More than $455 million was poured into technology companies in Washington State during the second quarter of 2000. That's up nearly 50 percent from the second quarter of the previous year. Offering a helping hand in tech fundraising is venture guru Guy Kawasaki, CEO of Garage.com. Garage.com, a venture capital investment bank, has helped over 70 high tech startups raise more than $260 million in equity financing since 1999. The typical investment size is between $3 million and $5 million.

The company fills the gap between "friends, fools and family" investors and traditional venture firms, says Kawasaki. Garage.com sifts through 12,000 business plans a year to find the 80 or so startups they help each year with early-stage funding.

Kawasaki may be best known for his former role as the chief evangelist for Apple Computer Inc., where he fired up software developers and users alike with fervor for the Macintosh.

Kawasaki gave us 10 minutes for 10 questions on obtaining financial savvy to make a company look attractive and show a clear path to profits for venture capitalists.

Q. Garage.com - a clever name. Give us your elevator pitch.
A. We’re a venture capitol investment bank. We specifically focus on private offering where we raise venture capitol for high-tech startups from angel investors, corporations and venture capitalists. We’ re based in Palo Alto, with offices around the world. We want to help a guy or a girl in a garage start the next Apple, HP, Yahoo or Netscape.

Q. How did your experience at Apple inform what you’re doing with net startups now?
A. I was Apple’s chief evangelist and my primary function was to work with software companies as they were beginning. In a sense, I had to pick whom Apple worked with. Now I’m picking companies to help them get funded. Only now I’m looking all over the technology sphere, not just Mac software.

Q. The tech sector pendulum has swung to the dark side in the past year. What are we looking at down the line?
A. If I knew that, first of all I wouldn’t tell you (laughs). Clearly there is a correction and things have gotten out of whack. Anybody with a cute domain name and a clever idea can say that there are thousands of avocado farmers; there are thousands of people that want to buy avocados. If we make the Avocado.com b2b exchange and just 1% of the avocado’s pass through us, we’ll be billionaires. Right now you have to show a relevant, realistic and believable business model; cleverness doesn’t cut it anymore.

Q. Is there a change in the funding environment that will help serious, long-term plays get funded or are we still haunted by the “enthusiastic money”?
A. There is still a lot of money to be invested in serious companies; however, if you were “enthusiastic money”, the situation now is you’re performing triage on the enthusiastic companies that you put your enthusiastic money in. Lots of v.c.’s are slowing down their new investments while they put the paddles on their existing portfolios.

Q. Are venture capitalists the strongest source of funding?
A. People have a short institutional memory. They think that venture capitol is always hot and always the best place to go. But there have been 3-4 times in the history of recent financing when v.c.’s have been returning 6-8% returns, so in those kind of times, to put it mildly, people weren’t flooding billions of dollars into venture capitol. Money is going to go wherever it is efficient - sometimes its real estate, sometimes industrial, sometimes technology.

Q. Are v.c.’s still the place to go for funding technology?
A: A bet on venture capitol today is largely a bet on technology. You have to believe that technology is going to continue to be a hot space. It’s not like on April 13 you say “I love e-commerce. I love going to Amazon.com, picking through 3 million titles, getting 25% off, never leaving my desk, two days later I get any book in the world” and then on April 14 we said “let’s get in our car, let’s drive an hour, let’s look for parking, let’s pay full retail, and choose from 50,000 titles”. The fundamentals of technology, i.e. what customer’s need, are still there. It’s just that the segment got hot because of the herd mentality. The herd can go up, the herd can go down.

Q. So what are venture capitalists looking for?
A. A venture firm wants its own exit strategy, a way to get its money out of the startup. They are generally not interested in business plans that duplicate what already exists, either for selling books online or trying to out-yahoo Yahoo.

Q. Are investors offering less pressure to their companies to go public right away?
A. Expectations are going back to the good old days where it’ll take 4-6 years before a company can go public. We went through an aberration during the heyday a few years ago.

Q. How has the downturn affected Garage.com?
A. At Garage.com we literally receive thousands of business plans each year and that flow is down. The reason its down is before, i.e. in the last century, if you had a clever idea and you could boot PowerPoint, you could raise $5 million bucks. That’s not true anymore. So all the people who wear Brut and Armani with pierced ears and noses can’t raise money anymore. That’s life and that’s good.

Q. What kind of companies are Garage.com funding now?
A. There was always this theory to get a lot of eyeballs and figure how to monitize it later. Those kinds of models are definitely passé. We’re funding real technology meaning infrastructure, software, hardware, medical devices, life sciences, semi-conductors, things that are built by geeks with real technology.

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A full audio interview with Kawasaki can be heard at www.webtalkguys.com . Kawasaki’s website is at www.garage.com . The website offers information on how startups can apply for funding, current job opportunities with fast-growing high tech startups and a free email newsletter from Garage.com on startup and venture capital topics.

(Editor's note: Dana Greenlee, president of LoudVox.com and co-host of the WebTalkGuys Radio Show, will be writing a technology column for Friday editions of the Index. WebTalkGuys, which features technology news and interviews, can be heard Saturdays from 11 a.m. to noon on KLAY 1180 AM in the Tacoma/Seattle area. Past show and interviews are also webcast via the Internet at http:www.webtalkguys.com).