I attended Rick Segal’s VC round table last week, which was also attended by Susan Dingwall Williams and Scott Pelton.   It was a good forum to discuss the VC community and the funding process for startups.   One area I was surprised with was the agreement from both Rick and Scott that they wanted to involved early in the funding process.  Generally the area where Angels would have traditionally been involved.

Then over the weekend I read about Xnobi being approached by Microsoft, from TechCrunch.  Xnobi makes a social networking for Outlook and it would make sense that Microsoft would want to purchase them.  Xnobi has just recently, probably has no revenue and very little business model.

Is this the state of startups today?  With early funding and early exists?  This would certainly explain the decline in VC funding, with smaller startups and earlier exists, there is less need for huge capital investments.  VC’s will need to be nimble about how and when they invest, and startups will also need to be equally as quick about how they invest.