The Six Secrets of Raising Capital

SECRET 1Great Business Ideas Do Not Get Funded

Intuit, a $20 billion global high-tech company born and built in the Silicon Valley, was never able to raise a single dollar of venture capital funding, despite seven years of pitching investors. Hotmail, founded by Sabeer Bhatia, and ultimately bought by Microsoft for $450 million, was not able to raise funding, despite desperate attempts to gain interest from angel groups, seed investors, and venture capital firms, until they had already gained traction with hundreds of thousands of users. On the other side of the coin, five out of ten companies that receive venture capital investment fail within three years. Clearly, something else is at work here, beyond the intrinsic merit of the business idea. ...