Venture Learnings

By way of introduction, I'm David Scott Carlick and I have been in the ‘entrepreneurial ecosystem’ now for almost thirty years. I started an ad agency in the late 1970s in Silicon Valley to serve the needs of startups, which I eventually found out were backed by ‘venture capital.’ Over that time, I worked with hundreds of companies and thousands of new products and ideas, some of which became institutions, some of which blossomed and then withered, and most of which never got anywhere meaningful. So I have a lot of experience, and experience, as you all know, is what you get when you don’t get the money.

How does one go about getting money from a venture capital firm?

I have been at work in a venture capital firm for nearly ten years with one title or another. I have led or joined investments either independently or with VantagePoint Venture Partners in at least 20 companies. I have sat in at least a thousand presentations by entrepreneurs who are trying to get money.

(The math of 20 against a thousand sounds bad, but about 20% of the deals I looked at got money elsewhere.)

I still can’t figure out why one deal gets the interest of many investors while others languish. (Maybe I should change careers.)

More on how to get money from a venture capital firm.

In my first blog on raising money (Raising Wine Money) I described a ‘traditional’ route to getting a venture opportunity considered and funded – networking.

(As I understand it, Sean Fanning, co-founder of YouTube, a company that started, got funded, and sold to Google for $1.6 billion in under two years, is the son-in-law of Jim Clark, arguably the most bankable (and banked) entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. I doubt his marriage was an entrepreneurial run at networking, but his marital connections didn’t hurt, either.)

So what to do if you aren’t connected to powers in the industry or don’t marry well?