It was only a matter of time before Silicon Valley’s most sought-after programmers would begin referring you to their agent.

A San Francisco-based agency called 10x Management is among the first to bring a Hollywood agency model to the tech industry. The agency carefully vets its engineers and designers, and it connects them with high-paying, short-term opportunities at The White House as well as companies like Google and Mozilla.

Cofounder Altay Guvench [left] is a Harvard-educated programmer who joined up with Rishon Blumberg [center ]and Michael Solomon [right], music managers who formerly represented John Mayer.

Guvench was inspired to start the agency after finding that his lifestyle dramatically improved when he began working as a freelance software engineer, only agreeing to the most challenging projects that suited his schedule. The agency is designed for others like him; the “talent” can avoid dealing with mountains of paperwork and making deals.

Working for 10X gave Randy Lubin the flexibility to pursue his own startup ideas.

“I did not have to deal with the back-and-forth — and could just get on with the work,” said Randy Lubin, a Stanford MBA graduate with U.X. skills, who was formerly represented by 10X.

“It was also a status symbol to have an agent,” he explained. Lubin worked on 10x projects for less than a week per month and earned enough to cover his living expenses. This gave him the flexibility to hash out independent startup ideas and seize the next big opportunity. He later joined a Y Combinator-backed startup Meetings.io as its first employee, and he now works at Jive Software.

The story of the agency’s roots was recently chronicled in Bloomberg BusinessWeek. I caught up with Guvench for an interview in the weeks after the story hit.

VentureBeat: How do you vet talent?

Guvench: People appreciate that I am a programmer. We do the interviews, reference checks, code reviews, and provide ongoing feedback. We also screen for communication abilities and other soft skills.

VentureBeat: What skill sets are the most sought after and command the highest hourly rates?

Guvench: Right now, mobile app development and data-science skills are the most sought after. Companies will pay a few hundred dollars an hour. The most highly paid gig is a data scientist. Our cut always remains the same: We take 15 percent.

VentureBeat: You have about 30 programmers now. With the recent press attention, do you expect rapid growth?

Guvench: We’re starting to get more interest and just signed a deal with Nordstrom. We have been at it for a year already and are deliberately growing slowly. But we are hoping to have hundreds of programmers before the end of the year.

VentureBeat: How do you find the best gigs? 

Guvench: Sometimes [our clients] send us a list of companies they would like to work for, and we try to make it happen. It’s about maximizing happiness. But the deal flow isn’t always stable; some months you’ll have five offers, and others, it’ll be zero.

VentureBeat: The name “10x” — does it refer to going above and beyond the call of duty? 

Guvench: Yes. I was surprised by how crazy productive our programmers are. We have one engineer who barely sleeps and works 30 or 40 hours a week in a research lab. I don’t understand how they do it!

VentureBeat: Aside from the fact that you represent a different sort of talent, what are the key differences between 10x and a typical Hollywood acting agency?

Guvench: I don’t think there are huge differences. But one of the big ones is that people talk about “rock star” programmers. But we don’t dress like stars, and there isn’t the same ego. Believe me, I’m no Jerry Maguire!

Top image via 10X Management 

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

I went to Beaver Creek Colo. this week for the Rocky Mountain region’s largest and longest running startup conference, VCIR.

Twenty-two early-stage tech startups had less than five minutes to impress a panel of venture capitalists and judges. Many of them had already secured high-profile customers, a team of engineers, and close to $1 million in seed funding. The calibre of the startups was unusually high.

Most of the founders said their major obstacle to growth is cash. In Colorado and the surrounding states, it’s not easy to procure a first round of institutional funding. As Democratic Gov. Hickenlooper admitted in a conversation with the media, “better access to venture capital came up all over the state,” when his team conducted research for their Economic Development Project.

In an impressive pack, here are a few that stood out.

