Web Ventures conference

I'm sitting in a Marriott in San Mateo today at the Dow Jones Web Ventures conference. My plan is to file some reports for Conferenza, a blog-style site that reports on tech conferences of interest. But in the meantime I thought I'd list a few highlights.

First, my overall impression.

This is a place where entrepreneurs give 20 minute pitches to an audience of VCs and each other. In the  heady days of the dot-com boom, VCs with bulging pocketbooks roamed the halls and meeting rooms to find companies they could give their cash to.

These days the conference is much too sedate. There are no more presentations with VCs overflowing into the halls to listen to the pitch. The VCs are still here, but speak on panels where they're tossed softball questions by conference organizers and put people to sleep. At the end of the day a panel of VCs is supposed to talk about some of the companies they've seen, but no one declares winners or highlights any more, and few of them even mention and presenters by name.

I don't know that this indicates that the companies are duller so much as the fact that VCs are no longer tripping over each other to hand out their money. Pundits keep claiming there is a lot of opportunity out there for VC-funded companies, exemplified by such ear-popping valuations as Google's price to buy YouTube. But the sense of excitement just isn't there.

The conference is still well-attended. A VentureOne researcher gives some statistics on venutre funding today. Panelists include people like Chris Alden from Six Apart, Kent Lindstrom from Friendster, Kim Polese from SpikeSource, and Anke Audenaert, a VP from Yahoo. There are VCs from Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, Venrock, Softbank, Redpoint, Accel and others.

But just seems ... slower. There are a few private discussions at corner tables around the hotel, but no crowded hallways filled with excited buzz. The panels would benefit from a little antagonistic questioning by an acerbic journalist to liven them up. I don't see any excitement that indicates companies are getting funded here. But I'll let you know if I hear of any.