Just Because It's Easier To Raise VC Money, That Doesn't Mean You Should

When should an entrepreneur raise money, who should they raise from….and, well, should they even raise? These were some of the questions discussed on a morning panel at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013, which included participation from?Mike Abbott of Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, Aaref Hilaly of Sequoia Capital, AngelList’s Naval Ravikant, and Box Group’s David Tisch. Pitching A Partner Vs. A Firm The VC’s debated the various merits of pitching or working with an individual partner at a firm, versus considering what the entire firm could offer, in terms of guidance and experience. Abbott said that at KPCB, each partner has a different set of experiences to offer, and?Hilaly agreed that while that’s true, he challenged the premise that it’s a single VC partner that’s most important to a founder, noting that individual?partners?are not as important as the collective partnership, like at Sequoia. There, everyone has their own specialities, but the entire firm gets behind the company, he says. (And yes, even Color, he admitted, responding to a question from the panel’s moderator, TechCrunch co-editor Alexia Tsotsis.) Ravikant, however, offered a different, more challenging answer to the question about who and how entrepreneurs should?determine who to work with and pitch to: just use AngelList instead. “As a technology entrepreneur, I wanted to solve the problem with a product,” he explains, and says he tells founders to use the product, and “call me later if you fail.” The A Round When an entrepreneur has moved beyond the seed stage, the next question that typically gets asked is who to raise the A round from? Tisch says that’s an impossible question to answer. The only data point you have is that someone has invested in another company like yours before, or has recently blogged about their interest in similar technology, he explains. When someone asks him about the A round, he replies, “just go meet with them all and see who’s interested.” The problem, he continues, is that VC’s can’t really advertise their interests, because it would be limiting. That being said, he admitted that being New York-based himself, he likes to send founders to area firm USV. What Do You Want To Fund? Then, the burning question that?entrepreneurs?are continually curious about: what areas do you want to invest in? Abbott responds with a fairly pat answer that KPCB is about investing in the technology that can enable the world-changing trends. Tsotsis

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