RoundPegg

What do they do? Don’t underestimate company culture — it can mean the difference between success and failure. Just take a look at Microsoft‘s morale-killing ranking system, which was recently chronicled in Vanity Fair. RoundPegg says its software can replace those expensive consultants who are routinely brought in to make recommendations, like firing a bad egg in senior management. The cloud-based software can also help recruiters identify candidates who are culture fits and can track employee engagement.

What’s cool about it? Cofounder and chief psychologist Dr. Natalie Baumgartner told me the startup has integrated with Jive to track conversations between teams and make broader assumptions about employee satisfaction.

The verdict: This startup is taking on a genuine pain point. However, the software might work best in collaboration with an external consultant. A few potential issues with a software-only approach: If a high-ranking employee is identified as a negative influence on office culture, would RoundPegg’s results be enough to root him or her out? Sentiment analysis, which tracks how employees really feel, is a tricky technology problem. It’s darn near impossible for a machine to tell the difference between neutral, positive, and negative expression.

Lendio

What do they do? Lendio helps small businesses find the best loan. Simply fill out a survey and answer a few questions, and the company trawls its database for a loan match. The company is not a lender but makes fees on the referrals.

What’s cool about it? It’s free for small businesses to use, and owners may be able to bypass those long and boring negotiations with the local bank.

The verdict: It’s a useful tool for small businesses that aren’t typically denied loans. But how about the “underbanked” population? Startups like Kabbage have raised a pool of equity and debt to lend to online retailers at better rates than traditional banks.

Serious Integrated

What do they do? The founders are on a mission to do away with buttons on machines. Most mechanical systems use an interface that consists of buttons in some sort of control panel with a small monochrome screen. Many manufacturers have tried to replace this with touch, but they have to design the screen and all the hardware behind it, as well as integrate with the existing system. Serious Integrated’s touch screen tech (above) sells via Arrow Electronics, one of the largest Colorado-based companies.

What’s cool about it? Founder and CEO Terry West was the first employee at Blackberry RIM. Revenues are promising — in its first year, the company pulled in a humble $134,000; this quarter, it’s on track to meet a $250,000 revenue goal.

The verdict? One of the judge’s favorites, particularly given the team’s expertise. The company has already raised close to $1 million in seed funding — to scale, it will need some venture funding.

Cloud Elements

What do they do? Once you’ve identified the cloud applications you need, whether it’s SendGrid or Twilio, select from over 20 pre-built integrations in the startup’s Elements Library. The goal is to save developers time by helping them avoid writing custom code for each application. Cloud Elements makes its money by selling its technology and consulting services.

What’s cool about it? If an application you need isn’t in the library, the team will build it at no additional cost. CEO Mark Greene said they are relying on developers to spread the word as “evangelists,” so they cater to their needs.

The verdict? This Denver-based company will ride the open cloud trend all the way to the bank.

photo credit: snowbuzz via photopin cc

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Startups often say their technology will change the world — a claim that seems wildly optimistic at best.

But step into the San Francisco offices of Change.org, the online petitioning site that is arming ordinary people with the tools to start revolutions, and you’ll be swept up by the mission. You won’t be alone. The movement is about 25 million people strong and is growing at a rate of 2 million memberships per month.

Can an individual spark a revolution?

Governments and corporations, they say, will be forced to listen if hit by thousands of signatures on Change.org, an army of Twitter and Facebook fans, and a few well-placed newspaper articles.

I meet Ben Rattray, the company’s charismatic CEO (pictured above), in his corner office. He’s weary from frequent travel: we joke about the “networking opportunities” during the red-eye flight from New York to San Francisco on Sundays. It’s typically jam-packed with tech execs returning from East Coast trips.

Directly behind his chair, a single photograph is framed in an otherwise sparsely decorated room. It’s the face of Molly Katchpole, the 22-year-old nanny who took on Bank of America. In November 2011, Katchpole’s victory was affirmed when 300,000 people signed her petition and the bank dropped its new $5 monthly debit card fee.

This is one of many recent campaigns that caught the attention of the global media. On Change.org, a trio of high school girls secured CNN’s Cindy Crowley as the first female presidential debate moderator in 20 years. One of the site’s members rallied hundreds of thousands of people to put pressure on the South African government to crack down on “corrective rape,” a term used to describe the horrific practice of a man raping a lesbian with the aim of ‘turning’ her heterosexual.

