I have six years running one company, no experience prior to that (came out of think tanks). Four pieces of experience. 1) The first contact people at most VC

I have six years running one company, no experience prior to that (came out of think tanks). Four pieces of experience. 1) The first contact people at most VC funds are entry level jobs in finance. They're young, they don't actually have the power to commit funds, and the deals they are doing are teeny-tiny. Baby realtors might move 10x the amount of money in a year. Mostly they're copying the behaviours and ideas of the more senior people in the fund, and trying to look the part. There is a lot of cargo culting. 2) Psychology and decision criteria vary enormously between funding rounds - pre seed, seed, bridge, A Round etc. are different people with different vocabularies. They're all mapping what they see in front of them to an abstract model of how a company "should look" at this stage (see: "cargo culting") and 50% of the battle is making your real world mess look like their model of how a company should be at this point. Remember: they've never worked in a successful start up, they're usually fresh out of business school. This is not true of the fund seniors, who are often wicked smart, but the front line people are usually pretty green and afraid of making mistakes. 3) The perception that <thing> is about to become a huge sector is more important than how clever your capabilities are in <thing>. 100% of a $5m market is a very fragile position. 0.1% of a $5000m market is also pretty fragile unless there's something to stop a category killer emerging. You want to be A Player - a story about being big enough in the market to invest in your advantages and keep moving, vs. a tiny thing in a huge market that could roll over you at any time. How well can you respond do and navigate the unknowns of the future? "<thing> is growing fast and we're in the first wave and intend to stay that way." 4) It's real easy if you can find a network of VCs who are all mates and say "yep, this is good, pile in." Functionally speaking I think that only happens in San Francisco, everywhere else they tend to be extremely catlike and independent to a fault. If you can find a friendly network, work it as hard as you can! Good luck!