Why start-up fever will never cool for some of us

Netscape founder Marc Andreessen and his business partner Ben Horowitz have just finished raising a new $300 million (£183 million) early-stage venture fund, further evidence that investors here are still willing to make bets on promising Valley start-ups.

But what about the people those newly-funded start-ups will want to hire? Are they up for the ride? After years of living the start-up life, quite a few of my friends have moved to large and long-established firms recently. So will some of that VC money be left on the sidelines for want of personnel? Well, not really.
Sure, the days are gone when it seemed like a no-brainer to ditch a good job with HP, Cisco or Intel for a start-up predicated on little more than a wing and a prayer. But the trend I'm seeing is more about how work patterns here are generational.
My thirty and fortysomething friends mostly now have children to support, mortgages to pay, and health insurance to worry about, all of which means their appetite for risk is shrinking. They've basically aged out of a young person's game.
But right behind them is a new generation of talented, creative and as-yet-independent twentysomethings. These kids are perfectly willing to work the insane hours it takes to make someone else's start-up dream come true.
In families with two working parents, there's a smaller, related trend that's helping us avoid complete generational apartheid. If one adult has a "safe" job, it's not uncommon to find the other spouse dreaming the start-up dream again.
They'll need an exceptional reputation, of course, not to mention the stamina to compete with the hot young things. But for some the temptation to go to work in the hope of hitting it big will never dim.

* HOW do you know when you've invented something pretty darn cool? When the US state department calls and begs you to postpone your website's scheduled maintenance because your service is too geopolitically important. It happened to Twitter this week, because of the elections in Iran. And just in time, perhaps. Reports of low-to-zero growth were threatening the site's "Valley's Hottest" status.

* HERE is a slightly warped sign of the times. Cristina Warthen, a Stanford law school graduate who was convicted in January of tax evasion while running an "escort" service, can't pay her fines. Why? She told a San Jose court that her internet mogul ex-husband David Warthen, who co-founded Ask Jeeves, has lost so much of his net worth in the past few months that he's reneging on their divorce settlement, which had included paying her legal fees.