Something has shifted in recent years. Political activism is no longer the realm of the youthful and naive. Obama’s election and re-election were fueled by social media, and protests against SOPA and PIPA were staged on Twitter. Social media has created a culture of transparency that is making a site like Change.org truly effective.

“The strong thesis we hold is that people aren’t born apathetic, they are trained to be,” said Rattray.

“If you show them that their voice matters, you can radically change behavior.”

The company is hiring at a rate of two people per week and forecasts revenues of $15 million this year.

The blurry line between profit-making and change-making

And this is where Change.org has faced some criticism. Some say the company has crossed the line between change-making and profit-making; Clay Johnson, author of “The Information Diet” told the Wall Street Journal he has “huge problems” with the site as it is a “lead-generation business disguised as a social-change organization for whoever is willing to pay them for the email addresses.” He continued, “It’s dangerous to monetize ‘change’ because there’s an economic incentive to sensationalize.”

Certified as a B Corporation, the company makes its money through their cause-based ad model. For instance, the World Wildlife Fund might place a sponsored ad on a campaign that supports the environment, or might pay for Change.org to promote an existing campaign. It’s not dissimilar to sponsored tweets or sponsored links on Google.

Rattray claims the company is less concerned with the profit motive than with maximizing impact. To deflect critics, he uses the example of an ongoing engineering project to build a mobile offering that can be deployed in developing countries. This is not intended to make money.

He says Change.org, as a revenue-generating and angel-funded business has been able to offer its employees a competitive salary and benefits. Meanwhile, nonprofits are struggling to hire and maintain talent.

Why work at Change.org?

This week, the company brought on a high-profile CTO, Tom Hughes-Croucher, to lead the engineering efforts. The new hire has a strong reputation in the open-source community, and has worked as a technical evangelist at Joyent and Yahoo.

On the engineering roadmap is a plan to incorporate machine learning so members will be matched instantly to a petition based on their pre-existing interests.

“I’m really excited to be starting at Change.org because I know we have such an amazing opportunity to have an impact on the world here as well as some really interesting engineering challenges that come at the scale we operate,” Hughes-Croucher said.

Still, the company has not been able to lure quality engineers that are interested in a sky-high salary and large chunk of equity. “Eighty percent really care about the equity upside and a massive exit,” Rattray told me. “For the 20 percent that care about the mission, we are the fastest growing company in this space.”

The company has openings in communications and marketing, business development, customer support, and engineering. Check out the full list here.

“Startup culture” is a new series that highlights what it’s really like to work at a Bay Area startup. We’ll be profiling a startup every two weeks. Please send your suggestions for the most rockin’ office spaces, startup happy hours, or company perks via email (christina@venturebeat.com) or Twitter (@chrissyfarr). 

This year, a record 55,000 people made the annual pilgrimage to Black Rock Desert in Nevada to build a temporary city in the desert. For over a week, they inhabit the dusty abyss, dancing and sharing gifts, before taking off and leaving no trace of civilization behind.

Would you believe that your typical costume-wearing, drugged-out attendee at Burning Man, is almost as likely to vote Republican as Democratic or Independent? And probably works 9 to 5 in the computers or technology field, the most well-represented profession at the festival (this year, one of the most popular camps was “electronics/tech,” which catered solely to Bay Area nerds).

Newly-released data from 2011′s survey of thousands of participants reveal growing gentrification in the ranks of the attendees. Interesting revelations include:

• In 2008, surveys showed that Republicans were less than 10 percent of attendees. By 2011, this group counted for 20 percent of attendees.
• In 2011, over half of the attendees attended college and achieved a bachelors degree.
• In recent years, attendees are younger than ever before. In 2003, just over a third of participants were 30 and under. By 2011, the younger population was even represented than the older group (between the ages of 31 and 50)

In recent years, the survey’s organizers have thrown in the occasional provocative questions. Burning Man might be growing in popularity, but a large chunk of professional city-slickers are still not prepared to admit that they attend the festival.

