Over the last several weeks, there have been erroneous reports in the press that my partner Jeff Jordan and/or I might become an operating executive of Yahoo in some capacity.

To be crystal clear, neither Jeff, nor I, nor any of our partners at Andreessen Horowitz, are in the running for, or would accept, any operating role at Yahoo, including CEO, acting CEO, chairman, or executive chairman.

Jeff and I have high regard for Yahoo, but we are fully committed to our day jobs as general partners at Andreessen Horowitz and board members of our portfolio companies.

Today, my company Ning, where I serve as chairman and cofounder, is announcing that it has agreed to merge into Glam Media.  In this post, I’d like to briefly explain the whats and whys, and to thank a lot of people who have worked very hard to get us to this point.

Ning is my third company, founded several years ago by Gina Bianchini and myself, and run for the last couple years by my close friend and colleague Jason Rosenthal.  Over the last two years, Jason and his team have brilliantly executed a dramatic transformation of the company and today Ning hosts over 100,000 social networks covering every conceivable topic and interest, from 50 Cent to Sarah Palin and beyond. Ning’s mission has always been “your own social network for anything” and the team at Ning has worked hard to achieve this.

Glam is a company founded by longtime entrepreneur and innovator Samir Arora.  I first met Samir almost 15 years ago in his role as founder and CEO of NetObjects, one of the first, and best, web and e-commerce development systems, later bought by IBM.  Before that, Samir was a longtime senior contributor at Apple, where his work led to Apple’s famous “Knowledge Navigator” vision video and then later, through a long and winding road, to the Apple iPad.

In Glam, Samir and his outstanding team have built one of the leading premium content networks on the web.  Glam’s high-end content has amazing reach: 200 million users and 2.6 billion page views across 2,500 publishers, with advertising participation by 1,000 premium brands. Combining Ning’s social technology, user base, and 100,000+ networks will immediately boost Glam’s reach to 240 million users and 3.1 billion page views, add recurring subscription revenue to Glam’s business model, and most importantly, set up the combined company to be the leading social media content company on the web.

As consumer behavior broadly moves from old media to the web—as software eats content—the opportunity for high-end online content is gigantic and our combined company will be in the pole position in this huge market.  To that end, I am also delighted to announce that I will be joining the board of directors of Glam after the completion of the merger, which we expect to occur in the fourth quarter of 2011.  I’m thrilled to be able to work with Samir and his team at Glam, as well as Jason and his team from Ning, to build an amazing combined company.

Now, I owe some people huge thank you’s.

To Jason, the management team, and all of the wonderful current and former team members at Ning who have worked so hard to get us here, as well as our extremely supportive investors along the way, thank you so much. Working with you over these last several years has been one of the highlights of my life, and I look forward to working with you for years to come.

To Samir and the Glam team, thank you for building Glam into such a great company. I’m excited to pursue the huge combined opportunity with you.

Finally, a very special thank you to Gina, my cofounder and longtime friend and colleague, for all of your insight, innovation, hard work, and commitment going back all the way to the beginning.

Andreessen Horowitz prefers funding companies whose CEO is a co-founder. We also prefer founders who are technical. Put the two together, and you often have a CEO who has to hire executives into roles (e.g., marketing, sales, customer support, finance) she has never done before.

How in the world do you interview and recruit someone for a role you’ve never done before? Start with Ben’s latest blog post “Hiring Executives: If You’ve Never Done the Job, How Do You Hire Someone Good?“.

One of the best parts of my job as a venture capitalist is that I meet super-interesting and super-motivated cofounders all the time. As you might expect, most cofounders have compelling personal histories that have shaped them as entrepreneurs—stories such as “started coding at age 10 before ever seeing a computer”; “enrolled at Stanford at age 16 and graduated in 3 years”; “founded and sold two businesses while in high school” and so on.

Against this backdrop of amazing stories, we recently met an entrepreneur whose personal background is so jaw-dropping that it ought to written into a Hollywood movie script. Head on over to Ben’s Blog to hear the story of Christian Gheorge, co-founder of a company named Proferi, which we recently funded along with our colleague and friend Aneel Bhusri at Greylock. The story begins with in Communist-ruled Romania in the 1970s. Go read the rest of the story.

Ben’s last post on minimizing corporate politics generated a bunch of interesting comments. One set of commenters essentially asked, “gee, why should an employee be motivated first by a company’s success rather than by their own success”? Frankly, this surprised both of us.

So I suggested that Ben answer this line of questioning directly, which he does in his latest post The Right Kind of Ambition. In addition to his trademark rap quote, he also quotes esteemed management philosopher Theodore Geisel—a.k.a. Dr. Seuss—speaking in the voice of Yertle the Turtle. That’s got to be the first time Drake and Dr. Seuss appear on the same page of, well, anything.

As companies grow, they often get more political—by which I mean, people start advancing their own agendas by means other than merit or contribution.

Ben explains in his latest blog post what a CEO can do to minimize corporate politics. It’s not intuitive. For example, Ben points out that CEOs need to give career guidance to junior employees in a very different way from giving advice to executives. Read the post to learn how to minimize politics—especially around the traditional flash points of performance reviews, promotions, and re-orgs.

These days, entrepreneurs spend a lot of time thinking about scaling their products. No one wants to build the next Facebook only to watch their technical infrastructure crumble when user growth takes off.

Entrepreneurs rarely think as much or as deeply or as rigorously about how to scale their companies. Best practices for scaling human organizations are harder to find, and the whole endeavor feels much more like an art than a science.

Ben leaps into this information void with his latest blog post titled Taking the Mystery out of Scaling a Company. This post will be the first of a series Ben will write on this topic because each skill CEOs must learn to scale their companies—such as designing and rolling out re-organizations, hiring functional executives for functions they’ve never done personally, optimizing incentive systems, and so on—need a post (or three) of their own.

Ben Horowitz and I co-founded one of the first cloud computing companies which we named, appropriately enough, Loudcloud. So we’ve been thinking about the cloud longer than most folks. In fact, we had to call ourselves a “managed services provider” in those days since no one was talking about “cloud providers” in the year 2000. I have to say it’s gratifying to see both the cloud name and the cloud computing architecture going mainstream in the past few years.

This time around, we’re thinking about cloud computing as investors rather than entrepreneurs. On his blog, Ben walks through why we invested in Okta, our first cloud investment. We couldn’t be more excited.

As the ranking officer, the CEO has a huge impact on their company’s culture. This is especially true in startups where the whole company is watching the CEO’s every move, every interaction, every decision. As a result of this micro-scrutiny, CEOs can feel like they need to be the company’s Chief Morale Officer, continuously and relentlessly accentuating the positive and downplaying the negative.

As Ben shares in latest blog post, he often felt this way as a first-time CEO. He also shares how (and why) he quickly got over this need to be unfailingly positive—and how this was a turning point in his development as a CEO. Go find out why CEOs need to tell it like it is.