Following a slowdown in technology IPOs after Facebook’s offering last May, companies including microblogging service Twitter Inc., peer-to-peer lending site Lending Club Corp. and software-tools startup Atlassian are among those preparing to go public, said executives and people familiar with the matter.

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Instead, Mr. Goldberg tapped Tiger Global Management LLC, an investment firm run by Chase Coleman, an East Coast native and protégé of hedge-fund guru Julian Robertson. In January, Tiger helped lead the $444 million equity portion of SurveyMonkey’s $800 million recapitalization.

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But now that Facebook Inc., Zynga Inc. and Groupon Inc. have fizzled in their first year on the stock market –even though they were considered on the cutting edge of some of those tech trends — the hype over “SoLoMo” has subsided.

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His start-up makes software for marketing departments, and for years, he toiled in obscurity as the tech spotlight shined on hip Web arenas like social networking and their young Internet entrepreneurs, such as Facebook Inc.’s Mark Zuckerberg.

But now it is Mr. Fernandez’s turn in the limelight. His firm, Marketo Inc., is generating buzz among investors as an initial-public-offering candidate. He says he is getting daily invitations to baseball games, lunches with investment bankers and fancy society dinners.

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Entrepreneurs in California have quietly launched dozens of small hardware companies, designing everything from smart wristwatches to digital thermostats. The typical business plan: raise enough money to create prototypes in the U.S. that can be manufactured in Asia and sold online.

These consumer-electronics makers are attracting new interest as some of the Internet frenzy abates following spotty performances by newly public Web companies like Facebook Inc. and Zynga Inc.

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Disappointing debuts of Web companies such as Facebook Inc. and Zynga Inc. have put some pre-IPO investors under water, leaving them with shares worth less than what they paid. Other investments remain profitable, but with much smaller gains than projected as recently as a few months ago.

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On Wednesday, venture-capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and Insight Venture Partners invested $150 million for a 10 percent stake sports-apparel website Fanatics.com at a $1.5 billion valuation. That’s more than four times what it was worth a year ago.

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After a year of high-profile consumer Internet IPOs — from Groupon Inc., LinkedIn Corp. and Zynga Inc. last year to Yelp Inc. and Facebook Inc. now — a slew of Silicon Valley companies that sell technology mainly to businesses are also getting ready to hit the stock market.

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Traffic to the website — which lets users create online scrapbooks to share images of projects or coveted products — has grown tenfold over the past six months. In January, the number of visitors on Pinterest.com was almost a third of that on Twitter.com.

There is one problem: The 16-person Palo Alto, Calif., start-up isn’t sure how it is going to make money.

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Tech-jobs website operator Dice Holdings Inc. said salaries for software and other engineering professionals in California’s Silicon Valley rose 5.2 percent to an average $104,195 last year, outstripping the average 2 percent increase, to $81,327, in tech-workers’ salaries nationwide. It was the first time since Dice began the salary survey in 2001 that the wage barometer broke the $100,000 barrier, said Tom Silver, a Dice senior vice president.

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The first quarter is the most common period for new stock and options to be awarded and therefore for older equity grants to become vested, according to compensation-research firm Equilar Inc. And so some Bay Area executives will soon be able to cash in millions of dollars of restricted stock units and stock options granted over the past few years.

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Since participating in a $112 million funding of Web darling Airbnb Inc. in July that valued the online room-rental company at more than $1 billion, Mr. Andreessen said his venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz has “taken a step back.”

With some deals for private companies “definitely on the expensive side” amid a choppy stock market and concerns over a European debt crisis, Mr. Andreessen said he is looking to invest in fast-growing tech start-ups that aren’t as well known and where “pricing is still under control.”

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“We have anticipated this for quite some time,” he says of that Monday date, adding that he’s tripled staffing at his business in hopes of a sales bonanza.

That Monday is when social-networking site LinkedIn Corp.’s employees can begin selling their stock, and Silicon Valley businesses like Mr. Trailer’s mortgage firm are gearing up to steer the wealth their way.

Car dealers are readying Lexuses and Lamborghinis, jewelers are stocking up on Rolexes and financial advisers are studying how to woo newly moneyed clients.

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In closing the fund, the Menlo Park, Calif., firm is bucking two prevailing trends in the venture-capital industry, including an anemic fund-raising environment that has winnowed the number of venture firms that can raise large pools of capital.

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Previously on AllThingsD: What Bad Economy? Three Big Silicon Valley VCs Poised to Haul in $2B in New Fund Raising.

Aaron Levie, the 26-year-old CEO of Box.net, said the expansion round brings in strategic partners like Salesforce.com and SAP Ventures, as well as venture-capital firms such as New Enterprise Associates and Bessemer Venture Partners, along with former investors including Andreessen Horowitz. In total, Box.net has now raised $162 million.

Box.net, founded in 2005, gives businesses a secure way to share content online and on mobile devices.

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But after spreading its bets to clean technology — and missing out on early-stage investments in some of the hottest new Internet companies — the firm is scrambling to grab a leadership role in the latest Web boom.

That was evident at a June event in San Francisco, where the firm hosted a packed room of entrepreneurs. At the front of the room, Kleiner venture capitalist Bing Gordon spent an hour onstage espousing his theory of “gamification” — that is, how start-ups can benefit from using online gaming techniques — to the gathering.