• Nearly 16 percent of participants said they lied about attending the annual festival because they were ashamed.

The census is managed by Megan Heller, an anthropology graduate student at UCLA. With about 60 volunteers, her team travels throughout the various camps, wearing white lab coats. According to student reporter, Xandra Clark, who attended the festival, this year’s research team collected basic demographic information, as well as data about urban planning, transportation, gender and sexuality.

Data is not yet available from 2012 — it has been reported that about 11,000 people took the survey, roughly one fifth of the desert population.

This story was originally reported by the Stanford University Graduate School of Journalism’s Peninsula Press. Read the full story here. 

Image via Manamana / Shutterstock.com

You probably sit too much — I know I do. Given the sheer amount of time that our generation spends hunched behind a computer screen, chiropractors must be absolutely raking it in.

Parked on our backsides for hours at a time, bloggers and programmers may be the worst offenders of all. It’s no surprise that standing desks are the latest craze to hit Silicon Valley and other tech hubs.

Seeking relief from back pain, some of the most pragmatic solutions to hit the market were built by tech entrepreneurs in their spare time.

One of the most popular is the Standesk 2200, hacked by Colin Nederkoorn, founder of Customer.io for just $22. At the co-working offices at General Assembly in New York where he debuted the desk, word spread quickly. Soon all the cool entrepreneurs wanted one. Nederkoorn wrote on a blog post that the first users were fellow founders from hot startups like Stripe and Opani.

Nederkoorn hit a nerve with the community; his announcement received well over a hundred comments from fellow standing desk converts.

Meanwhile, serial entrepreneur, Dan McDonley, was able to exceed his funding goal on Kickstarter in just 24 hours to bring to market one of the world’s first portable standing desks.

McDonley gets to work, answers emails like a ninja

McDonley’s “The Ninja Standing Desk,” is designed for mobile, young professionals. It hangs from any door, wall, or cubicle, and folds up so you can carry it with you.

He told me he was experiencing debilitating back pain numbness in his elbow from sitting at a computer all day — he created a prototype for his personal use. It worked, so he began taking manufacturing classes at TechShop, the mecca for hardware folks, located in San Francisco and Menlo Park.

“I was assassinating my deadlines, slicing through my work day, while feeling healthier and nimble as a ninja,” McDonley explained on the project’s Kickstarter page.

After raising $30,000, a far higher sum than expected, McDonley is focused on keeping up with orders.

If a standing desk is for you, the Internet is filled with useful tips for you to build your own. Order cheap parts from IKEA, and you can assemble one on a $20 budget in a matter of hours. But if you’ve got dollars to spare, this piece in Wired’s Gadget Lab is the most comprehensive review of the best on the market.

I’m told by friends (my roommate, a tech entrepreneur, is a standing desk evangelist) that standing for hours on end takes some getting used to. If you stick it out, you can expect to shed calories and to see your energy levels to drastically increase. In fact, your doctor would tell you that even taking a 5-minute standing break every hour is an improvement.

If you’re not convinced, check out this article in the New York Times, suggesting that sitting is a lethal activity. If Dr James Levine’s hard-hitting campaign against our “chair-based lifestyle” doesn’t spook you even a little bit, I don’t know what will.

Teens in Tech, an annual conference in Silicon Valley, celebrates the elite and high-powered designers and programmers in the industry that are too young to swig a beer.

They may be college dropouts with dimples, and they certainly say the word “awesome” a lot, but these teens are a force to be reckoned with. At an age where most of us are still taking AP classes, these kids were hustling products, snagging meetings with investors, and teaching themselves to build mobile apps.

We’re at Xerox PARC, a famed research and innovation hub a stone’s throw from Sand Hill Road, and these teen mavericks have some wisdom to pass on. Listen up, kids.

