You have a small company. You think your product or service is unique and innovative. You feel like venture capital funding might take you to the next level, put you in competition with the big boys and slingshot you into real profitability. Before you decide on that course of action, consider this: raising venture capital funds is probably the most time-consuming path to financing your business's growth.

How much time it will take to raise venture capital funds (assuming you succeed in getting the money) depends are a variety of factors. NYConvergence recently gave an example of one small media company that decided to pass on the time involved in dealing with VC funds and looked for financial help elsewhere.

Amar Goel puts it in perhaps the most eloquent and poetic verbiage I've found when he said recently that it "takes a crapload of time to raise venture capital. Goel speaks from personal experience. In 1998, at the age of 22, he owned a company that was doing $100K a month of online business. Raising VC funds took him four months of more-or-less fund time work. Dave Kaupii points out that if you do grab the attention of a VC fund, you're probably looking at reviews of your business my multiple outside parties; ushering all those people through your offices and production areas, explaining your vision, and looking through your books with them eats up days at a time.

So the lesson, I suppose, is twofold.
- First, be careful what you wish for; if you go after venture capital funding and your application actually attracts some interest, you may regret it when the VC's people start hang out in your office and taking up your time.
- Second, count the cost. Be prepared for the time commitment before you start looking into VC funding. Otherwise, you may end up looking, well, silly to the fund managers...