My lousy hearing prevented me from attending the AlwaysOn Venture Summit Silicon Valley 2008 personally, so I arranged for Al Hulvey to go as my surrogate. Al way a great choice considering his experience as a CEO of several startups. (Bio at the end of this post.)

By Al Hulvey

Survival or opportunity were the warring perspectives and I found the two distinct camps well represented at the Summit in Half Moon Bay (CA).

Most everyone has seen the “R.I.P. Good Times” slide presentation from Sequoia Capital to its portfolio company CEOs—it went viral in major and new media in a heartbeat. (In case you missed it, it’s at the end of this post.) It outlines a rational and pragmatic approach to reacting in the current economic crises. The tombstone on the title slide clearly defines the lens through which Mike Mortiz and the other Sequoia partners expect their CEOs to view the world—hunker down and survive.

I wondered if survival was the prevalent attitude among VCs or if some would view the economic tumult as a time of opportunity.

I found that view represented by Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurvetson in his keynote presentation at the Summit when he said, “For the next three or four years, venture capital is going to be a fantastic place to be, because we are going to be able to invest in companies that are starting the next great revolution.”

Based on panel discussions and comments, I found the VCs divided between the two camps, but what was most interesting to me was that, in general, similar sized VCs fell in the same camp.

• The large venture capital firms were generally on the ‘hunker down’ side. This was the consensus view from a panel including Atlas Venture, Accel Partners, and Venrock Israel.
• ‘Opportunity’ was where many of the smaller venture capital firms lined up, especially those partial to seed funding. They included Alsop Louie Partners, Claremont Creek Ventures, Formative Ventures and First Round Capital.

What definitely surprised me was the attitude of the corporate venture funds, such as HP, QUALCOMM, Cisco Systems and NVIDIA, because they definitely were on the side of opportunity. Very encouraging.

It will be interesting to watch this play out. The portfolio companies of both firms are operating in the same economic environment, with essentially the same resources and facing the same challenges and collectively may achieve similar results.

But one set of CEOs will be looking over their shoulders, while the others will be looking over the horizon.

Al Hulvey is a C-Level executive with 30 years experience turning startups and divisions of major corporations into profitable businesses and attractive acquisition targets. The businesses included Silicon Valley startups, namely Touchpoint (ecommerce), I/PRO, iLux, Predictx (Internet advertising); and also Fortune 500 companies, namely ADVO (advertising services), Heublein and KFC (consumer products).

Image credit: SlideShare