Gumroad’s founder and CEO, 19-year-old Sahil Lavingia

On startups: “Before you start something, ask yourself: Could you see yourself working on this ten years from now?”

On raising funding: “Raise money when you don’t need to. I put my first million dollars in the bank, moved to San Francisco and got a loft. Use the money to build things that are difficult and valuable, and help you build focus.” 

On building companies: I think products keep me alive. Ask yourself “why” before you starting something? My “why”? I want to build products. I think a song is a product. A product is a way to outlive yourself. 

Kiip’s 20-year-old head product designer, Adam Debreczeni

On networking: Even if you’re 16-years-old, go out and email people. I would never have had opportunities if I hadn’t. Just reach out to talented people, especially if they’re not famous yet. Talk to me now! I don’t have an entourage. But have your parents spell-check your emails first!

On startups or school?: For the four years you’re in school, your job is to become a better person. Don’t rob yourself of that experience.

Read more here about Peter Thiel’s $100,000 fellowship for talented teens to drop out of school. 

On playing tough: It is weird being on the phone with the VP of Marketing at Disney when you’re 19-years-old. There are benefits though. This girl I was crushing on in college was into One Direction. So I got some props from her when I did some design work for them.

On delegating and designing: People are going to criticize you, so stop googling yourself! Instead, if you’re really stoked about your work, make sure you show it off. Put your work on Dribbble, it will push you to become a better designer.

Alexander Bass, lead designer, ONE inc. / teen star of “That’s so Raven” 

On snagging opportunities: I met my cofounders going down in the elevator, and we talked about design. Cory and Michael said, we like you. … Go home, check your email, and we’ll make you an offer. It was that easy.”

On Hollywood vs. Silicon Valley: Acting … it’s not a burning love like I have for design and products. But if you’re on TV, they’ll listen to you more. I have learned to accept rejection, be humble, and work with people. In design, you also have to remove yourself from the process and do what’s necessary. I don’t get mad or take something personally. I think the creative process is similar. 

Mark Daniel, 18-year-old CEO of GoalHawk 

On making the move to Silicon Valley from Nashville: I always had this incredible ambition and wanted to make products that impact people on a real level. I also hope that one day I won’t have to worry about money. Growing up, my dad has always had a six-figure corporate job, but we were over-extended and in 2009, we lost everything.  

The collegiate route or the startup?: I’m going to Babson College. It makes sense for me to do both, unless my startup takes off. If it doesn’t work out, I really don’t want to be left in a vulnerable spot.

Advice to fellow entrepreneurs: If you try to do everything, you’re destined for nothing. Stay humble. There’s an infinite amount to learn from every single person. 

Images courtesy of Michael O’Donnell (@Photo) 

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Skyrim is awesome; Pinterest users need to calm the hell down; and Facebook users need to stay away from the gun cabinet.

In this week’s episode of VB Weekly, the VentureBeat writing staff takes a front seat, with a range of our editors and reporters spouting off about the stories they found most interesting.

This week, we’re talking about:

• Steve Jobs’ FBI file
• the crazy coming features for hit game Skyrim
• Facebook’s all-new lightbox for photos
• Pinterest’s semi-skeevy affiliate marketing play

All our loud-mouthedness is in the video, and we welcome yours in the comments section below. Have a great weekend!

This week, we had Meebo CTO and co-founder Sandy Jen come into the VentureBeat studio to talk about women and tech.

We’ve featured a few strong and opinionated women CEOs and CTOs in our videos lately, because we think it’s important to show the female faces and voices in the tech industry. And in this interview, Jen said that’s one of the most important things for encouraging more female entrepreneurship.

After we chatted about Jen’s background (not one but both parents were engineers) and the importance of diversity in startup teams, she went on to say that she and many women like her are hesitant to leave companies and step into co-founder roles simply because they don’t see many precedents for that kind of behavior. The young, male entrepreneur/hacker is pretty well glorified by our society, but what Jen wants to see is more visibility for the women who do so.

