[oraboy]

The challenge with the $200k-$500k funding gap is the fact that most VCs make funding decisions by partner consensus.

After spending the last 8 month trying to put such a round together, and going through the process with quite a few VCs, It's apparent that this brings 'boldness' way down because all the lead partners need to develop the intuition necessary to be bold-- on what is essentially a hypothesis on market development or consumer demand in a field that is usually not their individual core expertise and in the short time frame that this business allows nowadays. doesn't happen often.

This is why these sort of investments are made by small/ partner-lean funds or through the "strong" partner in a more traditional firm... and there aren't enough of those.

It's not that they don't want to make those sort of investments, its that they're not setup to do so. In our discussions, we've gotten to, at several occasions, a point where our sponsor partner is actively trying to get the deal done, only to fall apart because of this need for uniform consensus of the entire clan.

If I were a VC, I'd focus on streamlining that process through more partner independence as I agree that this is the sort of funding a truely innovative (particularly web software) company needs to establish itself these days and they are mostly missing out...