We also take the temperature of Matt McCall – the firm’s managing director and the blogger of VC Confidential – on the current venture climate. Finally, we highlight the SAVO Group and the Chicagoland Entrepreneurial Center for giving momentum to Windy City entrepreneurship.

Eric Olson (right) with TECH cocktail co-founder Frank Gruber. Photo credit: Lou Calamaras, MidwestBusiness.com

Every three months, Eric Olson buys a round of drinks for hundreds of area technology entrepreneurs and enthusiasts. His next order of business will be sourcing deals for venture capital rounds. Cheers to that.

The TECH cocktail co-founder and former FeedBurner/Google executive late in Feb. 2008 joined Northfield, Ill.-based venture capital firm DFJ Portage.

As an associate, the 25-year-old Olson will be tasked with finding new investment opportunities for the firm. There should be no shortage of conversations. Within the last year, DFJ Portage portfolio companies FeedBurner and TicketsNow have each sold for nine figures to Google and Ticketmaster respectively.

“I’m trying to be out and about talking to everybody,” said Olson, who grew up in Worcester, Mass. and moved to Chicago in 2005 to join FeedBurner. “This can mean shooting down to the University of Illinois in Champaign, bouncing around Chicago or checking out what’s going on in Madison, Wis.”

Olson worked at Google for a few months after it acquired FeedBurner last summer. He left in September to join a New York-based company called BuzzFeed and returned to Chicago earlier in 2008. In the summer of 2006, Olson started TECH cocktail with blogger and AOL product manager Frank Gruber.

The popular, free and quarterly cocktail party for technology professionals will be holding its first industry conference on May 29 at the Water Tower campus of Loyola University. Confirmed speakers include Jason Fried of 37signals (an internationally acclaimed Web design firm based in Chicago) and Adrian Holovaty (founder of citizen journalism Web site EveryBlock).

“There is a next generation of entrepreneurs who are coming through the ranks,” said the 43-year-old McCall. “At the end of the day, somebody like Eric has a better chance of knowing these people and interacting with them.”

DJF Portage, which has $200 million under management and is the Midwest regional affiliate of Silicon Valley-based venture firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, welcomes company operators to serve on its investment team. This includes Jamie Crouthamel, who started Chicago-based interactive advertising firm Performics with a seed investment from DFJ Portage in the late 1990s.

In 2004, Performics was sold to DoubleClick. Crouthamel, who is now a venture partner with DFJ Portage, co-invests with the firm and serves as an advisor to its portfolio companies.

Checking Your Watch

After signals that valuations for early stage companies were declining due to a souring economy, McCall is now seeing what could be the rise of dot-comedy 3.0. Recent success in the venture capital industry has given more firms (especially on the coasts) the capital and incentive to double down on new deals with minimal regard to price.

“Sometimes I have to look at my watch and make sure it’s not the late 1990s,” he said. “Entrepreneurs from companies doing one or a few million dollars in revenue are having conversations with coastal VCs who are telling them they can get $20 million in funding off a $100 million pre-money valuation. This is why we focus on the Midwest where people don’t get morbidly depressed during downswings and ecstatic when times are good.”

CEC Honors SAVO

Ernie Banks was among the hundreds of community leaders and innovators who converged on March 4 at the Ritz-Carlton in Chicago for the Momentum Awards, which were put on by the Chicagoland Entrepreneurial Center (CEC).

The Chicago-based SAVO Group picked up the Merrick Momentum Award for its success selling online sales tools to several large enterprises including IBM and William Blair. Merrick is also the name of a venture capital firm managed by Click Commerce founder and former CEO Michael Ferro (also the co-chairman of the CEC). Venture capitalist J.B. Pritzker was also honored with the Entrepreneurial Champion Award.

“It’s very tough when nobody believes in you but you,” Pritzker said. He added that entrepreneurs need to be “tenacious to the point of lunacy” and “learn from their roughest moments”.

Event co-host Pat Ryan Jr. (CEO of Chicago-based INCISENT Technologies) noted that the awards coincided with the 171st anniversary of the founding of Chicago. Since that time, Chicagoans have bootstrapped the development of the railroad, overcome a fire and withstood nearly a century of baseball futility on the North Side. Successful entrepreneurs learn their lessons. Will Cub fans?

Around Chicago

The Chicago Council for Science and Technology will offer a program on Wednesday night at the Chicago Cultural Center that features keynote speaker Robert Rosner (director of Argonne National Laboratory). More information about the event can be found here.

On Thursday morning, the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce continues its Applied Innovation Series with a session titled “Creating a Culture of Innovation,” which is led by William Wrigley Jr. Co. CTO Tawfik Sharkasi. More information about the program can be found here.