Feinstein & Fleming: Dynamic Small-Cap Duo?

I've been curious about what blogger and former VC Michael Feinstein has been up to, ever since I bumped into him over the summer at one of the OpenCoffee Club gatherings in Central Square. Feinstein, formerly at Atlas Venture and Venrock, is also a regular presence at the Web Innovators Group.

At the last Web Innovators Group, Feinstein was wearing a stick-on name tag that linked him to Clear Stream Ventures, and when I asked him if that was the name of a new VC firm he was starting, he told me it was a placeholder.

Things got more interesting last week, when I ran into a VC who told me that Feinstein had been to a Deloitte-sponsored lunch, and talked a bit about what he was up to.

After trying for a time to put together an early-stage fund using the Clear Stream name, Michael has now linked up with Bob Fleming, founder of Prism Venture Partners. (Fleming left Prism as part of Woody Benson's extreme make-over of that Needham firm, now known as Prism VentureWorks.) Feinstein and Fleming are apparently now working together to raise a fund to invest in small-cap public companies, using some space at the Waltham office of Foley Hoag, a law firm.

"I will confirm that we are doing something oriented around small-cap public companies," Feinstein writes via e-mail, adding that he and Fleming won't have anything to announce officially until 2008.

Feinstein did acknowledge that he'd been working earlier to try to set up a seed-stage VC firm, but that he may have missed the right moment for that: "I was probably too late compared to some of the new funds in Boston -- .406, DACE, Kepha, etc."

This will be an interesting project to watch ... and I'm eager to find out more...