Venture Capital For Dummies

Chapter 17

If at First You Don’t Succeed — and Even If You Do — Try, Try Again

In This Chapter

Staying on investors’ radar

Making regular and consistent progress

Assessing how investors really feel about your deal

If you have a venture company, you’ll go through the fundraising process pretty regularly. Even if you’re successful, you’ll probably engage in more than one funding round. Most venture companies expect to raise one angel round and two or three VC rounds before their companies are acquired or have another kind of liquidity event.

The days of meeting one VC and completing the round three weeks later are simply over. Expect to undergo a fundraising campaign for a few months and interact with many investors before you’re successful. Why? For lots of reasons: Some investors can’t invest in your company because it’s in the wrong industry. Others will have completed their portfolio building and stopped investing altogether. A few investors simply won’t be interested. Perhaps some of the people you’ve talked to who claim to be able to connect you with investors have wasted your time. (It takes experience to be able to predict how good a contact will be in helping you with ...