Silicon Valley - Marc Andreessen and long-time business partner Ben Horowitz have raised $300 million in fresh capital to form a new venture capital company called “Andreessen Horowitz.” The focus of all investments will be “new” business model areas, including consumer internet, cloud computing and consumer electronics. The company will also invest in some B2B-plays, such as virtualization and cloud storage.

Palo Alto - Bling Nation, a mobile payments infrastructure service, has raised $8 million in funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Meck and Camp Ventures. The money will be used to work with banks in local U.S. communities to set up the infrastructure required for its Redi Pay Bling mobile payments service.

New York - Media6°, a provider of data and information and activity to marketers and advertisers from social networks, has raised $9 million in venture funding in a Series A round led by U.S. Venture Partners. The new funding comes in addition to seed funding from Contour Venture Partners, Coriolis Ventures, and a number of angel investors.

Santa Monica, CA - Start-up web image analytics technology company GumGum announced on Friday that it has completed a first round of $1.2 million in funding from First Round Capital and Crosscut Ventures.

There is an art to sucking up. Done too blatantly it will backfire. Done too weakly, you won't get what you want. The perfect suck up contains the following elements:

• Credibility. No matter how good your suck up, if you don't meet the requirements for placement, a job, an interview, whatever, it won't matter, so you need to show why you deserve what you're asking for.

Jeffrey Pfeffer is the Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University. He is the author or co-author of twelve books. Dr. Pfeffer received his B.S. and M.S. degrees from Carnegie-Mellon University and his Ph.D. from Stanford.

Because of Truemors, I’ve learned a lot about launching a company in these “Web 2.0” times. Here’s quick overview “by the numbers.”