While we talk a lot about the need for role models and tech education for young girls, not enough is said about the need to encourage grown women to pursue new goals in technology. This includes learning a programming language, starting a company and taking on leadership roles within the community. But as Jen noted in our talk, the biggest encouragement can simply be seeing someone like you doing something you’ve always wanted to do but never tried.

We’re glad to be engineering a small part of that visibility here at VentureBeat, and we hope you find Jen’s words interesting and inspiring.

According to a new report from the Level Playing Field Institute, IT workplaces, including tech startups, can create hostile or unpleasant environments for women and people of color, leading to those employees seeking out other companies or even other industries for work.

The report states that biases inherent in the average tech workplace make it a less-than-inviting environment for women and minorities, who deal with negative workplace experiences, such as exclusionary cliques and bullying at much higher rates than do their male and white counterparts.

“The IT sector is one of the fastest growing in our country, yet women and people of color continue to be vastly underrepresented,” said LPFI Executive Director Robert Schwartz, Ed.D.

“Previously we’ve pointed to problems in the STEM education pipeline as the reason for low rates of women and people of color in IT positions. But the findings in this report clearly show that there are also significant concerns with company culture and workplace experiences of underrepresented professionals.”

The Level Playing Field Institute, or LPFI, is an organization dedicated to exploring and eliminating the gender and ethnicity imbalances and biases in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) communities.

The report is called Playing Field: An Examination of Hidden Bias in Information Technology Workplaces. It shows that subtle and implicit favoritism in both large IT enterprises and startups ”can produce unequal opportunities and outcomes for employees depending on their race and gender.” The study uses data collected from a sample of IT engineers and managers in large companies and small startups around the United States.

In addition to encountering more bullying and being negatively effected by cliques, women and underrepresented people of color saw a higher likelihood of experiencing negative workplace incidents. And the more negative work experiences each person reported, the less likely she was to be satisfied with her job and remain working for the company.

In other words, subtle sexism in tech workplaces is making women and minorities want to move on.

Nevertheless, the study also showed that for most hiring managers, maintaining a diverse workplace was not a high priority. In spite of the fact that most of the companies polled showed diversity stats representative of the rest of the tech industry (i.e., few women and underrepresented people of color), 68% of the managers and engineers polled said they were satisfied with their company’s diversity efforts.

Not surprisingly, women and minorities were much more likely to favor more diversity in the workplace. In fact, underrepresented people of color were almost twice as likely as white employees to want a company-wide policy to increase diversity (80 percent compared to 46 percent).

As a result of these subtle (and sometimes overt) biases and lack of diversity in the workplace, woman and minorities in the report were less likely to feel they had a career path at their current company or that they were adequately developing their skills and abilities. Likewise, the same groups were more likely to be looking for a new job or planning to leave their current job within the year.

It’s not surprising that negative workplace experiences were linked to job dissatisfaction. What is disturbing is that these factors were so closely tied to gender and ethnicity.

In the report’s conclusion, LPFI recommends more research on these biases. The authors of the paper also challenge everyone working in the tech industry to confront their own biases and to support productive conversations about these biases within their companies and communities.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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We all know that tech investment needs more women, and Natalia Oberti Noguera thinks that female philanthropists are ripe for the training.

We recently had Noguera into the VentureBeat office to chat about overarching issues of women and technology. In this video, she discusses what her project, the Pipeline Fellowship, is doing to improve the gender split in the industry and visibility of women leaders and role models in technology.

The Pipeline Fellowship trains women who already give money charitably to nonprofits and other organizations to start making angel investments. These women are introduced to early-stage startup financing through a program of education, mentorship and hands-on practice. Fellows in the program commit to investing in a woman-run, for-profit startup at the end of the training.

For at least one VC, Draper Fisher Jurvetson partner Tim Draper, the market for U.S. startups just got noticeably chillier.

“In investing in start-ups globally, we at Draper Fisher Jurvetson try to view governments as competitors for our capital and for the great entrepreneurs of the world,” Draper told VentureBeat.

“Countries with the best rule of law, the best bankruptcy protection, the freest trade, the freest markets, and the best credit ratings are the countries that rule the day. The U.S. just dropped a notch.”

