

How to Raise a Successful VC Round or Series A - eladgil
http://blog.eladgil.com/2011/03/tactics-for-how-to-raise-vc-round-or.html

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CoffeeDregs
Lots of nice tactics in this, but a key assumption of the article: you have
the knowledge of your market and the product that demonstrates your knowledge
of the market so that you have a sense of confidence in your pitch and in your
company's future.

The above probably sounds silly... until you've been in or seen pitches in
which the folks pitching it don't have that confidence. The classic trap is
building the pitch on good ideas and being smart about them. You can just
about smell that pitch and it doesn't smell nice. Great pitches are ones where
the audience starts thinking about how to _accelerate_ a great product/market
(introductions, additional markets, tactics, etc), not about how to _validate_
it (search for comps, call around to colleagues, etc).

But YouTube wasn't making any $$$ when they got acquired! Those kids
definitely had it: obviously growing and _inevitable_ market in which they had
huge adoption, huge growth, dominance. Questions after the pitch: How much do
you need to crank this thing up? What kinds of introductions can we make? When
would you like to start discussing acquirers? And, most importantly, where do
we sign?

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callmeed
Cool post, but I have a question:

How do you actually get a meeting in the first place? (and how hard is it?)

I'm applying to YC this week. If I don't get in, maybe I'll try hitting up
some VCs or angels. Do I need to _know someone who knows someone_?

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eladgil
That is usually best. Some people you can also just reach out to directly,
e.g. on Quora. Or you can go to an event and talk to e.g. a panelist, and then
follow up afterwards.

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avichal
Great overview post. A really useful, related post might be what goes into a
VC pitch and examples of great ones and some not so great ones (just as a
reference).

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eladgil
Thanks - that is actually my next post which is queued to go :)

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swampplanet
How does this play with VC's coming into the Super Angel space?

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eladgil
That is a pretty different dynamic and more similar to an angel round, given
all the competition from angels for the same investment. The key is, once you
get to Series A, the universe of potential financiers collapses down to the
venture community.

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jayliew
Hey Elad, thanks for all the advice. Can you write the same post, but geared
for someone at the stage just before that? i.e. going from $0 to seed round.

