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.

By Rodney Brown

Whatever side of the net neutrality debate you fall down on, you have to be able to recognize a bonehead when you see one.

I offer an example of such individuals — the executives at AT&T Inc., who think sending pre-fab letters opposing net neutrality to possibly non-existent organizations is a good lobbying scheme, and the people at those alleged groups who forget to take out the boilerplate AT&T allegedly wrote for them.

A number of websites and bloggers have pointed out a letter to the Federal Communications Commission from one supposed Arkansas Retired Seniors Coalition — good luck finding them on the web — that contains the following brilliantly boneheaded passage: “Access to a robust, reliable Internet has become an important component in the day-to-day lives of many seniors in Arkansas; consequently, the elderly community here is concerned about the proposed rule making on net neutrality. XYZ organization shares this concern.”

Aside from being another example of why proofreading is vital, the letter shows that this alleged grass-roots opposition to net neutrality is fake, a process known as “astroturfing” in the lobbying circles.

This is yet another example of how the major Internet connectivity providers like AT&T, Verizon Communications Inc., and Comcast Corp. desperately want to keep the new net neutrality regulations being proposed by the FCC from ever being enacted, but it is not the most troubling. According to online reports, Jim Cicconi, AT&T’s chief lobbyist, sent a memo around to AT&T employees encouraging them to send e-mail messages opposing the new rules from their home e-mail addresses.

Now what happens if any one of those employees who did not participate in that spam campaign gets fired, even for cause? How quickly will a lawyer be knocking on his or her door to encourage a wrongful dismissal suit? Aside from pulling a truly sleazy lobbying move, AT&T may have just put the gun to its own temple.

Massachusetts Biotechnology Council is a mouthful, and MBC, as local life sciences insiders call it, doesn’t mean anything to anyone outside of the state. So just call them MassBio.

The organization has officially changed its name, its logo and its website. The new site prominently lists the services and educational programs the organization provides.

In this economy, it’s not all about the miniatiure crabcakes. Biotech companies want to know their dues — which range from $1,500 per year for tiny companies all the way up to $18,000 for the Pfizers of the world — are getting them something of tangible value. So the new MassBio offers everything from group purchasing for natural gas to partnering events geared to spur deals between the small companies and big pharma.

The new name creates congruence between the Massachusetts organization and several other high profile groups, including the San Francisco Bay region’s “BayBio.”

“It also helps because we are doing more work in Washington, and before people would say, ‘MBC? Is that a TV network’?” MassBio President Bob Coughlin said.

Finally, the name casts a wide net. Coughlin said if any biomass or biofuels companies want to join, they are more than welcome.

- Julie M. Donnelly

Look to the past in order to move forward. That’s the mantra we followed in putting together our latest Mass High Tech issue in print today. This isn’t the first recession environment that businesses have faced. And in fact, many well-known companies launched during past recessions and depressions have not only survived, but thrived.

We talked to a few of these companies and got their “survival stories.” But we’re sure there are other stories of birth and survival in a recession for other businesses — stories we’d like to hear about and potentially include in future issues. What are your stories? How did you manage innovation on a restricted budget? And what about those of you who may have launched a business in a recession or depression and were not so fortunate? What did you learn and where are you now? Leave us a comment below.

In the meantime, take a look at our “Born in the Recession” issue:

• Change, efficiency and messaging drove iRobot’s downturn survival
• Millipore built from military filtration system roots
• Twitter startup launched by ‘Pistachio’ with funding
• John Clancy expounds on Iron Mountain Digital’s growth
• Roger Greene bootstrapped Ipswitch, sans bank funding
• Omgeo learned lessons in a rough 2001
• Launched in Great Depression, Jackson Labs now thrives
• Recession leading unemployed engineers to incubators
• Execs advise fair compensation over cheap hiring in downturn
• 4 first-time CEOs hold their role from startup to growth firm
• How the 1987 stock market crash helped Avid Technology
• Three steps to add investment with fewer resources