Michael Moritz, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist, are shrugging off talk of economic collapse and scouting for winners anyway. “A downturn can be a very good time to build a company,” he contends. “The parvenus and the pretenders are gone. The only people who want to start a company in a time like this are the ones with the greatest conviction.”

It’s really something that is needed to become a great entrepreneurs!

Mr. Moritz’s firm, Sequoia Capital, scored big by helping Cisco Systems expand during a tech slump in the late 1980s. Now Mr. Moritz, a former journalist who became a billionaire by backing Yahoo and Google, is scouting not only in the United States but also in China, India and Israel. “We’re planting our version of winter wheat,” he declares.