OMG. Apple is reportedly hosting an invitation-only event to roll out new stuff on October 22.Our lawmakers are truly unbelievable. Now they’re trying to open the government piece by piece to ease the political pressure they’re feeling.

We’re entering week two of the shutdown with no end in sight. On talk shows yesterday morning, House Speaker John Boehner rejected continued calls to reopen the government and raise the federal debt limit unless President Obama plays ball, saying, “He knows what my phone number is. All he has to do is call.” [Eye roll. Hair pull. Screams.]

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Dick Costolo’s Joke Bombs, on Twitter

Over the weekend, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo finally did something that millions of Twitter users have done before him: He tweeted a comment that’s attracting unwanted attention.

The tweet was prompted by a New York Times report that Twitter has just one woman among its top officials. The story includes comments from academic Vivek Wadwha, who ascribed Twitter’s gender imbalance to “elite arrogance” and the “same male chauvinistic thinking” that permeates Silicon Valley. Costolo took to Twitter Friday night to call Wadwha the “Carrot Top of academic sources.”

Coming from anyone else, the tweet might have been mildly amusing if a bit mean-spirited — typical Twitter fare, in short. Coming from Costolo, it was a surprising misstep. Twitter is in its quiet period. Within weeks, it will be a public company. So why not just keep quiet until then?

In shooting the messenger and not addressing the message itself, Costolo also inadvertently helped feed people’s worst perceptions of Twitter, including that it’s not always a friendly place to hang out. As Josh Constine observed in a recent TechCrunch piece, many users already avoid or abandon Twitter because of its competitive undertones and the pressure they feel to be “thought leaders.”

Half a day after Costolo published his tweet, one such thought leader, the blogger-entrepreneur Anil Dash, decided to challenge him on it. Tweeting to his 477,525 followers, Dash said that he was “sorely disappointed to see @dickc respond defensively to criticisms of industry sexism. Why not just lead, as Twitter does on free speech?”

After a few defensive exchanges with Dash and others on the topic, Costolo suggested that he’s very mindful of the gender issue at Twitter, tweeting: “I *think* I have an acute understanding of the topic & host of related issues. Of course, proof is in deeds.”  (In a display of deference to Costolo that has also become de rigueur among Twitter’s most astute users, Dash “favorited” each of Costolo’s responses before responding to them.)

Whether there will be lingering damage from Costolo’s tweet remains to be seen. Plenty of people have lost their jobs over less, but Twitter doesn’t seem inclined to ditch its star CEO any time soon.

As for Carrot Top, a comic long known for his red hair and his use of props, no one yet knows how he feels about being dragged into the conversation. His publicity team didn’t respond to questions sent to them yesterday morning.

It’s worth noting that Costolo himself once tried to be a stand-up comic, an effort that led to zero job offers, as he shared during an on-stage interview in May. “It was one part of [my career] strategy,” he’d said, as the crowd erupted with laughter.

New Fundings

ERN, a two-year-old, London-based “big data” company focused on helping its banking customers create loyalty programs, has raised $1 million from undisclosed sources, bringing the total amount of capital raised by the company to date to $5.6 million.

Fastacash, a two-year-old, Singapore-based social payments platform, has raised $3 million in Series A funding from Jungle Ventures, Spring Singapore, and Spring SEEDS Capital.

Lark, a three-year-old, Mountain View., Calif.-based maker of a smart wristband and app, has raised $3.1 million of a $3.6 million round of funding, according to an SEC filing. According to TechCrunch, which spied the filing on Friday, Lark has previously raised $1 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners, CrunchFund and others.

Loom, a two-year-old, San Francisco-based startup that’s taking on Apple’s iCloud as a better storage solution, has raised $1.4 million from Google Ventures, Great Oaks VC, Tencent and numerous angel investors among others.

MongoDB, a six-year-old, New York-based data management company, has raised $150 million from new investors Altimeter Capital, Salesforce.com and T. Rowe Price. The firms were joined by existing investors Intel Capital, New Enterprise Associates, Red Hat and Sequoia Capital. To date, MongoDB has raised roughly $230 million from investors.

Silk, a year-old, Amsterdam-based Web data-crunching platform designed for so-called knowledge workers, has raised $1.6 million in seed funding, led by New Enterprise Associates and Atomico. The company has previously raised $435,000, including from Atomico.

