This just in: If you’re a startup with some savvy technology or great people, Google Inc. may be interested.

At least those were the words expressed by Salman Ullah, Google’s director of corporate development, and Sean Dempsey, the company’s principal of corporate development, at the Los Angeles Venture Association’s 2007 Investment Capital Conference, held in downtown L.A. on Wednesday. The pair of seasoned executives, who help lead a corporate development team of 15 people, said Google presently closes one to two deals per month. Most of these are small, but on occasion, there’s the whopping $1.65 billion acquisition. That’s what Google paid for YouTube Inc. last November.

But most deals resemble Google’s $28 million acquisition of Endoxon, a mapping software developer, in December, or its $23 million purchase of Adscape, a video game advertising startup, in February of this year. Still, that’s not pocket change, especially to startups eager to cash out.

Dempsey said Google sees M&A not as a strategy, but as a tool, and that the company looks to buy what it can’t economically build in an accelerated time frame. Google is both proactive and reactive, aggressively seeking acquisition targets but accepting pitches on a regular basis. And at least 70% of Google’s internal resources – engineering, products, sales, etc. – are focused on its core business, that of search and advertising. The remaining 30% is focused on products such as Gmail, Google’s free Web e-mail, Google Earth, and it’s wi-fi offerings, and thus the company’s acquisition targets will likely need to fit into those groups. The company looks for talent, technology and, in some cases, “monetizable traffic,” such as was the case with the YouTube deal, Dempsey said.

So how do you get heard or seen by the Google corp-dev team? Don’t call – but write, said Ullah, indicating the tech-savvy crew doesn’t “know how to manage phone calls.”

“We follow up on every e-mail we get,” he said.

That’s good news for all the investment bankers and corporate lawyers who are undoubtedly anxious to do more deals. And who wouldn’t love to sell out to Google? —Cheryl Meyer in Los Angeles