The meltdown in the debt markets has been sending a chill across Silicon Valley since late last month, prompting predictions of a sharp retrenchment in the region's normally optimistic technology start-up businesses.

Many of the companies that emerged in the recent start-up boom will end up "spattered on windshields and radiator grills and be forgotten", said Michael Moritz, a partner at Sequoia Capital and an early backer of Google and Yahoo.