I've been collecting a lot of data about attitudes and behaviors towards early stage investing in today's tumultuous and uncertain market environment. Whether you happen to be an investor or an entrepreneur, an angel or a venture capitalist, you are going through a disciplined re-assessment of what you should be doing and how you should be doing it. One thing is for certain: few people are operating in the ways they did only a few short months ago. Aside from dozens of meetings with entrepreneurs and VCs, I attended a NextNY event last night that was all about how young companies should be coping with today's uncertainty. David Kidder of Clickable and Matt Blumberg of Return Path both had some sage advice, from the perspective of business builders that have been around since well before the bubble and crash and have been challenged to adapt to hard times.

Venture Capitalists: Uniformly more conservative, but many are still in business

As seems to be the case with many industries, I am seeing a barbell emerge in early stage investing. Many of the larger funds ($100 million+) I know and work with are pulling in their horns, focusing largely on current portfolio companies and reserving cash for supporting those that warrant additional investment. I recently had a deal where a term sheet was pulled by a premier VC; this is not something I could have imagined back in the summer. There is definitely a sense of hunkering down and being all over their management teams, asking for stepped-up financial reporting, cost cutting plans and hiring freezes. But in general, there doesn't appear to be much of an appetite to do new early stage deals. They are preparing for a nuclear winter where exits are few and far between, the IPO market is closed and times to exit could be extended from 3-5 years to 8-10 years and beyond.

Smaller funds, while certainly applying the same discipline to their existing portfolio companies, in general appear more sanguine about the opportunities that exist. They have fewer companies to deal with than larger funds, often have plenty of dry powder (both financially and managerially) to both support existing companies and to deploy in new deals and are seeing more deal flow than ever.