Tom Huseby, a venture capitalist with SeaPoint Ventures, who focuses on investing in wireless companies, shared his thoughts this morning at Mobile Northwest 2008 in Seattle about the economy, and offered a more measured view of how it is affecting venture capital. He said things like the stock market, bank failures and even the memo distributed by Sequoia Capital two weeks ago, which told its portfolio companies to brace for a deep economic downturn, are inflicting undue fear on the start-up community. Last week, he said his mother called from Florida to give him her regards. “She must have thought I was in the midst of total chaos and doom and gloom, but really, I was too busy to notice, other than seeing my net worth diminish. Who would have thought early-stage VC was one of the safer investments? Who would have thought it was better than mortgages?...It’s better because no one expects to get money out of it for a long while. We are equity driven..No one borrows money to build a venture fund.”

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Huseby called the “Sequoia Panic Notes,” which were paired with a visual of a grave stone with the message R.I.P.: Good Times, “hypocrisy and hearsay.” On follow-up, he revised the words to “hyperbole and histrionic.” He added while they were spreading a negative message, he successfully conducted a capital call and committed to funding a new startup. “Capital continues to flow.” Still, he said there will be an impact. VC’s will be less likely to connect the dots and see a company’s potential. Anything that was easy, is gone. “It’s gone. You won’t get a lot of people getting a second round and a third. It’s going to be hard. Hope is diminished.”

On the wireless industry specifically, he said: “The general downturn won’t be good for anything. There’s nothing that’s counter cyclical. I don’t think people will buy more games, or spend more on their phones. They are going to do less of everything. But the really neat thing is that people don’t make the decision to consume advertising. The consumption of advertising isn’t something they elect to do, but they [advertisers] have constrained budgets, and they are becoming more constrained. It’s usually out of the budget called “the new shit budget.” The key to mobile advertising is to get out of the new shit budget. We are never going to make it otherwise. Advertising on mobile phones is going to be part of everything. It is the medium we have to turn to in media. It’s one of the most powerful mediums that’s launched in the world.”