Growing competition to invest the next great start-up company has prompted venture capital firms to move from early-stage funding to what amounts to salvage operations. The Wall Street Journal reports that VC firms are taking a rummage-sale approach as they seek out long-depressed companies that somehow survived the burst of the dot-com bubble and may be on their way back. The Journal cites as an example a computer-storage company, BlueArc Corp., dubbed a later-stage “survivor,” that managed to emerge from the ruins of the tech breakdown and, with some financial restructuring and management changes, was able to attract investors. What really is attracting VC firms that normally focus on early-stage companies, however, is that investing in these later-stage survivor companies may have a big payback sooner as they are a lot closer to an initial public offering than start-ups. That’s becoming a bigger deal these days as the average time for a VC-backed company to launch an IPO has grown from five to six years in the late 1990s to nine years today, according to Thomson Financial and the National Venture Capital Association.