If you are looking for great information about startups in an easily digested format, e.g. slides, I highly recommend Slideshare.net.
One major change in VCs in the past decade or so, which I believe was spearheaded by Brad Feld of The Foundry Group and Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, has been a sincere attempt to educate entrepreneurs. While I’ve known both of them I never asked them about their motivation, but I can take a good guess. Top flight VC firms see literally hundreds of pitches a year, year in, year out. Yet a partner like Brad or Fred may make only one or two investments per year. So it is in their interest to teach entrepreneurs not only how what VCs want to see in a pitch, but how to conduct themselves in a VC meeting, as it is much more efficient to deal with educated founders rather than having to teach everyone, one at a time.
I’ve already written about and recommended Brad’s book, Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist. Now I’m going to recommend a great slide presentation by Jeff Bussgang of Flybridge Ventures entitled Mastering the VC Game: How to Raise Your First Round of Capital. It’s a 19 slide primer that takes the founder from first pitch to due diligence. While its six years old I don’t think anything has really changed in the VC game regarding how to raise your first round of capital. Of course Jeff being a VC he doesn’t spend any time educating founders about the alternatives to VC funding, such as corporate VC, angel groups, angels, super angels or grants like SBIR. After you’ve gone through Jeff’s presentation check out my blog post VC funding and its alternatives to help decide what type of investor is the best fit for your venture.
I have to admit I have not yet read Jeff’s book, Mastering the VC Game, but based on his blue chip reputation and the quality of his slide presentations (you can search SlideShare for others), I’d venture to say it’s well worth reading.
If you still have questions and the time to search for answers there are a number of posts on this blog that fill in the many gaps in knowledge of raising capital that I’ve seen from mentoring dozens of founders in the past decade.
