One of the most useful (and short) posts I’ve ever seen (*) on raising VC money. This post from Mark Suster encapsulates key things that every VC knows and feels is so obvious they wont even mention … But which new entrepreneurs have no way of knowing:
…and if you’re raising money in europe (by which i mean “london”, in practice), i encourage you to benchmark your experience against this list.
There are still, even today, plenty of so-called VC firms in London whose processes are opaque, elongated, archaic, or pointlessly troublesome. If your VC wont stick to this process demand to know why not – and ask yourself how much trouble it will cause you down the line?
E.g. If your VC is a spinout from a London hedge fund, they may have an investment banking twist on process, that anyone from the city would recognize, but whose origins are in servicing a very different audience from entrepreneurs.
(*) – of course, im assuming you read http://venturehacks.com already. If not, youve got a lot of reading to do, and probably need to start again from scratch on your funding strategy :).