Stories by: Jonathan Rabinovitz

The founders of some 75 promising Internet startups flew into Santa Barbara, Calif., this month to hear advice from Robertson Stephens on how to prepare for an initial public offering. But Robert Emery, the bank's CEO, doesn't want to dwell on his firm's role in the IPO market.

After lying low for almost a year, CoreExpress, an Internet infrastructure-services company, announced Tuesday that it has received a mind-boggling $573 million in financing since the start of the year.

Palo Alto bargain hunters who came out Sunday hoping to buy a discounted Porsche found that none were yet to be had. And indeed the local economy in Silicon Valley has been so hot that even the market's momentary tanking could not immediately cool it off. Take Carlsen Motor Cars, a Palo Alto Porsche, Audi and Volkswagen dealership, a favorite shopping destination among new VCs and dot-com millionaires.

As if it were just another Silicon Valley Sunday, Bob Cordaro found himself having to wait for a table at the ever-popular Buck's Restaurant. It was a sign that no matter how much poorer he had become in the past week, life around him continued unchanged. Cordaro, 55, isn't some high-flying venture capitalist or software coder, but one of the thousands in this tech mecca who caught stock-market fever.

Claiming that it has raised the largest Internet-related venture fund ever, the venture capital firm Technology Crossover Ventures announced Monday morning that it closed a fund at $1.6 billion. Such a huge fund was once unthinkable.

Alan G. Spoon, president and COO at the Washington Post Co., is leaving one of the country's most powerful media positions to become a venture capitalist.

The firm that brought out eBay and Webvan is going European. Benchmark Capital announced Monday that it would open an office in London - its first outside the San Francisco Bay Area. Two Benchmark partners will cover Europe, bringing the total number of partners to eight - and don't be surprised if the firm adds a few more soon.

It wasn't supposed to be like this. Two years ago, W.R. Hambrecht started with dreams of creating a Net-based investment bank. Founded by Bill Hambrecht, the legendary Silicon Valley banker who also helped create Hambrecht & Quist, the firm boasted of using online auctions to open initial public offerings to the small investor while ensuring companies a fair offering price.

Almost two years ago, the venture capital firm Monarch Partners opened for business, setting up shop in Atlanta and Dallas with a $30 million fund. On Monday, the company plans to announce that its going to add an office and partner on Sand Hill Road, as it begins raising a $300 million fund specializing in wireless telecommunications and the Internet.

A recent Goldman Sachs report calls eBay the pioneer of "C2C" trading. As in "consumer-to-consumer." But at the investment bank's technology conference this week, eBay CEO Meg Whitman made clear that she also wants people to associate a better-known acronym with the online auction house: "B2B," or business-to-business.

E-Offering, an online investment bank, has gone six months without a permanent chief executive, leading industry experts to wonder whether the one-year-old firm has lost its way.