Andreessen Horowitz this morning announced another big funding deal – $30 million for San Jose cloud-security provider CipherCloud – but I was more interested in the fine print: As part of the investment, John M. Jack, an Andreessen Horowitz board partner, will join CipherCloud’s board of directors.

First off, I wondered, what’s a board partner? And did I miss the announcement that Andreessen Horwitz had added yet another high-level investor?

The simple answer to the first question is, “They sit on boards!” quipped Andreessen communications maven Margit Wennmachers, who’s known Jack for years. Jack himself – who goes by “JJ” – told me that his role is akin to that of a part-time venture partner and includes sourcing and vetting investment opportunities, especially in the security space. 

The former CEO of Fortify Software, which HP acquired in 2010 for an estimated $265 million, praised CipherCloud’s approach to protecting users of cloud-delivered software. “They essentially put a gateway between users and the cloud providers themselves,” Jack said, “and the data going into the gate that needs to be protected is encrypted. We’re talking billions and billions and billions of dollars in terms of market opportunity.”

As for whether I missed the announcement – there wasn’t one. Jack said he quietly joined up with Andreessen Horowitz about three months ago. “It’s kind of a perfect opportunity for me,” he said of his new gig. “It allows me some of the flexibility I like, but at the same time, I get to work with a great VC firm.”

This being Silicon Valley, of course, CipherCloud is hardly the only startup announcing funding today: Campbell-based Centric Software, which serves the retail, apparel and luxury goods industries, has closed on a $19 million financing. The series C round was led by Palo Alto’s Oak Investment Partners and Masthead Venture Partners of Cambridge, Mass.

And in case you missed it, Poshmark – a Menlo Park mobile marketplace that lets users buy and sell secondhand fashions – on Tuesday trumpeted a $12 million Series B round led by Menlo Ventures. The same day, Palo Alto’s ScaleIO came out of stealth mode with a $12 million funding of its own, led by Norwest Venture Partners and the Israeli outpost of Greylock Partners.

Twelve “techmanitarians,” whose idea of cool technology has nothing to do with the iPhone, will be honored at the annual Tech Awards in November.

These tech tinkerers aren’t working to create the latest gee-whiz gadget. Instead, they are striving to make the world a better place by helping the many who have so little, such as Peruvians in need of access to running water or the world’s poorest billions who are illiterate and lacking basic health and agricultural knowledge.

“We are inspired by the laureates’ desire to improve the world through the creative use of technology and their perseverance to this end,” Tim Ritchie, president of San Jose’s The Tech Museum, said in a statement. “Their lives and work serve as a challenge to us:  Do we desire to make our work count for others, and are we willing to use our considerable assets to build a better world?”

The awards ceremony, which spotlights the work of social entrepreneurs who use low-cost technology to change lives around the world, will be held Nov. 15, 2012 at the Santa Clara Convention Center and will be presented by Applied Materials in association with the Center for Science, Technology, and Society at Santa Clara University. Two cash prizes of $75,000 and $25,000 will be awarded in in each of six of The Tech Awards categories: Intel Environment Award; Microsoft Education Award; The Swanson Foundation Young Innovator Award; Nokia Health Award; Flextronics Economic Development Award, and The Sustainable Energy Award.

Since the inception of the museum’s signature program in 2001, 257 laureates have been recognized. Their pioneering work has included designing earthquake-resistant construction technology to creating a heat-sensitive label for vaccine vials to make sure children receive potent immunizations to building a simple, low-cost, mobile phone-based device that allows remote monitoring and operation of irrigation pumps.

“In many ways, the Tech Awards embody the spirit of Silicon Valley and the belief that technology can improve people’s lives and make the world a better place,” Mike Splinter, Chairman and CEO of Applied Materials, said in a statement.

During the ceremony, Narayana Murthy, co-founder of Bangalore-based outsourcing giant Infosys Technologies, will be honored as the winner of the 2012 James C. Morgan Global Humanitarian Award.

Previous humanitarian winners include former Vice President Al Gore; Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates; Intel co-founder Gordon Moore; Jordan’s Queen Rania; Muhammad Yunus, pioneer of micro credit and founder of the Grameen Bank ; and Jeff Skoll, eBay’s  first president who now heads up his own film company, Participant Media.

“In a developing society like India, which is embracing capitalism and free markets only recently, it is very important for the evangelists of capitalism like me to embrace philanthropy so that the common man has confidence in us,” Murthy said in an interview earlier this year.

The 2012 Tech Awards Laureates include Arup K. SenGupta, who has created simple-to-use technology to protect people from arsenic poisoning in contaminated groundwater in Cambodia, Nepal, India, Bangladesh and Vietnam; TeachAIDS, which created effective HIV education software at Stanford University and Eco-Fuel Africa, whose technology allows people to convert farm and city waste into clean cooking fuel and organic fertilizers.

