Not only was OpenTable a rare venture-backed IPO, it was a modest sized IPO with a $665 million market cap. Those are just the sort of deals that are supposedly impossible in a day of Sarbanes Oxley expenses and thin analyst coverage on smaller deals.

So what made OpenTable brave the markets and what made it the exception? We ask CEO Jeff Jordan that in the third segment of our post-earnings sit down interview.

Unlike a lot of people in the Valley, Jordan doesn’t think the issue is a structural problem between Wall Street and the Valley. He just thinks most private company CEOs don’t want to file.

And, we couldn’t let Jordan go without weighing in on two issues: His thoughts about the state of his former employer eBay and his rebuttal to users like me who hate OpenTable’s dining points system.

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OpenTable was a rare dot com survivor and as such it went through a period of hunkered-down survival mode. One example: The so-called Internet company only had one developer devoted to the diner-facing site for the first nine years of its life, while all the others toiled away on the back-end reservation engine that generates OpenTable’s actual revenues.

When eBay veteran Jeff Jordan took over OpenTable’s CEO reigns two years ago, he set out to change that. Under Jordan’s tenure OpenTable has invested more in the look and feel of the site and invested heavily in international expansion.

What’s next for the company now that it has a stock currency and some $25 million in cash in the bank? We put that question to Jordan in his first interview since the company’s quiet period ended. I started by asking why international expansion was such a priority when so many restaurants in the US don’t yet use the software.

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Silicon Valley's newest public company, OpenTable, filed its second quarter earnings yesterday and TechTicker was on the scene to log the first post-quiet period interview with the CEO Jeff Jordan.

The results were solid: Revenues were up 18% and OpenTable posted a $.03 GAAP profit. That's slower growth than the company has had in the past, but still impressive when you consider the restaurant business is off as much as 20% year-over-year, says Jordan.

In this installment, we talk more about the earnings, why OpenTable isn't more profitable, what happens once insiders start selling some 18 million shares, and whether the stock is overvalued at current prices.

Venture capitalists along Sand Hill Road, bankers on Wall Street and lobbyists in Congress will tell you that what ails the venture business is a disturbing lack of IPOs throughout most of the last decade. Sure, there were three in the second quarter, ending a nine-month dry spell. But three deals won’t go very far in resurrecting returns. No IPOs hurts the rate of acquisitions too, since big companies don’t have pressure to pay up before a would-be competitor goes public. M&As hit their lowest level in ten years in the second quarter, and the median price dropped 46%, according to numbers released last week by DowJones VentueSource.

The predicament is so bad that the National Venture Capital Association has proposed a four-point plan to encourage banks to start taking small-to-midsized ventures public once again and support a secondary exchange, where founders and investors could sell normally illiquid-stakes without having to become a public company.

Did famed Web entrepreneur Marc Andreessen enter the venture business at the wrong time? Ever the optimist, he actually sees a silver lining: The later companies have to wait to go public, the more chances he gets to invest in hot deals at better valuations. With a new $300 million fund, he certainly has the wherewithal.

That doesn’t mean he’s denying the challenges...

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It’s common for groundbreaking innovations to change dramatically in the first decade or so, then settle into an innovation rut. Not so with the Web, says Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape, Opsware, Ning and, now, new venture firm Andreessen Horowitz Venture Capital.

In this segment of our sit-down interview with the Web visionary, Andreessen explains why the Web is different. For one thing, it’s made of software, and software is malleable. That means the Web has a unique ability to morph into new things the way, say, railroads or PCs or fax machines couldn’t.

In fact, Andreessen argues the nature of the Web is change. If anything is big enough to have the potential to become the next Web giant, it’ll probably look insane when it starts. Just take the Web browser—once upon a time the most powerful executives in media told Andreessen it would never catch on. If people missed that, how can we expect them to predict what’s next online?

Plus, check out our earlier discussion about Twitter and Facebook.

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Marc Andreessen is a Web optimist. Not only does he believe in the medium’s innate ability to constantly reinvent itself – making entrepreneurs and investors all the more billions in the process—but he doesn’t worry about Web hot shots like Twitter and Facebook’s ability to turn their outsized audiences into big businesses either.

