Is Google Ventures the next Intel Capital? Will Google Ventures one day be more active, bigger and more prolific than Intel Capita? Please discuss.

Google Ventures already employs 50 people including 8 venture partners.

That already makes them one of the biggest venture firms in Silicon Valley, by people.

$1.5 billion is within a billion of the largest fund size I've ever seen -- NEA's $2.6 fund.

$1.5 billion is also the size of Andresseen Horowitz Fund III. It's huge.

Which means that now Google Ventures is one of the biggest venture firms in Silicon Valley, in terms of dollars managed.

This is particularly relevant since venture capital investments are way down this year:

Venture firms invested $6.5 billion in 890 deals in the third quarter, according to the report, which the association prepares with PricewaterhouseCoopers using data from Thomson Reuters. That's down 11 percent in terms of dollars and 5 percent in terms of deals from the second quarter. And it's substantially down from the third quarter of 2011, when $7.3 billion went into 992 deals.

In general it is much harder for startups to get funding now than in 2011.

So the presence of a big player like Google Ventures is a welcome one.

"We’re  not competing to beat other VCs. We’re competing for the attention and mindshare of entrepreneurs."   What a great approach.

Still, with that much money to put to work, I wonder if it means they cannot make small investments.

It's hard to see small investments being worth their time. 

Well from what we hear A16Z is putting in capital at all sort of stages with about similar size so GV could also follow similar pattern.