A full time job...

Lately - at least over the last month or so for reasons I'll skip - I've reflected a great deal on the amount of time and effort it takes for members of management, mainly the CEO, I think it takes to "close a venture round".

A while back, about 4 years ago actually, the Colorado Internet Kiertsu / Brad Feld asked me to give a presentation my fundraising experiences.  In that presentation, I had a slide called "tools comparison".  It was the kind of slide that would make Seth Godin cringe.  It was basically a table and it was designed to convey the notion that as you raise more money in later rounds - the tools you use grow increasingly more complex, and more exact in nature.  Since this was me telling the story of how we raised money at Vstream/Evoke/Raindance - it culminated in an analysis of the toolset I thought was necessary to execute your IPO.  Using the Seth Godin method - I'd probably verbally deliver the same message but the imagery I would use to interweave and emphasize my points would be something along the lines of a gorilla growing increasingly beastly...

Anyway - a point central to this experience that I tried to share and that I am sharing now - is that in the earlier rounds - it's usually more than one persons full time effort.  And as you raise additional funds in later rounds - it only gets worse in terms of time and effort required.  And that's the point I want to make here. 

It's a full time job.  If you're part of a start-up team and you're raising money - get it through your Neanderthal noggin that this is a full time effort.  100%.  Ask anyone that's done it - and this is what they will tell you.  If you approach your fundraising with anything less of an expectation - or worse you approach it with a yeah-yeah sure-sure attitude but not the action to back it up - you're designing a higher risk process to a critical function of your business.  Be aware.