Building Wealth through Venture Capital

CHAPTER 8The Mating Dance: Prospecting for a Venture Capital Investor

Since you're investing the time to read this, we assume you are either already a passionate entrepreneur or aspire to be one. You are also probably either an exceptional planner, not yet needing financing help but anticipating and preparing for that day, or you are already searching pretty urgently for additional funds. Even if you fall into that group of exceptional planners, if you do proceed in your entrepreneurial quest, you will be needing funds pretty urgently at some point, so let's proceed here on that basis.

We'll assume you are close to exhausting your personal funds and easily accessible credit and are near the end of the road in raising funds from family and friends. If you've reached out to bankers, you've learned that they're simply not interested unless you can demonstrate cash flow certainty, have substantial collateral, or can guarantee loans personally, which seems unlikely given our other assumptions.

You've heard about venture capitalists and figure that's your solution. Surely they'll see the brilliance of your idea and write the big check you need.

Unfortunately, you need to understand the realities:

• Most new ventures fail. (We know, you've heard that already countless times.) They are inherently risky. You are risky. (Sorry.)
• A major reason why most new ventures fail is that they are unable to raise the capital needed to buy time in order to fix problems and get all the pieces right. ...