How to Get Venture Funding, page 12

Web Resources, continued

Red Herring, named after a common term for a preliminary version of a public offering prospectus and affiliated with Red Herring Magazine, has a wealth of information about venture funds and VC deal flow. (See Figure 2.) You can sign up on Red Herring to receive daily updates about people and activities in the venture industry.

Figure 2: Red Herring has a wealth of information about
venture capital and current deal flow.

Softbank Venture Capital provides an online form as the only way to start the funding process with this Internet-centric VC. (See Figure 3.) While this is certainly a laudable example of “eating one’s own dog food”—using the Internet to automate business processes—the instructions on the site note “personal introductions are the best way to give your plan a chance.” There’s a place on the form to provide information about your “personal connection.” Be that as it may, the site is truly valuable to entrepreneurs seeking venture capital because it makes clear in great detail exactly what VCs are expecting to see.

Figure 3: The Softbank Venture Capital site’s on-line application lets entrepreneurs understand
exactly what questions they have to answer.

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