While many venture capitalists and angel investors were shaken by today’s wild market fluctuations, not everyone agrees with Draper’s view.

Nevertheless, analysts are saying companies with pending deals, including funding and IPOs, have some cause for concern today, especially if the market doesn’t right itself in short order.

Although the tech microeconomy and private equity in general operates somewhat differently from the larger market of publicly traded stock, today’s reactions also rest on the larger issue of the United States’ downgraded credit rating.

On a political note, Draper added, “I hope the U.S. changes structurally so that spending is limited to the amount raised in taxes the year before. With this simple change, the U.S. will again be the number-one preferred country to invest in.”

Google chairman Eric Schmidt echoed Draper’s concerns, speaking today on Fox News Channel’s Your World with Neil Cavuto.

“I am frustrated that America is in the process of falling behind Asia,” Schmidt said. “I was recently in Asia and the Asian view of America is that we are the past.”

Other VCs are more optimistic about the long-term trends.

“I’m sure people are anxious about their own portfolios, but for startups, it’s so far removed from their day to day lives. They’re still concerned about getting the next customer and closing the next round,” Saad Khan, a partner at CMEA Capital, told VentureBeat.

“I don’t think one day or one week’s stock market fluctuations are going to impact that. In Silicon Valley, things are pretty insulated from the rest of the U.S. in general. The ecosystem is alive and thriving. Leases have doubled for commercial real estate for places like downtown Palo Alto or Mountain View,” Khan said.

“It’s still very much boom time here. This year’s activity has been more active than I’ve seen in years.”

But angel investor Christina Brodbeck voiced a concern common to many angels: If enough personal wealth is lost in a market freefall, there won’t be money leftover to play with when promising young startups come courting a seed round.

“It definitely affects my angel investment thought process when an Armageddon-like situation happens in the market,” Brodbeck told VentureBeat. “The funds that small angels, like myself, invest are coming from personal gains in the market. If the market goes in to free-fall, I end up potentially being a lot more cautious about future investments, as I may not have as much room to play with in the coming weeks or months.”

Still, regardless of what the market does in the weeks to come, “Any company with an IPO planned for this week will probably pull it,” said Dow Jones Investment Banking deputy managing editor John Morris.

“If the IPO market shuts down for a while,” he continued, “that could affect later-stage venture-backed companies. They might need to go back to the VCs for more money.”

But while companies in the process of filing for IPOs have some cause for concern today, Morris said temporary fluctuations due to the credit rating change shouldn’t have much impact on startup investment — with the exception of rounds that are closing or about to close right now.

“In the short to mid-term, it probably won’t affect early-stage companies so much, since the VCs expect to have their money tied up for several years in any event. But it might delay the closing of any venture funding rounds scheduled for this week as people wait to see how catastrophic this is.”

And what if the result of this wobble in the stock market is completely catastrophic?

“Certainly it’s a concern if there’s a general malaise that lasts for a long time,” said Khan. “Macro trends do have an effect on Silicon Valley. But it’s hard for me to predict [another tech bust]. Stock market sentiment is certainly important, but I hesitate to make any judgment that doesn’t talk about fundamental market drivers as opposed to a rating change from one agency.”

And for those looking for a second bust, Khan said, “The infrastructure of the web is completely different now, and the next generation of companies are going to be bigger and faster than ever. I think we’re just at the start of a new innovation cycle.”

“I really hate pontificating on the future,” said early-stage specialist Babak Nivi of AngelList. “The best way to see the future is to build it, not predict it. Remember what people were saying when RIP: Good Times

was making the rounds?”

Nivi continued to say that the market shouldn’t have any effect on the quality of ideas and product that entrepreneurs are churning out. “Investors may end up investing less, but that isn’t going to change the innovation coming out of real entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs shouldn’t time the market as a strategy. Do your work, and the market will come around. If it doesn’t, we’ve got other things to worry about.”

Image courtesy of wobblymusic.

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