I was fortunate to have Kleiner Perkins’ investment partner Ted Schlein join me on Ask A VC this week. Schlein, who joined Kleiner in 1996 and has nearly two decades of experience in the VC world, discussed what’s changed in the VC industry as well as what the expectation is for a return on investment for startups. We also tackled what’s next in the enterprise world as Schlein sits on the boards of a number of enterprise companies including Jive Software, and was an early employee at Symantec.

This week’s Ask A VC series features a slew of awesome guests in the investment world. Tomorrow, we have True Ventures’ partners Tony Conrad and Puneet Agarwal in the studio, and Thursday, Shasta Ventures’ co-founder Rob Coneybeer will be in the hot seat.

Remember, you ask questions either in the comments or here and we’ll ask them of our VC guests.

Coming off True Ventures’ new $205 million third fund, there’s a lot to talk about with Conrad and Agarwal. And the firm now has $600 million under management.

Conrad is the Founding Venture Partner at True Ventures where he serves on the Board of Directors of Automattic (WordPress), appssavvy, Coffee & Power, Quarterly, StockTwits, RescueTime, PastFuture (GDGT), KISSmetrics, 20×200, Smarterer, Qualaroo, Trippy. A serial entrepreneur, Conrad co-founded about.me (acquired by Aol in December 2010) and Sphere which was acquired by Aol in April 2008.

Agarwal, who is a General Partner at True Ventures, started his career as a Product Manager at Crossworlds Software, an early integration software startup sold to IBM. He also spent time in the investment banking world, at BEA in product management, marketing roles and more.

Shasta Ventures’ Coneybeer co-founded the firm in 2004, started his career working in the Astro Space division of Martin Marietta, where he helped build the first EchoStar spacecraft. Later he moved into venture capital at New Enterprise Associates and then founded Shasta.

We’ll be asking Coneybeer, who focuses on investments in mobile and wireless startups, about the firms’ latest bets on collaborative consumption, his thoughts on the current fundraising climate, and more.

Check out our latest Ask A VC interview with Kleiner Perkins’ partner Megan Quinn.

Please send us your questions for Conrad, Agarwal or Coneybeer here or put them in comments below!

Kleiner Perkins’ partner Megan Quinn joined us in this week’s Ask A VC, chatting about her views on what’s next for ecommerce, where mobile innovation is heading, technical product managers vs. non-technical PMs, and more.

Quinn is one of Kleiner’s newest partners, with previous product experience at payments company Square and Google. Considering her roles at these two companies, Quinn has some very interesting views on how mobile will shape our lives in the coming years and which ecommerce companies are doing mobile right.

Check out the video above for more.

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.

Sabet is in the middle of some of the most interesting companies on the Web today including Tumblr, Twitter and Boxee. And as you can see from his last time on the show, he’s a great guest. Last time we talked about everything from investing in Africa to why Boston is struggling to get its startup mojo back.

What do you want to know? Send your questions to askavc(at)techcrunch(dot)com. Feel free to check out his blog to come up with some good ones.

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.

For one thing, he’s from the East Coast. And as a former member of the Israeli army– aka the country’s entrepreneurial finishing school– and a former exec for Tel Aviv-based Onyx Interactive, he’s well versed in what has worked so well in one of the world’s most surprising entrepreneurial hot spots.

Armony is also on the board of Intellectual Ventures, an invention factory set up by Nathan Myhrvold. Intellectual Ventures has been lauded by some, but is incredibly controversial in Silicon Valley where insiders lob one of the biggest possible insults at Myhrvold: A patent troll.

Lastly, a good deal of Armony’s experience is in enterprise software. So questions about the new developments in enterprise are fair game too.

We tape mid-morning tomorrow, so send your questions now to askavc(at)TechCrunch(dot)com.

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.

Maples was early on both the super angel and Web 2.0 bandwagons, investing in companies like Digg, Twitter and Chegg. He’s noted as one of the guys who coined the “pivot” concept– one of the most overused buzz words of the last year.

Barris is more of an old-school VC. NEA is one of the oldest firms and while it hasn’t done as well as its brethren in modern consumer Web movement, it has done one of the best jobs of making huge scale work. The firm has $11 billion in capital under management and invests in three continents.

No doubt, our readers have very different questions for each. Maples arrives in our studios momentarily so get your questions in now to askavc(at)techcrunch(dot)com.

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.

Enterprise software fell out of favor during the Web 2.0 consumer boom, but now, many investors believe a new wave of more disruptive, more sophisticated cloud-based services is bubbling up. Emergence already has one strong horse in that race with Yammer. Wonder how they view the upcoming Salesforce.com Chatter v. Yammer battle royale? I intend on asking Green.

What do you want to ask him? We’re taping early tomorrow morning so send in your questions now to askavc(at)techcrunch(dot)com.

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.)