Angel investor Bill Warner demos the iPad for media consultant Kristen Collins on the Nantucket ferry Thursday.

By Galen Moore

The Nantucket Conference has a reputation as a place where entrepreneurs can go to get hit by money. Two chilly nights on an island in the North Atlantic engender an atmosphere in which unheralded entrepreneurs sit down with blue-chip VCs for dinner or drinks. Deals are made, and so are friends.

This year, I’m on a boat once again bound for Nantucket, with the feeling that I don’t know what’s livelier – the two-day tango of founders and funders ahead, or the entrepreneurial foment I’m leaving behind on the mainland.

“The plural of anecdotes is not data,” founders and mentors in the Techstars incubator program are fond of repeating. I don’t know that the past 12 months have seen more startup activity than years past. But a year since Y-Combinator picked up sticks in 2009, and Techstars swiftly moved to expand from Boulder, Colo., to take its place, the paths for startups to navigate Route 128 for venture-capital dollars have gotten scrambled.  Seed funds, startup accelerators and new angel investor groups blossom like tulips. VCs like Polaris Venture Partners, Matrix Venture Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners have come down from their Mount Money redoubt on Winter Hill in Waltham and set up blogs, open office hours, startup incubator programs and business plan competitions.

Some may be chastened by the embarrassing returns they’ve shown their limited-partner investors. More likely, they’re hustling to keep up with the last half-decade’s changes in the region’s high-tech economy. While some VCs were rushing to follow one another over a cleantech cliff, some entrepreneurs were figuring out how to build startups that could prove a market with little or no outside investment. Institutional investors are eager to put their brand of fertilizer into the next wave of these green shoots, before their valuations go through the roof, making costly deals for johnny-come-latelies. So they’re courting the first-time entrepreneurs who are cooking up these ideas in university labs, garages and Central Square offices.

If there’s a Boston poster child for this new wave of seed-stage investing, it’s Eric Paley. After selling to 3M, he and his co-founders at Brontes started Founder Collective, a seed fund that aims to pick companies so capital-efficient that the firm can sit out later rounds, counting on the business’ rising valuation to ward off dilution. Paley, who is on one of the panels at this weekend’s conference, told me earlier this week he believes the region’s venture money is in transit away from the enterprise software businesses that built Route 128, spending big rounds of VC cash ahead of revenue to push products through a long enterprise sales pipeline.

“It’s really more to do with the speed and efficiency with which you move, as opposed to creating enormous capital overhangs that are inconsistent with the opportunity,” he said. VCs, stung by the latter, are now having to reset their orientation toward the former, he said. “What you’re seeing now is them trying to get involved in a way that makes sense with companies that don’t require those types of capital allocations at the beginning.”

Can this energy power a renaissance in New England’s high-tech economy? Angel investor Bill Warner, the Avid Technology founder who has become a godfather of sorts to the regional startup industry, thinks we don’t have a prayer of catching up with Silicon Valley, unless our entrepreneurs think in terms of building billion-dollar companies. But it’s uncertain whether VCs like Paley, who sold Brontes very profitably for $100 million, and Flybridge Capital Partners’ Jeff Bussgang, who in a book out this week acknowledges that most of the startups he funds will exit in an acquisition by a larger company – will be the ones to swing for the fences.

Regardless of whether VCs have the nerve for big startup plays, Warner, whom I’m sitting next to as I write this on the Nantucket ferry, says there’s no reason a lean company can’t get to a billion-dollar valuation. Avid Technology, he said, developed a prototype on $150,000 out of Warner’s own pocket. By the time VCs got in, the company had demonstrated the prototype to 40 film studios, many of whom said they’d buy it.

If that was possible in the early 1990s, there should be no reason a bootstrapped startup can’t do the same in 2010. And that begs my final question: If a wave of capital-efficient startups has sucked VCs out into the madding crowd, hunting opportunities, should an entrepreneur really sign up for three days on Nantucket with these folks? It’s five o’clock – cocktail hour, and your correspondent is about to find out.