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CNET News.com reporters Michael Kanellos and Carl-Gustav Linden recently met with Steve Jurvetson to discuss how the downturn in the broader economy will impact venture capital firms. For those of you who don’t already know, Jurvetson is a leading venture capitalist in Silicon Valley, best-known for his involvement in Hotmail, Interwoven, Kana, and Skype. He is a managing director at the presitigous venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

When asked how much the economic downturn has changed the venture capital, Jurvetson’s response was positive. He claims that in an up or down market, there will always be ideas. The market for innovation and entrepreneurship should not be considered volatile with respect to broader economy; in his experience, entrepreneurial activity can almost be thought of as a constant,or even continuously accelerating.

Jurvetson positions himself as somewhat of a maverick or rebel when describing his investment mantra:

I don’t really care what the venture industry thinks…We want to invest in unique ideas that can change the world. We don’t even care what industry they fall into, but ideally they’re driven by some major disruptive force, as a different way of looking at the economy and venture opportunities. I know that 10 years from now we will be investing in something that relates to that.

Over the next five years, Jurvetson sees a lot of money going into emerging clean tech and nanotech. He states that nanotech companies have yet to establish a business concept; most of the action is happening on the R&D level. Until the industry adopts more clear business models, Jurvetson claims that internet-related companies will be the bulk of his investments.

For those of us who are scared that internet investments will decline as the fears of Bubble 2.0 grow stronger, we may find consolation in the following:

One of the reasons I think (Internet-related companies are) such a great place to invest is that the capital required to hit the market is much lower. Energy projects are much higher, and the same of course goes for pharmaceuticals. So the cost component is one. The second is network effects possible over the Internet; you can reach global customers like never before, so Skype is now 309 million users. I mean, measure that with a cost on a global basis to any traditional based model before the Internet.

The disruption point, in the case of Skype, in the case of Hotmail–is the most interesting one. They take existing businesses and turn them on their head, in terms of a business model. Hotmail was offering their product into a market that was used to paying for clients and servers, you paid five bucks a month for service for e-mail, as a separate bill item. Hotmail as a Web-based service changed forever the notion that it’s just an application that runs on a network.

Skype is doing the same for VoIP. I mean we all remember the time when we paid our phone bill, we probably still do. I’m going to remember those crazy days in the 21st century when you actually paid a separate bill for a phone service. It’s just an application, right?

It seems as though as long as internet applications and services remain disruptive, they will be attractive investments to the VCs. However, my fear is that many internet applications being developed today are not disruptive. We constantly witness the entrance of new applications that are merely a slight improvement over the competition. Very few entrants are truly “breaking it open,” as they say. Umair Haque, founder of Bubblegeneration, a consultancy that studies the economics of consumer-facing industries, and now the Director of the Havas Media Lab, thinks Web 2.0 is full of crap. If his predictions are true and companies continue to produce online services that lack value and business strategy, the robust market for web applications could have a dim future.