Ever heard of the "zero billion dollar business"?

Some companies, like Craigslist or Digg, enter a market, like classifieds or news, and by virtue of their amazing efficiency, can attract millions of users at almost no cost, and thus live off a fraction of the revenue that market leaders need to operate profitably.

So writes Fred Wilson, who calls these "zero billion dollar businesses" because they are highly disruptive and change the economics of their industries over time. Look at what Craiglist has done with classifieds advertising, with hardly two hand-fulls of employees. It has contributed to the tremendous stress faced now by large newspaper companies like Knight Ridder.

Wilson points to comments by Bill Burnham that something similar might be happening in the venture capital industry. "In fact, the time may be coming sooner than any of us know," Wilson says.

Wilson himself left a fund that a half-billion-dollar sized venture capital fund, and instead raised a fund of only $125 million. Burnham, too, is raising a small fund. We've talked about this phenomenon before, including a recent mention of San Francisco's Geneva Venture Partners.

But we are also witnessing the rise of the angels and "super angels" like Mark Cuban and Pierre Omidyar who can act like angels but have the balance sheets of VC funds. And we are seeing VC veterans like Alan Patricof and Vinod Khosla strike out on their own, presumably managing mostly their own capital. Again, the rise of the super angel or micro VC. It's basically the same thing when it comes to pros like Alan or Vinod.

We agree with Wilson that large VC firms won't disappear anytime soon. It is easy to get sidetracked by the low-cost Internet companies out there, and forget about all the other companies, including chip, biotech and telecom, that require significant financing. Nevertheless, we do get the strong sense that something fundamental has changed over the past year. The extreme pressure by promising start-ups to raise money from a brand-name VC firm -- just for the stamp of legitimacy -- seems to have relented. A guy like Naval Ravikant, formerly of Epinions, fell out with two of the large backers of the company, August and Benchmark, and won a settlement to a lawsuit not long ago.

He then went on to raise cash from a small, relatively unknown venture firm called Leapfrog Ventures, and has just launched another start-up. It is called Vast, which we'll probably write more about. Unlike in the past, when Naval may have been shut out by a clique of large venture firms fearful of funding a pariah, he is free to circulate in a relatively open field of hundreds of angels and independent venture capitalists: "'There might be cliques and groups, but there's no single VC cabal that runs the valley," he told us for this story about how things have changed here in Silicon Valley.

And smaller funds like LeapFrog are easier to understand because they have a coherent philosophy, vision or strategy. Peter Rip, for example, makes a big deal about investing in what he calls the "semantic" web. He's investing in companies that try to make more sense from what is already there on the web, and to make order from it. His investment in Riya, which uses sophisticated engineering to recognize people in photos online, is part of that. His investment in Vast is also drawing meaning from crawling Web sites, and lets people search it in ways that Google, using a full-text search, does not. Similarly, a guy like Fred Wilson has become known for a focus on new media, having invested in Feedburner and Delicious. They can project their philosophies in much more efficient ways than they could before: It is called The Blog. Or, of course, if you have names like Vinod or Alan Patricof, you don't need a blog.

There are too many experienced former executives and entrepreneurs running now for there to any tight hierarchy to exist. The old order hasn't collapsed. But it has seriously cracked. People used to complain to us that they couldn't raise money from the Sand Hilll Road crowd. That may soon be a pretty thin excuse.