It’s time for Ask a VC, and this week Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital was back. We talked about whether it’s worth it for startups to launch at a conference like DEMO or Disrupt, the decision to turn a profitable lifestyle business into a venture-backed, cash-burning startup, how entrepreneurs in other countries can find US mentors and the value of MBAs.

In one of our more personal questions from a reader Daryn asks Sabet what he’d be doing now if he wasn’t a VC.

Tune in below for his answers.

Izhar Armory of Charles River Ventures was my guest on Ask a VC this week and he answered a host of reader questions including whether Twitter should be making money from celebrity Tweets, whether MBSAs aspiring to be entrepreneurs should drop out of school, what role academia still plays in the startup economy and why entrepreneurs today aren’t starting more substantial, life-changing companies.

But the bulk of the conversation was around the controversial concept of patents, particularly the way companies like Intellectual Ventures use them. Armory is on the board of Intellectual Ventures and explains the “misunderstood company.”

Video below.

My guest this week on Ask a VC is Peter Barris of NEA. NEA is one of the oldest venture firms in the country, one of the first to be bicoastal and one that unabashedly sticks to the same mega-fund strategy in good times and bad.

Reader questions for Barris included everything from how to avoid getting cheated by bad VCs and what metrics he looks at when investing in an ecommerce company.

And for those of you who write in week after week asking why more VCs don’t invest in the rest of America– Barris is an investor after your own heart. He tells the story of how loyalty for his hometown of Chicago has lead to a burgeoning portfolio of promising deals– including the first venture stake in Groupon.

Mike Maples, my guest on Ask a VC this week, is known for backing some of the best Web 2.0 entrepreneurs early on and hunting down “Thunder Lizards” or the 15 truly disruptive companies that hatch each year. But some of his most celebrated investments have turned controversial. In this video he defends Digg’s honor against some tough reader questions and defends Chegg’s co-founder and chairman Osman Rashid’s decision to get into hardware. For non-haters, he answers some general questions on why he doesn’t back more middle-aged entrepreneurs and how much of a stake he needs to do a deal.

Enjoy! And check out our earlier interview with Maples and his three companies that got away here.

Ask a VC was on hiatus for a few weeks, but your Friday investor-talk fix is back. Our guest this week is Tony Conrad, partner at True Ventures and founder of About.Me, which recently sold to AOL along with TechCrunch.

There was a pent-up flood of questions this week, and Conrad addressed many of them. In case you want to skip around here they are in order:

-Why does True Ventures invest in more product and gadget companies than most VCs? What do they look for?
-True’s views on International investing
-Conrad’s advice on getting into business in Southeast Asia and the moment he knew he’d “gone native.”
-Does Conrad have a secret “formula” for building companies to flip? And did he sell About.Me so early, because he didn’t believe in the business?
-Why True isn’t betting big in the current game frenzy.
-Why True doesn’t bet on education or music companies.
-And a general roundup of questions about how to pitch True.

In a previous life Conrad did business development deals in the wild west of South East Asia, so those emerging market questions are fair game too. But whatever you want to know, get your questions in quickly to askaVC(at)TechCrunch(dot)com, because we tape this afternoon.

This week’s Ask a VC has a different twist, since we had a different kind of VC on the show, John O’Farrell Andressen Horowitz’s guru on business development and deal-making.

The questions you asked O’Farrell are below. As usual, feel free to watch the whole show or use the links to skip ahead to your question.

So those startups or would-be entrepreneurs out there with burning questions about deal making? This is the perfect week to send your questions to AskaVC(at)techcrunch(dot)com.

That gives us just enough time to do this week’s episode of Ask a VC, starring George Zachary of CRV. Zachary’s investments include Twitter, Yammer and Crunchies nominee Millenial Media. Zachary is deeply connecting in the industry and can regale you with stories about working with everyone from the iconic Jim Clark to Elon Musk to Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey. He also spent some time in Hollywood producing movies with other ex-PayPalers, so questions about the Hollywood-Silicon Valley cold war are fair game too.

We film in just two hours so get your questions in NOW to askavc(at)techcrunch(dot)com

I have a dilemma with Ask a VC. Generally, I’m trying to do shows that are under 10 minutes, so they’re more consumable. But in the case of Ask a VC, I want to get to as many reader questions as possible and would rather not cut someone off when they are giving you business advice. So starting this week we’re going to post the whole show as usual below, and give you links to each question and answer.

That way if you don’t have 15 minutes to watch it all, you can still find out the answer to your question or a question that you are grappling with. I usually find that its easier to consume long-form videos in podcast form than during my daily blog reading, so as a reminder, you can also download the episodes of any of our TCTV shows from iTunes.

This week, Redpoint Ventures’ Satish Dharmaraj was our first return guest and we got to a good number of questions including:

Dharmaraj focuses on a lot of Redpoint’s consumer Web portfolio, but he has a history with enterprise too. I’ll be interested to hear which he’s most excited about in 2011. Because he’s a last minute fill-in, we have a quick turn around so get your questions in now to AskaVC(at)techcrunch(dot)com.

Who cares about enterprise software? Apparently you do. Even though I posted this solicitation for Ask a VC questions late on a Thursday, I woke up this morning to one of the better inboxes of questions since the show began.

Our guest in your virtual hot seat was Jason Green of Emergence Capital. Like a lot of things in tech, Green is a believer that the hype in software-as-a-service may have over-promised in the short term, but has underestimated how big this trend will get over time– and how big companies can get. His LPs certainly hope so. There are few firms who have bet so heavily on this single trend.

Readers asked most of the hard questions like, “If cloud is the future why are companies like Oracle, SAP and IBM doing so well?” and when– if ever– a billion dollar revenue enterprises would be confident enough in SaaS providers to have absolutely no servers in the back room.

We talk about Yammer– Green’s investment– and Salesforce– the investment that started Emergence– and which of them will win the social enterprise, and whether Jive could be a spoiler. We also discuss how the trend plays globally, both with startups and customers.

Video below.

Habib Kairouz of Rho Ventures was my guest on Ask a VC this week, and as I mentioned earlier this week, he’s had a range of Web exits in the last ten years. He’s also seen tremendous changes in his home tech market of New York. It’s gone from silly Silicon Alley days to tumbleweeds and now to a thriving hub that’s stolen Boston’s East Coast venture thunder, at least when it comes to consumer Internet companies.

In this episode we talk about what New York finally got right, why Rho has offices in Canada, the value of an incubator versus bootstrapping and why Kairouz doesn’t think there’s as much opportunity in online beer as there is in wine.

(Note: Apologies on my audio. We had some issues, but Kairouz is the one answering the questions and his is just fine.)

Stalder answered a range of reader questions including basic advice for pitching Matrix and how Google failing to acquire Groupon impacted the social commerce space. (Matrix is an investor in the number three player BuyWithMe and Gilt Groupe.)

Every week I’m getting more tactical questions from entrepreneurs in the trenches, so I wanted to get as many in as possible. We also talk about opportunities to save the doomed media business, the curse of crossing your fingers and hoping for advertising revenues, when to take money from angels vs. VCs, what entrepreneurs should not use venture capital money on, and why– for better or for worse– Stalder says his firm probably would have been the last guys to invest in Twitter’s A or B venture rounds. Towards the end of the video we discuss whether valuations are still climbing or finally coming down to earth as some investors flee towards later stages, and the one thing an entrepreneur can do to turn Stalder off.