Kevin Maney shrugs: My Portfolio colleagues are making hay about potential conflicts of interest among Google's board members, but, really, that's the reality at most significant Silicon Valley companies. The industry, particularly around San Francisco's Bay Area, is as insular and inter-related as the court at Versailles. The same venture capitalists fund multiple companies (and thus get seats on their boards), and they don't know which ones are going to grow up to be major players that then cross over into the territories of other companies they funded. And then the Silicon Valley crowd at various times works with each other, socializes together, gets comfortable with one another, and the next thing you know Facebook's Mark Zuckerman is asking Marc Andreessen to be on his board because Andreessen has been a friend and mentor, even while Andreessen has a company, Ning, that somewhat shades into Facebook's social networking territory.