Controversy swirled over the weekend around the close of the Arlington-based micropayments startup TipJoy Inc., which announced its shutdown late Thursday night, a few weeks after its husband-and-wife founding team moved to California.

On Saturday, TechCrunch reported co-founder Ivan Kirigin had landed a job at Facebook – presumably to work on Facebook Payments. No controversy there, except that it appears Facebook had sought to buy Tipjoy for $5 million, then walked away. The company’s investors, including the UK-based Accelerator Group, New York-based BetaWorks, ex-Googler Chris Sacca and Y Combinator, had put about $1 million in to TipJoy since its founding in 2008. Citing unnamed sources, TechCrunch reports some of those investors were not happy to learn of Kirigin’s new gig, saying the co-founder’s departure killed merger discussions that were still under way with Twitter and PayPal.

At least one investor, Y Combinator’s Paul Graham, has come to the Kirigins’ defense. “They’d been talking to several potential acquirers, including Facebook, but those deals all fell through,” he wrote Sunday in a post to Hacker News. “So the Tipjoys were going to have to get jobs somewhere.”

Others were less than chuffed with Ivan Kirigin’s decision. “Not the way to go about things in my book,” grumbled Accelerator Group partner Robin Klein in a post to his Twitter feed yesterday.

It’s impossible to know whether there’s any truth behind TechCrunch’s anonymously sourced report. But anyone could have guessed the flak would fly when he went to Facebook so soon after trying to negotiate an M&A. On the other hand, I’m sure Ivan and Abby Kirigin have more important things to think about, like paying the mortgage.

The most important problem in all this, which TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld rightly mentioned, is for investors and founders in all small and nimble web companies: what about the startup that gets traction while it’s still just the fabled two people in a garage? Why would a company like Facebook buy that startup when they can hire the founders much more cheaply?

Long-time director of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center — and tech startup scene stalwart Ken Morse — stepped down as head of the Entrepreneurship Center as of Monday. His replacement? Bill Aulet, a familiar face at MIT who was most recently CEO of SensAble Technologies Inc. of Woburn, a haptic feedback technology company spun out of MIT.

As first reported in Scott Kirsner’s Innovation Economy blog, , Aulet has been a lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Business since 2005. He notes that Aulet’s role is acting director, and that, although MIT isn’t actively looking for a permanent director, Aulet isn’t a shoe-in for the spot, according to Ed Roberts, who is quoted in the blog post. SensAble first gained recognition when it used its technology to help the Museum of Science Boston get a good look at one of its mummies.

Morse started at the Entrepreneurship Center in 1996 and two years later was named a Mass High Tech All Star.  As recently as June, Morse was serving as an adviser to the newly established, state-backed MassChallenge Venture Funds Competition, a business plan competition for entrepreneurs.

According to Kirsner, Morse plans to write a book on global entrepreneurship in his new free time.

By Jackie Noblett

Mass High Tech Staff

Congress’ decision to expand the wildly popular “Cash for Clunkers” program with stimulus funding earmarked for renewable energy projects has some cleantech leaders crying foul.

Congress authorized the transfer of an additional $2 billion to the program that provides rebates to car dealers that take in old, gas-guzzling cars for new, more efficient vehicles, but did so using money that was intended to provide loan guarantees to renewable energy project development. The DOE funds had been seen by many in the alternative energy sector as key to getting pilot plants and commercial scale wind and solar projects of the ground, spurring necessary private financing. Mass High Tech recently reported on the industry’s wait for stimulus cash.

“The ethanol industry understands the trying economic times this country finds itself in and thus supports ideas like the “Cash for Clunkers” program, but is concerned to see the program paid for by depleting the renewable energy loan guarantee program,” said Rob Dinneen, president and CEO of the Renewable Fuels Association, in a statement.

In addition to buoying the sales of Detroit’s Big Three, or more accurately Detroit’s Big One and Washington, D.C.’s Big Two, the program was also designed to reduce the dependence on foreign oil. But that will be difficult to do if alternative energy producers such as ethanol and biodiesel firms cannot get their production plants built in a timely fashion. Furthermore, advocates of renewable energy contend the environmental and economic benefits of clean energy generation outweigh the benefits of more efficient vehicles.

Even members of Congress are questioning the logic of this move. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine and Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California wrote a letter to Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, requesting data on what kinds of cars are being turned in and what cars are being purchased under the program.

“The tremendous number of sales in the first week of this program demonstrates that the CARS Act has succeeded in increasing new vehicle sales, but Congress needs this data in order to determine if the fleet modernization program delivered significant fuel economy gains and oil savings,” the letter states.

It is clear that Congress is interested in supporting a politically popular stimulus program, but how it did so raises significant questions about the original intensions of the program. A quick restoration of funds for renewable energy loan guarantees would likely resolve those questions.

[Editor's note: This entry is cross-posted and also appears on the Boston Business Journal's blog.]