Cloudy with a Chance of Funding

Apologies for suffering a little post-post depression, but I've been steadily catching up on my stack of business cards since last addition, as well as fielding a steady stream of calls about the steady stream of new funds and funding opportunities out there (and sneaking in a trip to NYC over the weekend as well, phew!). The recent additions to our local funding circles have indeed been significant, with Rogers Communications announcing its venture fund in Montreal last night (I was there, and will be there for the Waterloo launch in Tuesday), echoing the increased activity of Google Ventures in our fair nation. I'd previously posted about the OETF and IAF, and there are a couple of complementary developments for southern Ontario startups that are out there for the taking, including a new federal government initiative, as well as a BDC-sponsored fund, each designed to support knowledge-based companies in small, southern Ontario communities that formerly (and still) have mucho manufacturing dependency.

This is all well and good, I suppose, but how do you work up a plan to catch some of this rain? Here is my take on how to sort through the maze:

Get a helping hand: There is great virtual CFO talent around, and many have enough paying gigs that if you bring enough game to the table, they'll help you navigate the forms and build up an incremental plan to get a little, and squeeze three times the dollars out of it.

Get a bird in the hand: If you really need the capital, and especially if you're a young entrepreneur, don't agonize over terms. I truly think building good social networks among advisors and investors has an inherent value separate from the venture you're building. If you leave a little money on the table, all the better to make life-long friends.

Make hay: Make every effort to turn every financing event that you have (SRED financing, gov funding, initial seed capital) into a conversion trigger for interested investors sitting on the fence. Get your audience, keep them updated, and make every effort to turn good news into even better news for your financing strategy.

Bring a little "grid computing" to your strategies: You should parallel process your debt, government, angel and institutional strategies, and start and monitor and measure each of them in parallel. Even mature VC-backed startups have priorities among each, and again a decent virtual CFO can help you work up the to-do list that will be your guide.