Ten Good Reasons to Take Venture Capital Money

Following up on my post from Monday that rang like "reasons not to take VC money" here are some reasons you should:

1) You really like the investor and believe they can add more value than you give up in equity.

2) You are growing, and if you don't raise, you won't be able to build the infrastructure required not to come apart at the seams.  

3) You have the team in place or identified to build the product, you've done your homework by talking to customers that it is, in fact, the right product, and you're the best person to lead the effort, but you can't fund the build of the product yourself.  

4) You've identified the best team, and while they're asking for reasonable startup salaries, you can't afford to hire them quite yet.

5) You've figured out how to get a sales funnel going, the flywheel is turning, you've got positive ROI on incremental salespeople or customer acquisition dollars and now you want to put gas on the fire.

6) You're on your way to building a network effect, you know how you'll likely make money because you've spoken to lots of potential sources of revenue, but can't monetize without critical mass.

7) You're making a ton of money at the company level, but haven't really ever made any money yourself personally.  Might be time to let someone you want to work with buy your equity.  

8) You're doing something disruptive that is going to have some regulatory or other kinds of hurdles that require human hours of changing the playing field. 

9) You're doing something physical in the real world that just requires a certain amount of capital overhead.

10) You're doing actual science and R&D to build something that doesn't exist yet, but could have a huge outcome.  

 

Congrats to Backupify! A Great Exit Story for the First Company I Ever Backed

Ten Realities of Taking Venture Capital Money