The venture capital valuations for still-have-that-new-car-smell startups like Quora, FourSquare, Blippy are reaching unprecedented levels, and we wanted to find out why. Top VCs Marc Andreessen, Ron Conway and David Hornik came by the TechCrunch offices to debate the issue.

Four month old Blippy is worth around $38 million. Quora, still in private beta, is valued at around $86 million in its most recent round. And Foursquare will be worth $80 million or more when it closes the round it’s negotiating now.

These are all young, basically pre-revenue startups. A year ago these valuations would have been unthinkable. So what’s driving the feeding frenzy? The IPO market is still mostly closed to startups, and most acquisitions are still in the low tens of millions of dollars. There’s no clear profitable exit for VCs who invest at these valuations.

the tool promises to you let you (or developers) modify any application without actually modifying it. To do that, the software constantly looks for easily identifiable elements of an application (dialog boxes, scroll bars, buttons, etc.) and then “alters their behavior” by effectively taking over your display, leaving the actual program running in the background and displaying the augmented version instead. According to the researchers, the possibilities from there on out are virtually endless, and include things like adding iTunes buttons to your Word toolbar and tweaking Photoshop to display previews for a whole range of effects at once.

5) Remember that institutional character — like a liquid cupped in your hand — is fragile; easily lost; and hard, if not impossible, to regain. Egomaniacal moves, personal grandiosity, greed, and deception create impressions that are hard to erase. Whole Foods founder, John Mackey, sabotaged the integrity of his own exalted brand, damaging the company’s internal pride and customer admiration far more badly than any competitor could have, due to his self-inflating and his misleading “anonymous” blogging, hiding his identity through an anagram of his wife’s name, “rehodab.”