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 about Raising Venture Capital . few years ago it became fashionable for large VC’s to do seed funding.  If the large VC doesn’t agree to do your A round then you’re in a bit of trouble.  Because as a potential A round investor I’m thinking to myself, “if 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

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 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 . Many of these businesses were what First Round Capital called FNACs (features, not companies – this acronym has always stuck with me). Broadly speaking this last trend has been healthy as it has brought an increase focus on launching products that you can test with the market and on capital efficiency.  I remember going to an Under the Radar conference in 2006 in the heat of the Web 2.0

Before: “We went through a series of meeting with of these venture capitalists and we didn’t really realize how to use those connections to our benefit. And that’s how you’re going to get any attention from VC’s.” How connections that you don’t realize you have can help with funding. If you read the recent announcement that UserVoice riased, $800,000 this program will help you learn the small changes that allowed them to do it. Marcus Nelson, the company’s co-founder, came to Mixergy to talk about the changes so his experience

In the first post in this three part series I described why I believe the VC market froze between September 2008 – April 2009 .  In In the second post I argued that as of September 2009 the pace of VC investments has increased rapidly (at least for software / Internet investments – the only sector on which I’m competent to comment), but only for those remaining VCs who have new enough funds and aren’t plagued by “the triage problem.” 8221;  This is a direct result of innovation around the iPhone / mobile computing, Facebook / Social Networks and Twitter (as distinct from Social Networks).  It

I had previously raised VC in 1999, 2000, 2001 and 2005.  In case VC’s haven’t figured this out yet, shit rolls downhill.  My blog linked to Brad Feld’s blog because I was so grateful for his series on term sheets and he was one of the biggest reasons that as a VC I felt compelled to blog.  On December 3rd Brad Feld wrote a one paragraph blog post 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.  After my company was acquired by Salesforce.com I was asked to stop

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 ongoing series “ Start Up Advice ” but I’d really like to call this post, “VC Advice.” We exchanged ideas when I was an entrepreneur along side him in NorCal in 05-07 and my point-of-view on founder / VC relationships hasn’t shifted even 1% since I went to the dark side. We were trading emails on a recent rant posted on The Funded about founders’ equity and here is what my friend 8221; 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

This is part of my blog series “ Pitching a VC .” I’ve sat through a lot of VC pitches and having been CEO of an enterprise software firm for many years I’ve also sat through many customer meetings with sales teams. In the best case they might prefer to ask you questions but you didn’t prompt them and they’re being polite (although this is less likely in VC who are not known for being wallflowers !). 8221; There is one classic mistake that I see across both types of meetings – “the tell & sell”  presentation.