It isn't all doom and gloom; Walden and H&QAP are investing, while KLM plans a new fund

For the past year or so, I've been splitting my time between New York City and Silicon Valley (with occasional detours to Asia). Lucky me to be in the Bay Area - particularly when the temperature on the sidewalks of the Big Apple reached 108 degrees Fahrenheit.

To make the most of my ticket to the Valley, I decided to make the rounds of the venture capitalists and find out what's new.

On Walden Pond

Palo Alto is a great spot for VC adventuring. Everyone from Lip-bu Tan to Ta-lin Hsu calls it home. I dropped in on Walden International's Tan to find out how his portfolio is holding up in the meltdown (very well, thank you, he says) and how he's going about investing that $1 billion-plus fund he's just raised.

Tan, among the most directed and organized of the Asian-connected venture capitalists here, rattled off facts and figures about the business without once checking his notes. Interestingly, he shares office space with Kamran Elahian, one of the Valley's great serial entrepreneurs, who - like others before and after him (Wu-fu Chen, for one) - has become a venture capitalist. Walden has backed many of Elahian's start-ups.

Over the past two months, Walden has slowly begun to spend down its mega-fund, investing $26 million in four companies: $5 million in Palm Microwave, a semiconductor chip producer for handheld PDAs; $6 million in an optical components maker called cGuint; $5 million in another components company, CapXX; and $10 million in a medical device firm, Coalescent Surgical. All are U.S.-based except for CapXX, which was born Down Under.

Now on to nearby H&QAP. Ta-lin Hsu and Purvi Gandhi, who's surely the busiest woman in the business. Purvi, hired as the firm's CFO five years ago, has found herself caught up with lots of extracurricular activities: recruiting execs, acting as the firm's "public face" for news inquiries, conducting due diligence on potential deals, and planning for corporate training.

Semiconductor foundry appeals

Lately, she's been spending an inordinate amount of time in China, where the firm (along with every other VC, it seems) has invested $20 million in PRC-based semiconductor firm SMIC. But maybe she won't be going there quite so often now that the firm has managed to nab David Kao as the new Managing Director of its Greater China operations. (see page 10)

On my last stop, in San Jose, I caught up with KLM Capital's Peter Mok, just back from Hong Kong.

Peter didn't seem jet-lagged at all; he manages to catch some "shut-eye" on his frequent 14-hour flights to Asia. Peter, whose office is decorated with several close copies of Van Gogh favorites, had money on his mind - naturally. And no wonder. The firm - in spite of the very harsh climate for raising funds - has embarked on rounding up $150 million for a new fund, KLM Current Ventures V (see page 37). And for that alone, Peter wins this columnist's award as the most adventurous venture capitalist for the month.

REBECCA FANNIN, formerly International News Editor at Red Herring, and a veteran observer of the private equity industry, writes on Asian-Silicon Valley issues for AVCJ. She can be reached at rafannin@aol.com.