It marks the third consecutive quarter in which the high-tech financiers' investments have ranged between $7 billion and $7.5 billion.While that has been enough to put venture capitalists on track for their biggest investment year since 2001, it lags the feverish pace that fed the dot-com boom in 1999 and 2000 and set the stage for a traumatic bust.
"We are nowhere near that scenario," said Bryan Stolle, who ran Agile Software during the boom years and is now a general partner for Mohr Davidow Ventures in Menlo Park.
Venture capitalists invested an average of $20 billion every three months during 1999 and 2000, emboldened by the soaring stock prices of young and mostly unprofitable Internet startups.
This time Wall Street has shown little inclination to embrace unproven startups, one of the factors that has caused venture capitalists to show more restraint.
"I very seldom look at a closed deal and wonder, 'How did that one get done?'" said Bruce Robertson, managing director for H.I.G. Ventures in Atlanta. "It looks like most of the money is flowing into pretty good opportunities."
Entrepreneurs also aren't seeking as much money as they did during the dot-com boom because the lower cost of technology also means many startups need less money than they did a decade ago.
Nevertheless, the worries about a possible bubble are escalating as more entrepreneurs try to capitalize on the flood of advertising dollars pouring into the Internet.
The shift to online advertising has turned Google Inc. into the Silicon Valley's most prized company with a market value of more than $200 billion. The Internet search leader started with just $100,000 in 1998, followed by a $25 million injection of venture capital.
