Google Ventures has hired away MG Siegler from CrunchFund, a seed and early stage fund Siegler helped launch with famed tech blogger Michael Arrington less than two years ago.

If Zynga goes public at what is expected to be a $20 billion valuation, the company will make many people very rich, including a healthy percentage of its roughly 3,000 employees and its earliest venture investors. The IPO will also turn Zynga founder and CEO Mark Pincus, who owns about 18% of the company, into a [...]

Michael Arrington’s controversial CrunchFund got the most press in Q3, but it didn’t break into the top five largest first-time VC funds raised during the period. In what was a weak quarter for overall VC fundraising, CrunchFund was one of 19 newbie that funds raised a combined $300 million, the lowest quarterly amount raised since [...]

Time to catch up on the stories your colleagues found most compelling on peHUB this week. Here are the top 10 posts that garnered the most pageviews from regular readers from Sept. 12 to this morning, Sept. 16.

ONE Sequoia’s Doug Leone to Mike Arrington: Why You Want to Be a VC is Beyond Me — by Connie Loizos
TWO Top 10 IRRs from University of California’s Mid-Decade Venture Binge (Slideshow) — by Mark Boslet
THREE Slideshow: Dealt a Bad Hand? — by Jonathan Marino
FOUR Vinod Khosla: ‘I Don’t Much Like the Venture Profession’ — by Connie Loizos
FIVE VC Icon Tom Perkins Takes Swipe at Kleiner Perkins’ Big Bets on Cleantech — by Sarah McBride, Reuters
SIX Slideshow: Venture Capital’s Biggest Flops — by Joanna Glasner
SEVEN AOL Makes It Official: Arrington Is Out (slideshow) — by Lawrence Aragon
EIGHT Slideshow: 16 Alleged CalPERS Gift-Violators Face Fines — by Gregory Roth
NINE Study: Need a Fast Flip? Don’t Change the Management Team — by Connie Loizos
TEN Thiel and Levchin Offer ‘Blueprint’ for Solving Innovation Crisis — by Joanna Glasner

The Michael Arrington/AOL saga appears to be over, with AOL announcing today that the founder of TechCrunch has left the popular tech blog and AOL (which acquired TechCrunch earlier this year) to focus on his new venture fund. The announcement came more than two weeks after Arrington and AOL announced that he had raised a [...]

After tech blogger extraordinaire Michael Arrington announced yesterday that he launched a new venture fund, the blogosphere exploded with questions about conflict of interest. Specifically, how could Arrington remain editor of TechCrunch and write impartially about companies that he had backed with his new $20 million CrunchFund? AOL CEO Tim Armstrong initially dismissed the concern, [...]

(Reuters) – Michael Arrington, founder of TechCrunch and one of the highest-profile U.S. technology bloggers, has created a $20 million venture capital fund to invest in promising startups, Arrington told Reuters.

Fortune magazine’s Term Sheet blog was the first to report the news.

The fund, called CrunchFund, raised an inaugural $20 million fund in September, according to TechCrunch’s CrunchBase. “Investors in CrunchFund include AOL, Accel Partners, Austin Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Greylock Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Sequoia Capital, the founding partners of Andreessen Horowitz, each of the general partners of Benchmark Capital, Ron Conway, Yuri Milner & Kevin Rose,” CrunchBase reports.

Investor AOL bought TechCrunch in September 2010.

The move comes months after Arrington publicly announced that he had …

In this week’s Social Scene, Charlie Baker of General Catalyst Partners gets his jitterbug on, TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington is nearly a year older, Nihal Mehta of Eniac Ventures goes in search of tiger blood (see @charliesheen), and peHUB gets ready to Shindig!

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GigaOm is reporting that AOL is “on the verge” of buying TechCrunch, the tech blog founded by attorney-turned-blogger Michael Arrington. GigaOm founder Om Malik reports that “the deal is at a sensitive stage and might fall apart just yet, but I don’t think so. Sources familiar to both entities says that the announcement is likely [...]

Last night, TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington reported that on Monday night, a group of high-profile Silicon Valley angels met at a San Francisco restaurant, where, Arrington said he later learned, “collusion” and “price fixing” were on the menu. The story has been refuted by at least one angel who was at the dinner, but Arrington told [...]