When a company outgrows its founder-CEO, the fashionably euphemistic thing to do is to allow him to "step up" and take a job as chairman, or chief product visionary, or Beloved Leader — something that looks good on a business card. No such luck for Michael Baum, the boisterous cofounder of Splunk, who has simply been replaced as the enterprise-search startup's CEO. Godfrey Sullivan, who ran Hyperion, a business-software company acquired by Oracle last year, is displacing him.Baum, a self-described "serial entrepreneur," will continue, awkwardly, as the company's head of strategy and corporate development. Funny, don't those sound like the CEO's job? This should prove entertaining to watch — especially if Baum reverts to loudly drunk form. But if Splunk follows the rest of the script — hire experienced CEO, sell or go public, make founders rich — Baum will have all the more reason to shout. (Full disclosure: Valleywag very special correspondent Paul Boutin is married to Splunk executive Christina Noren, and you're not.)

After two years of playing footsie with Valleywag, I've finally been hired full time to write for what these kids call The Olds — that means winning over Fleetwood Mac fans and Fortune subscribers. Waist-high ace reporter Kara Swisher goaded me to start my first full day today with a journalistic "disclosure" statement like hers. She assured me that coming clean of my conflicts of interest would assuage Internet geezers suspicious of eww bloggers. Ok, but just this once. I hate journalism about journalism, plus I need to get back to nagging Arnel Pineda for an interview.

Meet Michael Baum, the CEO of recently funded enterprise software company Splunk. Is he a hero for raising so much money at a splendid valuation, when all the Valley's buzz is on profitless consumer plays? Or is he deserving of our Silicon Valley Tool award for being a colossal jerk? Our commenters are leaning strongly towards the latter.

The Valley's venture capitalists fall into and out of love with enterprise software. Today, with Facebook and other social networks the talk of the town, it's hard for the makers of boring IT products to get attention. But not, it seems, money. Splunk, in a lightning-fast fundraising effort, has pulled in $25 million in a third round of financing, bringing the company's valuation up to $120 million. Splunk's software analyzes server logs, and in a nod to the collaborative aspects of Web 2.0, lets sysadmins share and discuss the results to figure out if odd patterns are signs of system failures or security breaches. Think of it as a Google for hardcore nerds, but one they're actually willing to pay for. And that, in turn, made Ignition Venture Partners, a Seattle-area venture-capital firm, willing to pay for a stake in the San Francisco company. In every investment, there are winners and losers, though.