Know Your VC, redux
July 19th, 2007 by Benjamin KuoThere was a recent post by Bill Burnham, one of the many venture capitalists blogging about the business, outlining some of the basic steps to raising venture capital. Users of our venture database have been doing this for years, but I thought it was worth pointing out item no. 3 in his list:
3. Go through the raw list and identify those VC firms that make investments in your sector, stage, and city. You can do this by going to each firm’s website and reviewing their high level firm description and noting their location. As a general rule, it’s pointless pitching an early stage company to a Silicon Valley VC if you are in Alabama.
As a corollary to his step 3 on finding local VCs, I’d add that in some markets (Southern California, in particular) it’s not quite the case that Silicon Valley venture capitalists wouldn’t be interested in your firm. You just need to know which VCs a) regularly invest here despite not being located here, b) freuqently syndicate with local funds, and c) are “sector” specialists and aren’t as geographically contained. For example, you normally wouldn’t see Vinod Khosla hanging out in Southern California, but his firm, Khosla Ventures has made a large number of Southern California investments recently–all because of his cleantech focus.
