Audience As Economic Indicator

I sat on a couple of panels this week. Neither one had quite the hype of Andrew's bubblet panel. But both were surprisingly well attended for mid-week panels on the venture process. The panels were fairly generic -- one was on the current state of venture finance terms and the other was on the importance of management teams in growing startups -- yet both drew crowds that included a couple dozen startup CEOs in waiting. I've done a number of these panels over the last few years and to the extent that these things are indicative of economic trends, I would say that the startup world continues to look up.