Last month I posted suggesting that Venture might be back… The post below from trueventures makes a strong case, that yes, indeed, Venture is back.

http://www.trueventures.com/blog/2009/12/02/venture-is-back-baby/

Also, I was at Noah earlier in the month; company after company spewed out fantastic stats:

Betfair- online betting, 6.5m trades per day, 5 bn pageviews per month, 2.5m registered users, 600k active users, £13bn annual deposits, £300m revenues- £150M UK; £150M international

Delticom – online tire sales (yes, tires) €200M Revenues, €53M gross profit, €15M Ebitda, €10M net profit

Zed- entertainment (http://www.business.zed.com/)
Started off as mobile content player, expanded into everything – including tv
$700M revenue;

Bigpoint – browser gaming; playstation 2 quality Free
games, community based 1000 distribution partners TV partnerships with rev
streams to broadcasters Virtual goods/currency- micro transactions Subscription
= one price; virtual goods means variable pricing 95M registered users, 250k
new registrations per day

Spotify- online music, 6m users (3m UK), 15k new registrations  per day 120 staff Avg engagement: 94 min per
day; 

Stardoll- online "paper" dolls, 40m members, Avg age 13.8, 12m uniques/month

There were several billion dollars of revenue on stage that morning – representing some of Europe's more mature startups… with companies like these in VCs portfolios, and the exit market opening up-  it's easy to understand why venture's back.