The bursting of the Internet bubble, several years of unfriendly public markets and changes in Wall Street and financial regulations have been hard on venture capital over the past decade.
Rather than being a hard-nosed venture capitalist, he is more like a financial father-figure to young entrepreneurs.
One reason why entrepreneurs work so hard, and why venture capitalists place so many risky bets, is because they hope to make a fortune by going public.
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Even though Alchemy has been handed Rover on a plate, it is hard to see the venture capitalists finding the huge sums needed for new models to make Longbridge viable.
The venture was hit hard by a downturn in the global communications market and was scrapped in 2001.
Entrepreneurs will find growth capital hard to come by as the venture capital industry shrivels under higher taxes.
It is hard to imagine that the joint venture will survive this merger.
Add a screen, an audio system and popcorn, and it's hard to imagine why you would ever venture to the movieplex.
But the venture world has learned some hard lessons on the difficulty of building energy businesses: they face science risk, often take a long time to scale and can be capital intensive.
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Part of the problem is that venture capitalists themselves are finding it hard to raise funds.
"In the venture world, we try really hard to make sure that laborers are also owners, " one VC asked.
That is going to make it hard for a start-up CEO to persuade a venture capitalist that he is going to get in on the next big thing.
Whether you are starting a venture or joining a team, simply working hard, completing your tasks and being open to new ideas will set you on a path to success.
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With the big dollars and high valuations that venture investors are throwing around, companies may find the cash hard to turn down.
And while anyone can talk of home-growing the next Google or Apple, there's one big reason why it's very hard to make it happen, and that's the absence of venture capital.
Unfortunately, Band-e-Amir is still hard to reach for most Afghans, let alone foreigners who may want to venture out to the area.
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"I think that fact alone will make the Amazon model hard to clone, " says Bill Gurley, a partner with Hummer Winblad Venture Partners.
Fujitsu, for example, hopes to unload its loss-making hard-disk business, but it recently took full control of a joint-venture to sell computers as part of a push into computer-related services.
It not only guarantees a wider audience, but also helps consolidate the hard-headed sponsors who want to see a return for their investment in the new venture.
As shown below, the most impactful form of traction is when your venture repeatedly convinces rational, third-party customers to happily part with their hard-earned cash, at a market price, in exchange for your solution.
If the economy fails to revive, the party might want a financial whizz to top the ticket. (Mr Romney made a fortune in venture capital.) But he failed to connect with ordinary voters this year, and it is hard to see that changing in 2012.
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