If you're a budding young venture capitalist here in New York, getting money for your brand-new fund is the easiest part. This city is awash in money searching for a project. Among Wall Street bankers, it has become fashionable to invest in dot-com start-ups. Wealthy individuals who've made a lot of money elsewhere (like . . . the Internet) are eager to toss in a million here, a million there, just for sport. Investment-banking firms are throwing money at venture capitalists like rice at a blushing bride. "Anyone with money wants to invest in the Internet," says Mark Patricof, Alan's son and the head of <kpe>, which put up the money for the just-launched Beauty.com. "I could pick up my phone -- honestly, this is true -- and in 30 minutes finance a company."

In fact, promising companies often find themselves being offered more -- much more -- money than they can use. When Doug Platt completed the first round of funding for Prefer.com, a shopping site specializing in products for 45-to-65-year-olds, he had to turn down $12 million; all he needed was $4 million. And Davinder Sethi, chairman of iPing.com (an online "notification service" -- it reminds you to do things via your computer, cell phone, or pager), jumped through hoops to allow Sands Brothers & Co., a boutique investment-banking firm, to take a mere $100,000 stake. "To turn down people who are throwing money at you -- it's very political," he says. "You just never know when you'll come back to them."

The problem, essentially, is that there aren't enough companies like Platt's or Sethi's. New York investors are discovering the Internet at a time when it is already a terribly crowded colony. There are at least three online services that will furnish your son's dorm room (dormfurniture.com, durabull.com, ecoloft.com), at least six that will help plan your daughter's wedding (wedding.com, weddings.com, weddingchannel.com, theweddinglady.com, weddingnet.com, theknot.com), and at least two that will assist in making arrangements to bury your aunt Martha (funeral.com, Funeralstodiefor.com). Any venture capitalist in this city will tell you that the majority of proposals floating around this city are retreads, if not worse. "Without a doubt," sighs Colonna, "there is more capital out there than there are quality deals."

This puts venture capitalists in a bind. The money keeps pouring in from all directions, and they are obliged to put it to work in order to satisfy their limited partners. Yet 90 percent of the business plans they see are the equivalent of spam.

"In the seed space, it's standard for nine out of ten deals to just completely wipe out," says Brotman. "We're three for three. It's like shooting a bull's-eye from 10,000 feet away in high winds."

What do they do?

They hunt. Some even call it that: "elephant hunting." The hope is to find an entrepreneur with some germ of a seed of a new New Thing so they can be "the first mover in the field." (Short of that, they'll settle for the most qualified entrepreneur in a field, or the most aggressive, or the most connected, so that they can be "the No. 1 category-killer in the space.")

One of the places where venture capitalists hunt, or at least schmooze, is Super CyberSuds, the annual networking hoo-ha thrown by the New York New Media Association. And one of the typical attendees at such a function is Chip Austin.

Until last February, Austin was president and CEO of Bertelsmann Online. Then the venture-capitalizing bug bit him. With two partners, one a friend from Harvard Business School and the other a friend from McKinsey & Company, he decided to launch i-Hatch Ventures, a firm specializing in seed-stage funding for Internet start-ups. Lots of aspiring entrepreneurs recognize Austin. He always dresses in all black -- black blazer, black slacks, black turtleneck -- and he speaks at I-business breakfasts all around town. They like him, too. He speaks unhurriedly, almost languorously. His manner is mild. He has a sense of humor. His presence soothes.

Austin hasn't even made it into the main hall of the Metropolitan Pavilion -- to be more precise, he hasn't even made it to the registration desk -- when Fritz Desir, a handsome, strapping 29-year-old and one of the few African-Americans at CyberSuds, marches up to him and starts talking about his idea: Biguse.com.

It's not a bad idea. Desir wants to create the equivalent of an online houseboy -- a local one-stop service that will deliver your groceries, pick up your dry cleaning, fill your prescriptions, pay your bills. But his presentation doesn't inspire confidence in his would-be patrons. That's where Brad Farkas -- former software developer, Alexander's department-store heir, and one of Austin's two partners -- comes in. Farkas plays bad cop. Actually, he's a nice guy, but with entrepreneurs, he has a ruthless, third-degree style and a gaze that would skin a cat.

The two men talk in the lobby for fifteen minutes. Farkas never gives an inch. A typical example:

Farkas: "So I'm a dry cleaner. One question I would probably ask would be, 'What concentration of customers do you have in a three-block radius of my store?' "

Desir: "Right. Our answer to that would basically be based on traffic questions and to really work with them -- "

Farkas (shaking his head): "I'm a dry cleaner. What's your response?"

Desir: "What we're doing right now is trying to bring this online and do the promotions and see before we charge any money up front -- "

Farkas: "So the answer is, you don't really have a demographic profile of how many people are in my market."

Just five years ago, Super CyberSuds amounted to a few hundred guys in a film-and-television studio in Queens, nibbling cheese squares; this October, 4,200 people have shown up, and it's a full-blown Turkish bazaar for nerds. A tall guy in red satin shorts and a checkered white-and-lime-green cape is standing by the door, handing out black eyeglasses with masking tape wrapped around the frames. "Booth two -- check us out," he instructs the i-Hatch team. "Techies.com!" A fellow from corporategear.com, dressed like Austin Powers and speaking in some species of a British accent, presses red stubs of paper into Farkas's hand. "Free movie tickets, baby, yeah!" he shouts and runs off.

"Let's find a lucky aisle," Austin suggests. He tries weaving his way through the crowd, but we can barely move. I ask him why he bothers coming to these events. "To support the companies we've invested in," he says. Every few minutes or so, he shakes hands with someone he knows or gives out a business card. "And some of our co-investors are here, so we learn about some of the things they're investing in that might make sense for us," he says. "Also" -- he's rounding a corner now -- "there's the off chance you'll see something that you may not have given as much merit to on paper, but when you meet the team, and you actually see it . . . that happens more than you might imagine."