We need more geeks. Personally, we love geeks. But the truth is that geeks are critical to our country’s economic and technical excellence.

Last year, the National Academies of Science and Engineering published a report called “Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future.” The premise of the report is that the United States is being challenged in science and technology by global competitors such as China, India, Israel and the European Union. China’s universities graduate more than 600,000 people every year in engineering, computer science, and information technology; U.S. universities graduates 222,000 people every year in the same majors. Our ability to build and fuel great innovative companies is based in the quality of our workforce. Ask any high tech CEO and he or she will tell you they are challenged to fill their technical and engineering positions. It’s not just a question of cost, but of the quality and quantity of potential domestic candidates.

The issue is complex and involves our attitudes toward the rest of the world, during a time when the rest of the world isn’t so happy with us. We need to work to solve that and make it easier for those smart graduates from other countries come here to invent new stuff. But the United States also needs to put science back into our own classrooms.

I propose a simple solution: add science to the SAT Reasoning Test test along with reading, writing, and math. By making science a required subject for testing prior to admission to college, we would ensure that all of America’s college students would be grounded with a solid science foundation and would encourage a greater number of college students to major in science and technology fields.

An entrepreneur I respect: “I had a VC in my office today pitching us on taking their money and he said something interesting; he talked about our profitability as a species of strangulation, in that we have willingly choked off a lot of potential growth expenses to continue to bootstrap. He’s right. But there’s nothing like the discipline of fueling hires thru cashflow to keep you honest…”

He’s right? Must have been some MBA-programmed associate who tried that line out on my guy. Sometimes I’m embarrassed to call myself a venture capitalist, when I hear other VCs talk like that. Building businesses isn’t a zero-sum game, where there’s only just so much business and if you don’t get all of it, right now and without regard to operating or gross margins, you will never get it.

I recommend reading Joe Nocera’s column about Beliefnet in today’s New York Times (subscription might be required, but I can’t figure out the current policy on URLs), for a more rational view on how business gets done. The lead sentence: “I found the Chapter 11 period exhilarating.”

Last year, more than 1,500 Web 2.0 companies were started in Silicon Valley, according to the January 22 edition of The Guidewire Report.

We believe the number: We see a lot of Web 2.0 pitches from young entrepreneurs. The basic pitch: for an investment of $2 to $5 million, they can build a company that Google, Yahoo or Microsoft will buy. And, in under two years, we can get 5-10 times our money back. How could you not like that?!

We don’t. We always decline to participate in deals like that. We think this is a kind of disease, often caught by these youngsters in business school. They are looking to cash in on Web 2.0 fever and flip their companies quickly for a nice tidy sum.

These entrepreneurs confuse a feature for a company. Often these ideas depend on a platform controlled by the large company that they want to sell their company to. But they can’t get traction without permission from the large company. Examples include on-deck mobile phone features, new enhancement for a CRM service, or a cool feature for search engines. When someone else controls the platform, someone else controls the market — and the exit.

If Guidewire is right, we can assume some of those 1500 companies are doing more than features (including the three companies in our portfolio that would be classified as Web 2.0). But we know a lot of those companies are following exactly this trajectory, and they’re chasing the same markets with only minor variants to the theme. These deals are not only over priced but tend to lead to dysfunctional behavior among the competitors.

How can you tell a feature company? They let the competition define their product or service. You can see it in their Powerpoint presentations. On a slide, often one that appears before the product is defined, they list a half dozen new start ups that nobody outside of the blogosphere and venture capital have heard of. None of the “competitors” have gain market traction and most enterprises or consumers have never heard of them. These entrepreneurs mistake venture-based valuations for market validation.

Great companies are built by entrepreneurs who want to change the world. They have a basic belief that they will be rewarded for either defining a new market or redefining an old one. They do not want to be bought by Google or Yahoo!, they want to be the next Google or Yahoo!. My parents used to tell me two things about starting businesses, “if it’s easy, everyone would be doing it” and “easy money seldom is easy.” Most Web 2.0 entrepreneurs never learned those lessons. If Web 2.0 is to have legs, then we need find a new generation of entrepreneurs who are willing to build their companies to last rather than to flip.