The Tech Museum provides a complete list of this year’s laureates here.

My friend Michael S. Malone celebrated the 60th anniversary of disk-memory (as in disk drive) today on the  op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal. Malone is an engaging writer and a gifted historian who didn’t disappoint in his account of  IBM’s move west to San Jose in search of a better way for computers to remember things.

Rey Johnson and his crew at 99 Notre Dame in San Jose came up with a pretty fair solution, given that it’s still widely used today. But they didn’t come up with it before nearly killing themselves, as Malone explains, when the 20-pound magnetic disks they were spinning  would cut loose and fly across the lab.

I remember that the engineers involved in those early days referred to the massive 305 RAMAC disk drive as “the bologna slicer,” because the two dozen rotating disks were reminiscent of a deli machine.

Anyway, 10 years ago I wrote for the Mercury News about how the particular piece of history at 99 Notre Dame was in trouble. Today, I’ll note, the building is still there. The San Jose Redevelopment Agency, however, is no more.

Here’s what I wrote:

CITY’S PRIORITIES PUT PARKING BEFORE SILICON VALLEY HISTORY

3/29/2002

You’ve got to worry about a city whose claim to fame is ample parking.

No, San Jose isn’t there yet, but it’s got a shot. Maybe you’ve read about the city’s plan to knock down a building where tech history was made in order to put up a parking garage.

The scheme has caused a ruckus between the city’s redevelopment agency (division of parking proliferation) and the county court system, which just moved into the building after spending a lot of your money to renovate it.

But that fight misses the point. The point is the building at 99 Notre Dame Ave. needs to be saved.

In 1952, IBMer Rey Johnson opened the company’s first West Coast lab. Soon Johnson’s crew was developing the first magnetic hard disk drive — a humongous machine called RAMAC, with disks the size of trash can lids.

The machine marked the birth of the digital storage technology that makes possible personal computers, digital cameras, the Internet and much of the rest of everyday life.

“Basically, no one believed this would work, ” says Al Hoagland, who worked on the RAMAC and provides a little historical perspective.

Ah, historical perspective. Hoagland says work at the Notre Dame lab went a long way to making Silicon Valley what it is today.

So, what kind of city would eradicate history and a potential claim to fame?

Hint: All in the same day in November, San Jose City Council members voted to begin the process of declaring 99 Notre Dame a historic landmark and then voted for a parking plan that calls for tearing the historic building down. (Who needs a historic building when you’ve got a historic spot?)

This is the same city with a plan to hire street musicians and mimes to give downtown a little character. What’s next? Hiring squeegee guys to annoy drivers at traffic lights?

In short, this is a city that sometimes confuses style for substance and often ends up with neither.

Hoagland, who today runs the Institute for Information Storage Technology at Santa Clara University, would like to build a museum in the old lab. A museum that would show us all the importance of what went on there.

It’s not a technology story, he says. It’s a sociological story. A story of an invention that really did change the world.

But Hoagland’s idea would require city help. And that’s not good news.

This is the city whose redevelopment agency watched the county spend $3 million to turn 99 Notre Dame into a Family Court annex without clearly warning the court about its plans to knock the place down. (Wouldn’t want to spoil the surprise.)

It’s not as if there is no hope. In February, the court let Hoagland and his Magnetic Disk Heritage Center put up seven photo panels that tell the story of 99 Notre Dame. (To find the exhibit, empty your pockets, remove your belt and pass through the metal detectors.)

And there is still time. While the city council did accept a recommendation to build a 965-space garage where the historic building is now, it will take months or years to acquire the property and work out the fine details. The council could still decide to do something smart — find another place to park or build a garage around the building.

Or the city could try my solution: Let the court stay through the remaining six years of its lease with owner Barry Swenson Builders. Then buy the building and work with Hoagland on the museum. But that is getting ahead of the game, as Hoagland reminds me.

“Our overriding focus, ” he says, “is to keep the building from being knocked over by a bulldozer.”

In a rare PR victory, Mineta San Jose International Airport, long overshadowed by its bigger northern competitor San Francisco International Airport, is ranked California’s best when it comes to on-time performance in a new survey. SFO, on the other hand, landed dead last in the get-me-outta-here-on-time category for medium and large airports in the state.

While SFO handles far more air traffic than any other airport  in the Bay Area — domestic and international — its location is more prone to weather delays than San Jose’s airport, which basks in far more sunny days.

The new ranking is based on data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. For medium to large size airports across the United States, San Jose tied with Minneapolis-St. Paul for fourth overall. Kahului Airport on Maui ranked first, followed by Salt Lake City International and Portland International. Oakland International Airport ranked 17th in the nation, Sacramento International Airport ranked 20th, and SFO ranked 64th out of the 65 major airports in the U.S.

The rankings, though, won’t do anything to lessen SFO’s role as the Bay Area’s main gateway. Still, San Jose officials couldn’t help enjoying their 15 minutes of gloating.

