These have not been the best of times for the venture capital business, but there's still plenty of money out there looking for the right deals. Case in point is San Mateo-based Greylock Partners, which has put together a $575 million fund - and brought on Reid Hoffman, founder of the business-oriented social networking site Linkedin, as a partner. Hoffman, who has his finger in a number of Silicon Valley companies, will stay on as executive chairman of Linkedin. Greylock, by the way, has backed Linkedin and Facebook. From the NYT:

David Sze, a partner at Greylock, said that around half a billion dollars was the ideal fund size because it allowed the firm to invest in a range of deals. It often invests between $250,000 and $6 million in very young companies, as it did with LinkedIn, Digg and Workday. But it has also invested up to $25 million in growing companies, as it did with Pandora, Zipcar and OutlookSoft.

Bunches of young, fast-growing companies in the L.A. area (especially in tech, health care and e-commerce) are no doubt paying close attention to the Greylock fund. These days, half a billion is nothing to sneeze at.