But there are signs of life. Funding in the third quarter suddenly popped, up 17 percent from 2012. “I think this is the best time we’ve seen since 1999 to be a venture capitalist,” Mr. Backus said. He expects the returns on venture capital, which have been miserable since the bust, to greatly improve this year.

“Everyone talks about the mega win — who was in Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest,” he said. “But the bread and butter of venture firms is not those multibillion exits but the $200 million deals, and there are a lot of those.” As an example he pointed to GlobalLogic, which operates design and engineering centers. It was acquired in October in a deal that returned $75 million on New Atlantic’s $5 million investment.

Better returns would influence pension firms and other big investors to give more money to the V.C.’s, which would in term increase the number of deals.

“I would be really scared if all of sudden the industry raised $100 billion,” Mr. Backus said. “But I don’t know how you can stop that. The greed factor kicks in. Everyone wants a piece of action.”

Benchmark is putting together a new investment fund. Given its recent track record, it could easily raise $1 billion from its limited partners. Instead, it will keep the fund to its usual size, $425 million. That is a hallmark of the discipline that has attended Benchmark since its founding in 1995. While other V.C. firms have bulked up, offering more services to entrepreneurs, Benchmark has stayed lean.

Its founding partners did not put their name on the door, a way of stressing that all were equal and would share in the profits equally. For Silicon Valley venture capitalists, this was a radical move. A rival venture capitalist told an industry publication that this was “communism.”

Benchmark’s first fund quoted Voltaire: “God is not on the side of the big arsenals, but on the side of those who shoot best.” Its great dot-com hit was eBay, which was considered at the time the greatest venture capital success ever. In Randall Stross’s fly-on-the-wall 2000 book, “eBoys,” the partners are depicted as hardworking, smart and making it up as they go along, in the best venture capital tradition.