Swoon Editions, a two-year-old, London-based company, has raised $1.93 million in new funding from Index Ventures, Octopus Investments and angel investors. The company, formerly known as Decoholic, is a platform for handcrafted furniture makers to sell their wares.

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Exits

Lexmark International of Lexington, Ky., has acquired the healthcare software company Pacsgear, whose technology helps customers manage and share medical images, as well as integrate them with their picture archives and electronic medical records. The 13-year-old, Pleasanton, Calif.-based company was purchased for $54 million in cash and will be folded into the Lexmark subsidiary Perceptive Software.

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IPOs

Potbelly Sandwich Shop, the sandwich chain, saw its shares, priced at $14, soar during their first day of public trading on Friday, closing at $30.77, or up 120 percent for the day. The company’s biggest shareholders are Maveron, American Securities, Oak Investment Partners, Oxford Capital Group, and Benchmark Capital, whose pre-IPO stakes were 28.2 percent, 12.9 percent, 12.2 percent, 7.9 percent, and 7.7 percent, respectively.

GlycoMimetics, a 10-year-old, Gaithersburg, Md.-based clinical-stage biotech company that is developing treatments for orphan diseases, filed to go public on Friday. The company’s biggest shareholder is New Enterprise Associates, which owns 75.2 percent of the company. Genzyme Corporation owns another 11.6 percent. The company is looking to raise up to $86 million.

Mavenir Systems, an eight-year-old, Richardson, Tx.-based company focused on mobile communications infrastructure, filed to go public on Friday in an effort to raise around $85 million. Its biggest shareholders include North Bridge Venture Partners, Austin Ventures, Alloy Ventures, August Capital, and Cisco Systems, which own 24.5 percent, 23.1 percent, 17.1 percent, 16.3 percent, and 10.9 percent of Mavenir, respectively.

Karyopharm Therapeutics, a four-year-old, Newton, Mass.-based cancer drug company, also filed to go public on Friday. Karyopharm’s biggest shareholders include Chione, Ltd., which Karyopharm’s CEO has described as a Cyprus-based investment vehicle for an unnamed individual. Chione owns 46.8 percent of the company. Other major shareholders include Plio Limited, which owns 14.6 percent, Foresight Capital, which owns 9.4 percent, and Delphi Ventures, which owns 8.2 percent. Karyopharm is looking to raise $80 million.

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People

Jeff Haughton, a 15-year veteran of Goldman Sachs, who rose through the ranks to become co-head of Goldman’s Global Financial Technology group, has left to join 12-year-old FT Partners, a boutique bank in San Francisco that focuses exclusively on financial services and technology. Haughton’s title is managing director.

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Happenings

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Starting today in New York, the New York City Economic Development Corporation and the US Israel Business Council will be partnering for a few days to present 14 Israel-based startups to early-stage investors. More information here.

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Job Listings

Earlier this year, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s investment arm, Vulcan Capital, opened a new office in Palo Alto. Now, it’s looking to hire an associate director to help manage the team’s existing investments and support and identify other investment opportunities. Candidates have to have a tech background and/or investment management experience at a venture capital firm or a related business. Abhishek Agrawal, a former principal at General Atlantic, heads up the office.

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Essential Reads

You’ll probably never read a better story than this about the iPhone.

In San Francisco, entrepreneurship operates on a “much more campaign-based model, where you’re going to crush it for a few years and then be absent for a while,” venture capitalist Roy Bahat tells New Yorker writer Nathan Heller, in this newest examination of the city’s ballooning power.

New York isn’t done with Airbnb. The state’s attorney general has now subpoenaed data about all Airbnb hosts within New York to determine how many are violating New York law, and Airbnb is supposed to turn over the data today, reports The Verge.

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Detour

How realistic is “Homeland”? When it comes to Carrie, pretty realistic, actually, says a former CIA agent, weighing in on last night’s episode.

The broken lives of Fukushima in pictures.

“It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Mother*#%#ers.”

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Retail Therapy

For the cultural anthropologist in your life, here’s an attractive book that documents the fashion, food, and interiors of airlines in different countries across the years.

