Here’s a quick test of your entrepreneurial mettle: Would you like to pitch your company to a high-powered audience of investors, journalists and, generally speaking, techies? If not, keep your day job.

The chance to pitch– along with a stage and an audience–was the prize Tuesday for five selected startups at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco.

I wasn’t there, but I read about it in Five Startups Take Flight At Web 2.0 LaunchPad yesterday on TechCrunch. Jason Kincaid offers a short explanation of each of the five startups, plus–a very nice touch–a sample of the questions and answers.

The Q&As are brief summaries, but they do have a nice feel to them. How do you like this one, as ZeaLOG answers a question about generating leads for its Web app–tracking progress toward personal goals:

What seems to happen is natural virality; people will show it to coworkers, spouse. People seem to come in groups.

Now there’s a great term: virality. Does your Web startup offer virality? And if you can’t guess immediately what that means, you could pick up a book by Seth Godin, or read it in the second half of the sentence.

Tim BerryTim Berry

Tim Berry is the founder and chairman of Palo Alto Software and Bplans.com. Follow him on Twitter @Timberry.