Meet Steve Jurvetson-He’s smart, aggressive, and at 31, has legendary tech financiers like John Doerr looking over their shoulders.

For Steve Jurvetson, even a routine auto tuneup can turn into a pitch meeting. “He figured out where I was going, jumped out of his car, and gave me a five-minute sell,” Jurvetson says of the entrepreneur who followed him to the mechanic. “It’s flattering. The first time.”

At 31, Jurvetson is behind two of the hottest Internet launches in Silicon Valley, launches that prompted the venture capital firm, Draper Fisher, to promote him to partner in just six months.

Draper Fisher Jurvetson’s investment of $1.7 million in Four11, a site offering free email and directory services, and its infusion of $3.55 million into Hotmail, saw combined returns of $130 million in just two years.

It rivals other legendary returns — like the $5 million purchase by John Doerr’s firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, of stock in Netscape Communications, that’s now worth a reported $264 million; or Sequoia Capital Partners’ $2 million investment in Yahoo!, purchasing stock that would now be worth an astonishing $1.4 billion.

When Jurvetson came aboard in 1995 after a stint at NeXT Computer, the firm had money in only a few Internet businesses. Jurvetson quickly changed that. He saw trends where other VCs couldn’t — and took risks where others wouldn’t. “Hotmail was turned down by 21 venture firms before we funded it,” he says.

“Steve is just pure energy,” says Mark Gainey, CEO and co-founder of Kana Communications, an email software company that has Jurvetson on its board. “He’s young, aggressive, competitive. He doesn’t pretend to know everything, but he’s willing to find it out.”

Which means Jurvetson’s days are a blur of meetings, international calls, faxes, and emails. He reads some 50 business plans a week, but it takes more than just a well-written idea to catch his eye. He’s looking for the future.

A good business plan will be fairly short, maybe 20 to 30 pages, and capture the zeal and spark of the entrepreneurs. Jurvetson is interested in how an idea unfolds and what its impact on an industry could be. “A bad one will have reams and reams of analysis and have a long, muddled description,” he says.

JURVEY’S HOT PICKS

Kana — email software company

GoTo.com — search engine that charges companies to list with it

Release Software — electronic software distribution company

SportSite — online sales of sporting equipment

Concept Shopping — coupon issuer customized for each user

Global Sight — helps Websites become multilingual, taking cultural nuances into account

Like a winning stockbroker’s, his opinions are sought by casual investors and hell-bent entrepreneurs alike. What are a few of his tips? He’s hot on Concept Shopping, a personalized coupon issuer, and Global Sight Corporation, which helps Websites become multilingual by taking cultural nuances into account. Why? “You want to find an idea that’s unlike anything you’ve seen in the last few months,” Jurvetson says.

As far as caveats are concerned, he sees DVD (digital versatile disc) as overhyped and nothing more than a new channel for information. He also hates mass-market software because it’s too hard a market to crack.

But some industry-watchers say the latest startup his firm funded is just as wrong.

DFJ recently invested in GoTo.com, an online search engine that charges companies to list with it, but is free to users. Going up against portals like Excite and Yahoo! seems like Internet suicide — but Jurvetson is convinced, again, that this is the next wave, giving users big-name talent rather than meta-tag — loading amateurs on their search returns.

“Steve has this attitude that DFJ should be financing not just ideas that follow a pattern but bold ideas,” says Scott Russell, general partner with Softbank Technology Ventures. “He swings for the fence.”

And Jurvetson loves the game. A typical day finds him racing in his black BMW 850i to meetings, to an ultimate Frisbee match in the afternoon, to a conference call with a potential client, and back to his office to weed through the pile of papers covered with his chicken scratch, which, if deciphered, could tell a startup’s fate.

From Jurvetson’s initial meeting with Four11′s founders, Larry Drebes and Mike Santullo, it took less than two weeks to the first round of funding. In typical Jurvetson fashion, the term sheet was signed on the trunk of his car before a Frisbee game. The usual turnaround for DFJ is four to six weeks, Jurvetson says, while other VCs will take several months.

There have been bad picks, however. “We were really excited about a company called Webflow,” Jurvetson says about a groupware software idea. The product, though, had some problems. “It took more effort to sell the product than we realized, and the idea was never fully delivered.”

Jurvetson is happy about the success of Four11 and Hotmail, but those companies are already off his radar screen. The technology has been proven, so for Jurvetson there is nothing left to discover. He’s already looking for the next unknown.

“There’s far more excitement in what’s not known,” he says. “The energy and charge comes when you feel an idea starting to come into light.”

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