In the last two months, we have interviewed six VCs. In each case, we asked the same question: "How is early-stage financing doing during this downturn compared to the last one in 2001/2002?"

In this post, we consolidate all the responses, to see if a consensus among VCs emerged. But we also dig a bit deeper. We have been tracking Series A deals since the global financial crisis started. There is some concern that VCs are not walking the walk, that they say all the right things about investing through a downturn, but they may not actually do those things. In this post, we shine a light on that question.

Disclosure: I love Fred Wilson's blog. Union Square Ventures (USV) has invested in some amazing ventures that were far from obvious (i.e. they took risks), and they have invested in my friend Alex Iskold's venture. So, I am a fan. Hopefully, I was able to be a good journalist, restrain my enthusiasm, and ask Albert Wenger some good, probing questions. Read on and judge for yourself.

For the sixth in our investor interview series, we went east to India to chat with Alok Mittal, a partner at Canaan Partners, in the company's office in Gurgaon, India. We got his perspective on early-stage investing and specifically the challenges and opportunities for a venture starting out in India.

For the fifth in our series of interviews with investors, we decided to do something different. Elliott Dahan, of the START Fund, cannot write you a check. At least not yet; he is working on that. But he is trying to do something much more ambitious, which is to create a totally new model for funding early- and seed-stage ventures. VCs love to fund disruptive ventures. But the VC model itself has been pretty immune to change for decades. So Elliott has set himself the tough job of disrupting the disrupters.

Today we're launching a new channel called ReadWriteStart, in which we'll profile early stage startups and entrepreneurs. As well as startup profiles, we aim to help entrepreneurs in the critical early days of a start-up. We are a startup ourselves, building a business without external funding in a tough economy. So we know the spills as well as the thrills.

In this channel we'll focus on entrepreneurs building web technology ventures. That is what we know best. Some of our writing will be valuable to entrepreneurs in any line of business, but we'll focus on the specific technical, financial, management and personal challenges of building a business online.

This is the first in a weekly series of interviews with venture capitalists. We chose True Ventures to kick off the series because it closed a Series A deal for Syncplicity in the dark days of October 2008, earning it a spot on our A-Team. When it closed a second Series A with Loopfuse in February 2009, it joined a very small contingent of VCs that have done two Series A deals since the financial meltdown.