He takes a breather at the Mondera booth. "There's a bit of a herd mentality among venture capitalists," he admits. "The latest is that everyone has to have an Internet jewelry client."

And what else?

"Oh, It's a big list. Broadband. Pets. Drugs. Next-generation network equipment. Browserware. Digital currency."

We round another corner and discover a trio of men in bright orange, all of whom look like they should be handling hazardous waste. There's no banner in their booth. Farkas stares. "I'm always amazed," he says, "at how many of these things you go to, and you pause in front of one of these booths for twenty seconds, look at them, examine them, and have absolutely no idea what the company does."

He scans the room. He doesn't look happy. But he insists he wouldn't be a venture capitalist if he didn't enjoy these events. "A big part of this job," Farkas explains, "is walking the street, knowing what's out there, so when you're pitched an idea, you know if it's been done."

As we leave, a lone man, quite young, is standing at the doorway, holding up a handwritten sign: I NEED AN ANGEL.

Brotman is picky about selecting his investments -- so picky, in fact, that when he first hung out his shingle as a venture capitalist, he passed on Kozmo.com. ("In retrospect," he admits, "I should have trusted my gut about the CEO and invested in them.") He has thus far invested in only four businesses: LivePerson, which enables e-commerce sites to provide real-time customer service; Flooz, a form of Internet currency, so that kids and other creatures without credit cards won't be robbed of the pleasures of impulse-purchasing online; Bla-Bla, an irresistibly named portal people can use to juice up their own Websites with chat and postcards; and BoxerJam, an online game show by the creators of Jeopardy!

Brotman didn't invest in BoxerJam until it was already well off the ground. But he invested in the others at the seed stage, and all three of them have managed to generate a lot of buzz -- a remarkable feat in this staticky world. One (Flooz) has even managed to recruit Whoopi Goldberg to flack for it. But none has gone public yet.

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

I-Hatch, on the other hand, has decided to spread its risk around. It has 23 investments in its portfolio, including the FeedRoom, a customized local-news site started by Jon Klein, a former vice-president of CBS News; Faith.com, an online community for the spiritually inclined; and PlanetOutdoors.com, whose television commercials were done by the directors of The Blair Witch Project.

Brotman's not impressed. "That's not rifle shooting," he says. "That's machine-gun spraying." He pauses. "If I was comfortable with 10x," he says, referring the standard return on an investment most venture capitalists look for, "maybe I'd just throw half a million here, half a million there. But these companies need my time to become effective. I think that I can make the difference between 10x and 1,000x."

But i-Hatch, Austin reminds, has $150 million to spend and three partners to look after its investments, while Brotman is a one-man, $14 million show. "Also, a variety of investments diversifies the risk," shrugs Austin. "And we'd like to work with as many young teams as possible -- that's our passion."

A few days after CyberSuds, Austin and Farkas are sitting in the big, windowless conference room of i-Hatch's temporary headquarters in the MetLife building, listening to a pitch from a team of young entrepreneurs. Austin has cherry-picked this crew; he's very interested in what they have to say.

"The pitch" in the high-tech world is a funny thing. It has become as slickly produced as a Hollywood film, though the content is often better suited to dinner theater. There's a narrative. There are computer-generated visuals, piped in from a high-speed Pentium III processor and projected onto a big screen. And there are stars. ("Tommy Hilfiger sits on our board of advisers!")

This presentation isn't dinner theater. It isn't Broadway, either, but it's fairly engaging. The CEO, Wayne Chavez, is running the show. He's 29 but looks much younger. "What we've identified," he says, starting to tippity-tap on a sleek little laptop, "is the corporate-casual revolution in America." A series of statistics pop up on the screen. Ninety percent of all American men in corporate settings go casual on Friday. Online-apparel sales reached $300 million last year. Men's business-casual-wear is a $22 billion market.