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The new round was led by venture-capital firm August Capital, with participation from Insight Capital and existing investors including Jafco Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Bessemer Venture Partners, said Reputation.com CEO Michael Fertik. The round, which Fertik said was oversubscribed, brings the company’s total capital raised to more than $65 million. It was the company’s fourth round of institutional financing, otherwise known as a Series D.

Fertik said Reputation.com decided to raise more money because it is planning a big push into a new line of business. To date, the company has offered several services that help consumers manage their privacy, information and reputation online. Now Reputation.com has also built a dataset business–essentially, the start-up has collected data on individuals and layered that information with its own technologies–which allows the company to come up with assessments on people, among other things.

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A year ago, the 75,000-square-foot building at 410 Townsend St., near AT&T Park, had filled to capacity with young tech companies, after hovering at a 60 percent vacancy rate in late 2008 as the financial crisis hit. Now many of those start-ups have grown so much they have had to move out to bigger digs, while some remaining tenants have cannibalized the space.

“In 30 years in real estate, this is the fastest-growing building we’ve ever had,” said Chris Economou, the San Francisco leasing manager for PMI Properties, the landlord for 410 Townsend. “We’ve never had start-ups that have gone from 10 people to 200 so fast.” He adds that PMI is now able to charge rents of $34 to $35 a square foot at the property, up from $18 to $20 a square foot 18 months ago.

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But many of the gains are being disproportionately reaped by brand-name venture firms, which are benefiting from a wave of Internet IPOs and the soaring valuations of closely held companies such as Facebook Inc.

In what is a volatile business, some of the bigger venture-capital firms have forged ahead, taking advantage of their longtime network of entrepreneur contacts and building on past investment successes to continue getting access to the hottest deals. That helps those firms maintain an edge against less established venture firms, which in turn affects performance and returns.

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Today, many entrepreneurs can quickly raise small amounts of money–several hundred thousand dollars or less–to get their ventures going, with plenty of individual “angel” investors and others willing to plunk down the cash.

But entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who were around more than a decade ago during the dot-com mania say fund-raising today requires meeting a higher bar–namely, a working product and some marketplace traction–than it did in the late 1990s. Then, a clever idea often was enough to attract investors.

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Mr. Levie, 26 years old, founded online storage provider Box.net in 2005. While his 140-person Palo Alto, Calif., company has money in the bank, Mr. Levie saw the Web investing environment heat up recently, driven by interest in fast-growing start-ups such as Facebook Inc. and Zynga Inc.

So Mr. Levie decided to tap that interest and raise new capital. In less than three weeks last month, he closed a hefty $48 million round of financing from venture-capital firms including Meritech Capital Partners and Andreessen Horowitz. In the process, Mr. Levie said he turned down several other venture firms that wanted a piece of the deal.

“There was no capital limit and we could’ve raised more,” said Mr. Levie, whose start-up counts about five million users at 60,000 companies.

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Online real-estate brokerage Redfin Corp. is feeling the fallout. The 200-person company, which is based in Seattle and has offices in San Francisco, typically hires new engineers fresh out of college, relying on competitive compensation and the allure of working at a profitable start-up.

Redfin said it has recently been up against salary-and-bonus offers of $100,000 to $150,000 a year for new college grads from social-gaming start-up Zynga, among others—far above the $80,000 or so a year Redfin would normally offer.

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The new funds stand out in what is a bleak environment for most venture firms. Hit by the financial crisis and poor returns over the past decade, just 119 new venture funds were raised in the U.S. last year, totaling $11.6 billion in assets, according to research firm VentureSource. That was down from 215 new venture funds totaling $40.1 billion in 2007.

“Today’s fund-raising market is a have and have-not market,” said Christopher Douvos, co-head of private-equity investing for the Investment Fund for Foundations, an organization that invests in venture-capital funds on behalf of nonprofits. “The capital is really focused on accessing the best-performing funds.”

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In contrast to a decade ago, when many such deals went through with little trouble, today’s venture-backed acquisitions are fraught with landmines that can result in delayed payments and reduced purchase prices long after the deal has been struck, say venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and deal attorneys.

Such complications were evident in the $125.2 million acquisition of privately held surveillance-technology firm Era Systems Corp. by SRA International Inc., a tech supplier to the federal government.

While the deal was struck in mid-2008, Era’s shareholders took a haircut on their purchase price and didn’t collect their reduced amount until last year, partly because of a disagreement during the escrow period.

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In 2010, the region enjoyed one of its strongest slates of initial public offerings for years. A total of 15 local companies backed by venture capital went public last year, up from two Bay Area companies in 2009 and only one in 2008, according to new data from research firm VentureSource. It was the strongest year of local IPOs since 2007, when 21 Bay Area venture-backed companies went public, according to VentureSource.

Among the Bay Area companies that went public last year were biomedical company Pacific Biosciences of California Inc. in Menlo Park and electric car maker Tesla Motors Inc. in Palo Alto. In total, all of the local companies raised nearly $1.3 billion in IPO proceeds, up from just $103.7 million in 2009 and $54 million in 2008, according to VentureSource.

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