Would be law students have their LSAT, medical schoolers have their MCAT, and MBAs have their GMAT. Why should aspiring venture capitalists be left out of the fun of proving their self worth in a quick test?

Past Venture Voice guest Guy Kawasaki announced in his blog today that he's developed the VCAT (Venture Capital Aptitude Test).

Anyone who's just dropped $100k and two years of their life on an MBA will be loathe to learn that their degree will cost them 5 points. And just when you thought you'd seen your last aptitude test!

On the other hand, Guy might be viewing freshly minted VC analysts with a glass-half-empty mentality. The wise anonymous blogger at Going Private points out that the VC gigs might save the world of more management consultants. She writes "For the small gift of just $175,000 per year and a reasonable carry, you can save an MBA from the horror of Booz Allen. That's less than $480.00 per day." Do your part today at Dan Primack's 4th Annual Internship Drive.

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Premal Shah believes your last name doesn't need to be Gates or Rockefeller in order to make a real dent in global poverty. After leaving his job as a Principal Product Manager at PayPal, it has taken Premal less then a year to make good on Kiva's pledge that all it takes to become a micro lender is a credit card and access to a computer. Raising money "Howard Dean Style" from over 13,000 online lenders, Kiva has provided more than a million dollars in low-cost working capital to small-scale entrepreneurs in less developed countries from Bulgaria to Uganda. The site boasts high repayments rates and soon hopes to offer lenders interest. We talk to Premal about how working in Silicon Valley has shaped his approach to combating poverty, how he believes the market "bakes in psychic and emotional returns," and how the power of online communities can strengthen the world of micro credit.

While VCs rightly demand that their portfolio companies have great marketing, they generally have awful marketing themselves. If you've ever been an entrepreneur in fund raising mode, you've read some line to this effect a million times on VC sites: "We partner with great entrepreneurs to build world-class companies." Just try Googling it.

Since I have yet to find the venture firm that openly aims to fund mediocre entrepreneurs to create miserable companies, I've always found this a case of stating the obvious. But, believe it or not, there are some cool VC sites worth checking out. Here's a list of the top five VC web pages. (Note: This does not rank the quality of the firms, just of their sites.)

As many guests have said on this show, there's little value in an idea that's not executed. The Onion illustrates this concept perfectly in a recent news brief:

Changing gears -- smoothly and at the right time -- is something that the best venture capitalists do extremely well. By changing gears, I mean shifting from one investment theme to another. After building expertise in big box retail investing, for example, it's no easy feat to abandon that knowledge to pursue something totally different like communications investing. Yet that is precisely

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Real business networking takes place in the country club, at the chamber of commerce and on the golf course. After all, the Internet is just for friending strangers on MySpace and poking friends on Facebook. If you said all that to Reid Hoffman, he might think twice about adding you as a contact in LinkedIn, the business networking site he started that connects over seven million professionals. Although his Palo Alto-based company is now profitable and growing rapidly, Reid still thinks he has yet to hit the tipping point. Reid’s goal wasn’t always to be an entrepreneur: He just wanted to change the world. His original career choice was “public intellectual”. Hear if his career switch is paying off.