“With a great airfield providing ample runway and taxiway capacity, new modern, state-of-the-art terminal complex, and over 300 days a year of sunshine, one would only expect our on-time performance to be exemplary,” Bill Sherry, San Jose’s director of aviation, said in a press release. “All of these things allow our airlines to run more efficiently and provide more reliable service to our passengers.  With this incredible advantage to airlines and their passengers, we hope to attract more air service to Silicon Valley’s Airport.”

In May 2010, I wrote a critical column with the headline: “Start-ups still don’t know the way to San Jose.”

The key points:

“Among the region’s municipalities, San Jose ranked 11th in venture capital invested in startups in 2009, behind not just Palo Alto but also San Carlos.”

And:

“First, let’s look at the numbers. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, 43 companies in San Jose received $262.5 million in venture funding last year.
Compare that to San Francisco, which sits at the top of the list with $1.01 billion invested in 173 companies in 2009, and Sunnyvale, which was No. 2 with $662.9 million. It’s even less than the $290.8 million for San Carlos and the $266.5 million raised in Menlo Park.”

For a city that fancies itself the “capitol” of Silicon Valley, this seemed like a shocking deficiency. I disagreed with Mayor Chuck Reid’s assessment that this wasn’t such a big deal, that San Jose has traditionally been more focused on luring companies down the Peninsula as they grow.

In any case, while putting together a column about San Francisco’s reputation for being hostile to start-ups for this past weekend, I found some good news for San Jose.

In 2011, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers, startups in San Jose raised $784.2 million, putting San Jose at number four among Bay Area cities. The top three:

1. San Francisco: $2.87 billion
2. Palo Alto: $1.3 billion
3. Mountain View: $1.03 billion

Of course, in terms of scale, San Francisco continued to grow at about the same rate as San Jose. At the end of the day, San Jose, a city that’s larger than San Francisco, still only attracts about 25 percent of the venture capital of its rival to the north.

Still, it seems San Jose is making some progress in being more attractive to startups. And the last two years have only convinced me that’s more essential than ever for a couple of reasons.

First, those startups aren’t just launching in San Francisco, they’re increasingly staying there. Salesforce.com has big expansion plans in SF; Zynga bought a big chunk of real estate; Twitter famously is retrofitting a big ole building in mid-Market; and Dropbox this week is unveiling a new headquarters there. That means that rather than migrating south, they’re planting deeper roots in San Francisco.

Second, companies are increasingly expanding outside of Silicon Valley. Once they get past the initial startup phase, they’re looking at other regions of the U.S. or overseas. The salaries they pay this next tier of employees don’t make sense for people living in pricey Silicon Valley. This is not entirely true, of course. Facebook has made big plans to expand locally, and Google continues to gobble up every free square foot of commercial real estate in Mountain View.

But such mega expansions are going to be few and far between. And because San Jose didn’t land either of these companies early, it never really had a shot at landing their expansions either.

This all leads to another question: Has something fundamentally shifted in terms of San Jose appeal to startups? Hard to say at this point. But the signs the last couple of years are certainly encouraging. Whatever the city is doing, it needs to keep it up.

Kris finally got his long-expected letter of recommendation. Check it out:

Kris updated me this morning on the first of his two interviews. Still up in the air:

Tomorrow is the other one, at 11:00am @ Stanford Hospital.

The first one was interesting – I cam e in just as another interviewee was leaving. (Also in a tie, but no suit)

The interview was interesting – I really didn’t do much talking. There were two interviewers, a woman and the owner of the Flying Club. When I whipped out my “Binder of Success” they seemed very impressed. I decided there were two scenarios playing out:

1.) They had already decided on a candidate (hence the lack of questions) and were simply giving me a courtesy interview.

2.) They knew right away that I would be the one, and weren’t wanting to waste time with silly questions. (They had already seen my resume and cover letter) The owner of the club commented that he was looking for an outgoing person…and that, “I definitely fit that bill.”

I suck at reading into interviews, just fyi.

   Later that same day, I get this email from Kris:

 

SECOND INTERVIEW!!!

Tuesday, 11-12:30

Stanford Hospital CSR Position. (Working down the hall from LifeFlight…crews I worked with at Jet Center!

Wow, set a deadline…and look what happens, right?

   Kris gets a nibble at last!

Late last week, Kris wrote to say he’d landed an interview at West Valley Flying Club. (“Part time, but good pay, and discounts on flight training. Open to full time as well – will keep you posted,” he writes.).

   So check out the ad on craigslist. Knowing what I know about Kris so far in the series, I’d say he has a pretty good shot at this gig. What do you all think?

C

Kris has decided to impose a limit for himself as a way to jump-start his stalled job search:

September 15th is now my official cut-off date. If there’s nothing going on in terms of leads, etc then I’ll be in the market for a so called “headhunter.”