"We believe that the male consumer is somewhere between Heaven and hell," Chavez continues. "Heaven is tennis shoes, jeans, a sweatshirt. Hell is his starched white shirt, dark suit, black wing tips. And now that the corporate-casual revolution has come of age, he finds himself in a very confused state. He doesn't know how casual he should go or how formal. If he goes too formal, he looks too uptight. If he goes too casual, he's not serious enough."

Chavez looks confidently at the group. He is wearing a suit. They're dressed in slacks. "He also hates to shop," he notes. "About 30 percent of all men feel shopping for new apparel is a necessary evil. An additional 22 percent dislike the shopping experience. An additional 8 dislike it more than they did before. So well over half dislike the shopping experience."

Chavez came up with the idea for his company at Harvard Business School just over a year ago. Since July, it has been running on a small fund of angel money.

"Men concede that they need to dress well," he says. "But they have no time." A new slide pops up. men have no time, the heading says. Beneath is a picture of a man slumped at his desk, face buried in his hands, surrounded by bulging files.

"So you take a look at our customer," concludes Chavez, gesturing at the screen. "He's confused; he hates to shop; he concedes he needs to shop, because he needs to look good, but he has no time to do so. That's where smartcasual.com comes in. How do we solve this pain?"

Another slide. smartcasual is not just another dot.com, it says.

"There's a bit of a herd mentality among venture capitalists," says Austin. "Everyone has to have an Internet jewelry client." Also broadband and pets.

They will be the first movers in the space, Chavez declares. They will develop relationships with high-end clothing suppliers. Then he looks over at my tape recorder, politely asks me to shut it off, and explains the rest of his business strategy. (Suffice it to say that the customer will have to buy retail, but he'll be catered to better than most.)

Austin asks a question: How will smartcasual.com become a brand name and destination site?

Sixty percent of its marketing budget will go toward offline advertising, answers Jesse Stein, a former online journalist and the chief marketing officer of the company. "We want to make smartcasual what Kleenex is to tissue," he says.

Derek Reisfield, a partner at i-Hatch, politely asks why anyone would buy retail when Brooks Brothers has sales on a regular basis. Ah, says Stein. Because these are whole ensembles. None of the pain of mix-and-match. "It's like Garanimals for men!"

Austin gives advice as much as he asks questions, scribbling in tiny letters on a legal pad. "What's your burn rate?" he asks. (Translation: "How much cash are you tearing through per month?") Forty thousand, says Stein. "Where are you, and where do you want to be?" asks Austin. They have $80,000 left, says Stein, and they're looking for $500,000 more.

One month later, i-Hatch becomes the lead investor in smartcasual.com.

It's hard to tell whether all, or any, of the seed firms now blooming will make it past the tulip stage. Many of them, in Colonna's view, don't have the faintest idea what they're doing. "There's shit getting funded that shouldn't get funded," he grouses. "Shit where there's not a snowball's chance in hell that there's going to be a successful exit."

The more established venture-capital firms in the city will also argue, with some justification, that they add more than just a lot of money. They add cachet. Choosing an upstart is like choosing Hofstra over Harvard. "Just because you have $2 million doesn't make you a venture capitalist," sniffs Eddie Ryeom, a partner at Prospect Street Ventures. "I can honestly say, if an entrepreneur comes to us and he's partnered with someone who doesn't bring value, it's a bad sign for us, because you are judged as much by your partners as you are by yourself."

Small firms deflect this criticism by saying that their size is what makes them so attractive -- they have the ability to give their clients hands-on care. They'll draft and redraft business models with them. Help them find a chief technology officer and the right designer for their site. "It's a different approach," says Brotman. "It's spending 300 to 400 hours with the company. It's like having a puppy or a kid. You need to spend quality time with it."

Seed-stage funding is an inherently risky business, depending on large, better-endowed venture-capital firms to finance future rounds of a company's life. If these firms don't like Chip Austin's or Steve Brotman's taste, or if the market slips because Alan Greenspan declares that the emperor of cyberspace is wearing no clothes, the i-Hatches and Silicon Alley Venture Partners of this world may implode.

"Most people today are working on a formula where they finance the first stage and three months later, it's public," says Alan Patricof. "But if those companies don't make it, it's going to eat up a lot of capital. So a lot of these small firms -- I hope they pace themselves. Otherwise you're going to see a lot of failures that in the old days would have been private."