Check out this very elaborate chart designed to help you find beer based on what you already like. (If you’re really serious about beer, you can order a framed copy for 90 smackers.)

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It’s going to be all Twitter all day (and probably all month), so let’s jump right into it. Here’s Twitter’s S-1, made publicly available for the first time yesterday. Here’s its letter to investors, and here’s the best piece I’ve read about its upcoming offering so far.

Speaking of Twitter, what follows is a feature on one of Twitter’s early investors (Institutional Venture Partners, aka IVP) that I’d promised a couple of days ago. IVP doesn’t qualify as one of Twitter’s “principal shareholders,” unlike Benchmark Capital, Spark Capital, Union Square Ventures, DST Global and Rizvi Traverse Management, all of which own at least 5 percent of the company. But IVP did co-lead Twitter’s $35 million Series C round in January 2009, so it’s probably safe to say that if Twitter’s public offering does well, IVP will make out handsomely, too.

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The Rise of Old-Fashioned IVP

When Twitter goes public shortly, you can bet it will be a proud moment for Institutional Venture Partners. But it will be icing on the cake for its investors. Already, 95 of IVP’s 300 portfolio companies have gone public, and IVP’s 32-year internal rate of return (dating back to its 1980 founding) is a stunning 43.2 percent.

Interestingly, IVP has pulled off this hat trick by operating in as proudly an old-fashioned manner as possible.

Unlike many of its peers on Sand Hill Road, for example, IVP’s walls aren’t filled with contemporary art but rather dotted by the same, framed antique prints and maps of Santa Clara Country that have hung there for years.

By design, IVP doesn’t have celebrity investors. Its oldest partner is Norm Fogelsong, a former programmer at Hewlett Packard who joined IVP in 1989 and has remained virtually unknown outside of venture capital circles ever since.

IVP also eschews the popular wisdom that operators make the best venture capitalists. In a recent sit-down, Fogelsong calls venture an “apprenticeship business that you learn over time.” In fact, unlike many firms that cycle their associates out the door after a few years, IVP sends them off to business school, then brings them back and promotes them.

“Assembling a multi-generational team is one of the secrets to our success,” says Todd Chaffee, the IVP general partner who has largely assembled IVP’s current team of six general partners — along with its bench of associates, principals and vice presidents. “It gives us different eyes on every deal, and combines the energy and hustle from the younger team with the experience and insights of the older people.”

Yet there are other ways in which IVP has distinguished itself from the pack.

Though its investments used to run the gamut, the firm decided in 2000 to focus on one area almost exclusively: later-stage companies with between $10 million and $100 million in revenue. Likely, the move has paid off better than the firm could have imagined. During the go-go dot com era, emerging companies with between $10 million and $30 million in revenue could go public with the help of a boutique bank. But today’s companies need revenue in the $100 million range to go public, meaning they often need late-stage capital from firms like IVP.

More, unlike some industry peers that have collected billions of dollars from their limited partners in recent years, IVP has grown steadily, its fund sizes slowly expanding as its commitments to later-stage companies have grown. Over its last five funds, IVP has raised $225 million, $300 million, $600 million, $750 million, and $1 billion, a sum it closed on last year.

The money still adds up. Three billion dollars of the $4 billion that IVP has raised in its entire history has poured in over the last 13 years. But Fogelsong shrugs off any suggestion that it could jeopardize IVP’s continued ability to deliver big returns. “If you’re going to be a late-stage investor, investing $30 million at a time, you can’t do that with a $100 million fund.”

Which raises one final point. IVP makes just 10 to 12 investments annually, each chosen from the pool of roughly 2,000 companies it sees each year. Pacing itself means turning down some attractive deals. But sounding every bit the Stanford engineering student he once was, Fogelsong says the “idea is to make three to five times our money in three to five years, for a 41 percent internal rate of return. We don’t care how much of a company we own. What we want is to get our capital deployed properly in the best companies at a proper valuation.”

Fogelsong shoots me a confident smile. “We have a very tight, well-defined investment strategy,” he says.

It’s not not flashy. It’s not novel. Very plainly, though, it works.

New Fundings

9Slides, a two-year-old, Redmond, Wa.-based company that makes online presentation software, is raising $1 million in debt, according to an SEC filing. Earlier this year, the company raised $500,000 in seed funding from 500 Startups and individual investors, including Terrapass co-founders Karl Ulrich and Tom Miner.

