I briefly thought: “hmm… is this a Lou Dobbs quits CNN for Space.com?”

Then I figured: “nah… this is a reporter moving from one medium to another.” The fact that Venture Beat founder Matt Marshall was matching the reporter’s salary raised some eyebrows, for sure, but online ads are not where they were in 2000. In fact, IDC just reported that Q4 2007 online ads stood at $7.3B. That’s a lot of coin.

Anyway, the main reason why we’re not in the same mindset as before is simple: Venture Beat went out and raised money after bootstrapping operations. They remained in the black throughout… how much did they raise?

A whopping $320,000. That’s wise and a sign of good things to come: the company can always raise money in the future, and given the A-list backers list, they can if need be:

Investors include ex-Googlers Georges Harik and Aydin Senkut, Mike Brown (Foundation Capital), MHS Capital, Amidzad and the White Sand Group.

Nowadays, mistake #1 is raising too much money and not not enough.

Marshall must be reading enough nightmare stories on Venture Beat to have avoided such an outcome.

In the bubble days, we’d be reading that he raised $32M on a $68M pre-money valuation and spent $320,000 on a swanky party with a guest list that could not identify Marshall from a list of attendees or tell you what Venture Beat actually was.