohol, no carbs, no sugar

— Erick Schonfeld (@erickschonfeld) May 14, 2012

What is @naveen's current project?"Google Analytics for everything I know about my body" have to track 3 things: exercise, food, sleep

— Erick Schonfeld (@erickschonfeld) May 14, 2012

As Owen Thomas points out on Business Insider, Mr. Selvadurai and his cofounder Dennis Crowley always tried to pitch Foursquare less as a check-in app and more as a "a data-driven recommendations engine which analyzes and rewards real-world behavior."

That worldview dovetails nicely into the "Quantified Self" movement, which presumes that by measuring and analyzing behavior, one can improve it. (You're less likely to splurge on french fries, say, if life is a game of improving your fitness and all the apps on your homescreen are keeping score.) The target market for QS is somewhere in the Venn diagram between Ray Kurzweil fans and people who keep an Excel doc of their bicep girth. With iPhone apps that can take your blood pressure or sporty spice bracelets that measure "your entire athletic life," you can take that treadmill monitor with you.

Mr. Thomas argues that Quantified Self movement is "a big deal in fitness-obsessed Silicon Valley," but wonders if "the idea may be fresher in New York City." Psssh. You think we don't know from optimization? We invite Mr. Thomas to check out the Betabeat archives where we've explored how #4HB techies have opted for QS as the life-hack du jour. It looks like our old friend Jay Parkinson, Tumblr MD, even made an appearance at the USV event.

Behance CEO Scott Belsky (scottbelsky.com)

After years of bootstrapping, online portfolio platform Behance is taking on outside funding to the tune of $6.5 million, TechCrunch says. Union Square Ventures led the round, and the list of additional investors is something of a who's who. Says a note on the company's blog: 

We’re also thrilled to have a few other people we admire help fund Behance, including Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos (via Bezos Expeditions, his personal investment fund), as well as Dave Morin, Yves Behar, Chris Dixon, Dave Tisch, Dave McClure (via 500Startups), Alexis Ohanian, and Garrett Camp. These thinkers and investors have a history of changing industries. It’s a dream team for us.

Why now, when Behance has been around since 2006, subsisting on everything but other people's money? In the past, the site has "sold Action Pads, books, job postings, conference tickets, and even banner ads (horror!)" to fund the enterprise. The announcement explained that their recent growth means "it’s time for Behance to scale." The cash means more resources to devote to their "exciting product pipeline," and the post concludes with a reminder that yes, Behance is hiring.

So presumably at least some of that money will go to a "sick developer perks" fund.