I was reading the AlwaysOn Winter 2007 Magazine on the subway this afternoon and came across the “VC Deal Pitch� by Simeon Simeonov, a technology partner at Polaris Venture Partners. Before Simeon joined Polaris, he was the Chief Architect at Allaire and Macromedia. The article that he has penned for the magazine talks about a new way to date a venture capitalist before you get married, or in realistic terms, a new way to work together with a venture capitalist before they invest into your company.

Essentially, Simeon talks about how the founding team and would-be investors should work together, on the same side of the table, for a good amount of time to improve the business plan and test the market. This whole dating process only really works in the early stage funding realm and allows you to vet out a venture capital partner who does not share the same vision, culture, and operational expectations that you may have.

This process would only work if it was monogamous, says Simeon. As a founder, you do not want your VC partner to be flirting with other companies in your space. They ultimately will learn quite a bit about your business and have deep insight into your team, so keep it monogamous. Even though both parties will share lots of insight, Simeon also mentions that there should be “no strings attached.� If the relationship isn’t working for either party, it should be able to be terminated without any monetary compensation or consideration.

This is an interesting concept that Simeon proposes. As an entrepreneur, I can see how valuable it would be from an early stage perspective (maybe after seed funding?) but may not work for all startups due to time constraints, multiple VC’s, or other various reasons. What are your thoughts?

I am going to start this posting out with a quick anecdote. Around 10pm last night, I was talking over IM with a founder of one of the companies I am actively advising and she has her mind spinning about a new project that she wants to actively and quickly get off the ground. This posting won’t go into whether or not the idea is good, or whether or not she should be focusing on her own current project at it’s infancy phase, but will talk about her mindset about how she was going to market with her idea.

Essentially, she wanted to have the website built quickly by someone she knew, and release it as soon as possible as she had a need for the application. She then mentioned to me a few things about fundraising and so forth – all around this particular new venture.

I quickly applied the brakes. It was almost as if we were driving 100 miles per hour and I pulled the e-brake (emergency brake for those non-car enthusiasts). The conversation quickly went from a fair amount of agreement to a considerable amount of disagreement. My thoughts about this subject are as follows:

1. You do not have a business if you just have a website. I have a blog that gets traffic (albeit not much), but it’s not my business.
2. A business must have a financial/business model around it. The for-profit sector, the majority of businesses, all look to make money. Launching a site blindly without any financials is not just a bad idea, but irresponsible.
3. The operational side of launching a business is time intensive and laborious (filing paperwork, insurance, staffing, etc) and must be done before launch. I personally hate this part, but hey – it must get done.
4. Funding – its one thing to build a website by yourself or employ your cousin/aunt but what happens when the website takes off and you need to pull the resources together and scale it? Who is going to pay for that? Who is going to pay for the filing fees to the government for business formation? Insurance? Liabilities? Where is the money coming from?

The web cuts down the time to market for many businesses. If you’re launching a web-only venture, you can technically be online in a few hours (if you put up a landing page) but make sure before you launch to the world, you have all your ducks aligned. Not only does it make your job easier, but also allows potential partners (business development, funding, sales, etc) to work with you more efficiently.