And Andressen and his investing partner Ben Horowitz should know. They have stakes in Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg and other hot names; Andreessen is the sole outside board member of Facebook and co-founded his own Web 2.0 startup called Ning, which was valued at $500 million at its last funding round.

In this clip, Andressen dishes details on each of these high-profile companies and explains why Twitter and Facebook are still no-brainer investments, why LinkedIn and Facebook could go public any time they want, and why Digg’s best days are in front of it—not behind it.

Marc Andreessen and long-time co-founder and co-angel investor Ben Horowitz have closed their new venture capital fund, and it’s a whopper: $300 million. Never mind the toughest fundraising environment in some 40 years thanks to the across-the-board financial meltdown, between them Andreessen and Horowitz have the rare accomplishment of having founded two companies to exit at more than $1 billion each, Netscape and Opsware. That, and they boast one of the hottest Web 2.0 angel portfolios in Silicon Valley with stakes in Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Andreessen’s third startup, Ning.

We sat down with the normally-elusive Marc Andreessen to get more details on his move “to the dark side.” In this clip, he explains how just two guys will invest such a large fund, and he makes it clear that his good news isn’t shared industry-wide. Andreessen predicts hundreds of venture firms will be out of business in the next five to 10 years.

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Say you're a successful entrepreneur and venture capitalist who wants a one-of-a-kind, show-stopping electric car. What do you do? If you're the very playful Satish Darmaraj, you build your own!

After selling his most recent company, Zimbra, to Yahoo for a cool $350 million, Darmaraj decided to splurge on something electric. He thought about a Tesla, but at the end of the day decided he loved his Toyota Prius too much to switch. And while plenty of people pay a few thousand dollars to turn their hybrid Priuses into electrics, Darmaraj took, well, a very Silicon Valley route instead.

A true tech geek, Darmaraj sought out George Barris, the creator of the original Batmobile and updated versions of the Knight Rider car, and convinced him to come out of retirement to make Darmaraj’s Prius something greener, cooler and of course more high-tech. The result is a one-of-a-kind car that wound up costing Darmaraj more than a Tesla Roadster, but boasts sunny colors and sporty lines, an all-carbon-fiber redone interior, and in-car wifi network. All this and it still gets a 105 miles per gallon.

This is the latest in our series on Valley luminaries who are investing in remaking the U.S. auto industry and breaking America's dependence on foreign oil:

• Elon Musk’s sporty Tesla, which changes the idea of what an electric car is 
• Vinod Khosla, who is betting big on smarter-ethanol
• Shai Agassi, whose ambitious plan is to build out a network of battery charging and replacement centers around the world

As their ventures make clear, everyone has a slightly different vision of exactly what that future should look like.

But here's Satish Darmaraj's vision of fun, starting right here today. Enjoy!

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Shai Agassi is doing his best to break the world of its gas addiction through his startup, Better Place. But he needs the car companies, consumers and most off all, the government, to pull it off. So far, Better Place has spent most of its time rolling out its network of charging and battery replacement stations in smaller countries like Denmark and Israel. But eventually Agassi's eyes are locked on the U.S. market.

He’s not necessarily looking for handouts or subsidies. He just wants an even playing field - something he says the U.S. doesn't have now, thanks to artificially low prices at the pump. He explains what he thinks the U.S. can learn from France, Germany and even China in the clip.

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Earlier:

• Why Shai Agassi quit his dream job to make the world "a Better Place"
• Better Place's breakthrough: changing a car battery in one minute
• Shai Agassi's plan to get the world off oil

Shai Agassi started programming when he was seven. He finished school early and started building companies with his dad in Israel. Finally he knew he’d hit on a winner when he sold TopTier Software to industry titan SAP in 2001. Only SAP wasn’t just interested in the software—they wanted Agassi.

People thought the brash 30-something would last six months inside the stodgy German giant. Six years later, he was poised to be the company’s next CEO. Well, co-CEO technically, but still, he was a role model for Israeli techies and about to be one of the most important men in the tech world.

That’s when he decided to quit. In the third segment of our sit-down with Agassi opens up about the life-changing decision to go from software executive to an entrepreneur, building a company so ambitious many people call it crazy.

Earlier:

• Better Place's breakthrough: changing a car battery in one minute
• Shai Agassi's plan to get the world off oil

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