Gobstopper, a year-old, San Francisco-based company whose e-learning tools help educators create questions and quizzes within the text of a digitized assignment, has raised $1.5 million in a round led by Relay Ventures, according to an SEC filing.

Koality, a year-old, San Francisco-based company whose tools helps engineers test their products, has raised $1.8 million in seed funding led by Founders Fund. Other investors in the round include Webb Investment Network, Index Ventures, UJ Ventures, Felicis Ventures and numerous angel investors.

SimplyInsured, a year-old, Mountain View, Calif.-based company that helps consumers and businesses review competing health insurance plans to estimate their out-of-pocket costs, has raised $750,000 in seed funding from Y Combinator, along with a line of individual investors.

ZoomCar, an India-based car rental company, has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding led by Empire Angels of New York. Other investors in the round include Funders Club, Basset Investment Group and Lady Barbara Judge, the former SEC commissioner. The company has raised $1.6 million to date, including from former Treasury secretary Larry Summers.

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Exits

Cue, a three-year-old, San Francisco-based company that makes a personal assistant app, has been acquired by Apple for between $40 million and $60 million, reports TechCrunch. The company had raised $4.7 million from Sequoia Capital, Lerer Ventures, Index Ventures, and SV Angel among others.

AdReady, a seven-year-old, Seattle-based online advertising company that had raised $17.8 million over the years, has been acquired by CPXi, a digital media holding company. Terms of the transaction weren’t disclosed, though the companies said that AdReady will operate as an independent division of CPXi. AdReady’s investors include Madrona Venture Group, Bain Capital, and Khosla Ventures.

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IPOs

Goldman Sachs has jumped to the top of the U.S. technology media and Internet IPO rankings this year, with Morgan Stanley second, says Bloomberg.

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People

OnDeck, a six-year-old, small business lender with offices in New York, Virginia and Colorado, has named Aimee Fearon as VP of financial planning and analysis, and Lorna Hagen as VP of people operations. Fearon comes to Ondeck from Clear  Channel Media and Entertainment, where she was VP of finance; Hagen joins from  where she served as VP of finance. And, prior to joining OnDeck, Hagen was at Ann Inc., the parent company of Ann Taylor and Loft, where she was VP of human resources.ANN INC., where she served as VP of Human Resources. Ondeck has raised more than $100 million over the years, including from RRE Ventures, First Round Capital, Google Ventures, SAP Ventures, and Institutional Venture Partners.

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Job Listings

Comcast Ventures, the venture arm of Comcast Corporation, is looking for an an associate in New York City. You can learn more here.

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Essential Reads

Vanity Fair’s New Establishment is out and it’s boringly predictable as always yet impossible not to read. In one interesting twist, Vanity Fair threw Zynga founder Mark Pincus overboard this year but included his wife, Ali Pincus, cofounder of the online home marketplace One Kings Lane. Pincus, writes Vanity Fair, “has long played second fiddle in the tech press to her husband.” Expect that to change if One Kings Lane eventually stages a more successful IPO.

When Twitter goes public, one of the biggest winners will be 47-year-old financier Suhail Rizvi, who guards his secrecy so zealously that he employs a person to take down his Wikipedia entry and scrub his picture from the Internet, says Reuters.

Claire Cain Miller of the New York Times reports on a very interesting detail in Twitter’s filing. Though cofounder Evan Williams relinquished day-to-day control of Twitter two years ago, he managed to hold on to all the voting rights associated with the shares owned by cofounder Jack Dorsey. (Dorsey, readers likely recall, was pushed out of the company in 2008, but rejoined it the same month that Williams left.)

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Detour

Your status updates give away your gender and, for the most part, your age, according to the largest ever study of language use and personality by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania.

Here’s a fascinating look at the extensive help that American pig breeders provide to visiting farmers from China, where the average person consume 86 pounds of pork per year.

Behind Siri, there is a real woman. This is that woman.

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Retail Therapy

You might feel a little like you’re wearing clown shoes, but running experts say these Hoka One Ones are great for absorbing shock.

We just finished this collection of short stories and highly recommend it. (So does the New York Times.)

Finally(!), an ice scraper for the car owner who means business.

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