This is part of my series on Raising Venture Capital . I’m sure I’ll spark the ire of some VC’s for saying so, but there is certainly such a thing as black-out days in venture capital.  It is very difficult to raising venture capital between November 15 – January 7th.  It’s worth you knowing this so you don’t waste your time.  It’s also very important to understand so that you can properly plan when you raise money.

This is part of my ongoing series “Pitching a VC” – the outline is here . You’ve pitched several angels and VC’s.  Your friends and advisers tell you that this means you need revenue because in this economy VC’s will only fund businesses with revenue.  Now there are some firms Everybody seems to like you but nobody seems to be getting out their checkbooks.  Most of them are telling you that they just need to see a bit of traction before they’d be prepared to invest.

This is part of my ongoing series of posts and I need to file this one under both Raising Venture Capital and Startup Advice . Ajax was the new buzzword and many companies went overboard.  and the subsequent acquisition sprees of companies like Google, Yahoo!, I remember going to an Under the Radar conference in 2006 in the heat of the Web 2.0

Many startup companies hire advisory boards.  prominent industry luminaries to be closely associated with the company.  It’s done partly in hopes of gaining their wisdom but it’s also done to portray the company in a positive light through association. The CEO picks prominent people who are busy in their own right with their own companies.  This is part of my ongoing series Startup Advice .  It’s very tempting. 

This is part of my ongoing series “ Pitching a VC .” The “Triple Play” of VC Presentations large part of my series has been outlining what the typical VC PowerPoint presentation should look like.  Some also recently wrote a post about a company that came in for a presentation and never even got the slides out or presented a demo.  I photo courtesy of Atlanta Braves 8221;

This is part of my ongoing series about Raising Venture Capital . few years ago it became fashionable for large VC’s to do seed funding.  With open source software (LAMP stack) and cloud computing infrastructure it just wasn’t that expensive to get your company going and founders just wanted to raise less money.  This posting was inspired by an email from Rajat Suri who wrote me an email in response to Chris Dixon’s blog post (link below) from August, which recently re-ran on Business Insider and has generated much Twitter chatter. A

After my company was acquired by Salesforce.com I was asked to stop blogging and they took over my blog as an asset in the sale of the company.  I had previously raised VC in 1999, 2000, 2001 and 2005.  In case VC’s haven’t figured this out yet, shit rolls downhill.  On December 2nd, 2006 I wrote the blog post published later in this post when I was CEO of startup Koral about my experiences in pitching VCs.  My blog was wiped out. 

This is part of my ongoing series “ Start Up Advice ” but I’d really like to call this post, “VC Advice.” If a company has reached a level of success, has been around for a few years and you believe the company has potential to break out into a much bigger company then you should let the founders take money off of the table.  It’s Let me start with a couple of stories. A friend of mine 8221; It’s that simple.  Only

This is part of my ongoing series, “ Pitching a VC .” 8221;  Getting a meeting with a prominent angel or VC is difficult enough.  Some Some advice on how to do that was covered in this link – Getting Access to a VC .  This I spoke about the topic on Fox Business News yesterday in a great session with TechCrunch50 winner RedBeacon This post covers the day after.  The Day After (the waiting game begins)

This is part of my series on How to Raise VC but could equally be filed under Startup Advice more generally. recently got a phone call from an entrepreneur whom I respect and who runs a company that I hope will do great things one day.  He had pitched me in the past and I told him that for a variety of reasons his company was too early stage for me but that I would happily keep track of their progress. Handling PR with VCs I