Raise As Much Seed Money As You Can

In December 1999, Rosemary Brisco, founder of Redwood City, California-based WomenAsia.com, hit the dot-com jackpot. After four years of working part-time on her venture while maintaining a full-time day job, Brisco decided to sit down, write a business plan, and see where her idea could go. After

The problem was, just as CNBC and the United Nations were knocking on her door to negotiate business partnerships and her 19 employees were perfecting the product, Brisco needed another cash infusion. Instead of building partnerships, Brisco had to replenish her company's dwindling supply of capital.

"You should raise as much as you can initially," Brisco says. "You don't know how fast money is going to go. I wish that I had held out for more money in the seed stage of funding so that I wouldn't have to redirect my energies so soon after rolling out our new site. It takes so much energy to raise funds."

Brisco opted to cut short her first round of fund-raising — a decision she regrets. Brisco believes she could have raised twice as much money had she spent two more months meeting with venture capitalists. But at the time, she worried that waiting any longer would mean missing a window of opportunity. She was concerned about losing two potential hires — a Web-content director and an information-technology specialist — who were waiting for her to finish fund-raising.

While Brisco could have avoided having to hit the VC circuit again so quickly, the decision to end her first round of fund-raising held some advantages. She could send out more than 500 press kits to companies in Asia and contact many other potential partners and customers. When her product became better known, fund-raising would be easier, Brisco believed.

Thanks to her newfound connections in Asia, Brisco expects to raise the majority of her second round of funding from the booming Asian venture-capital market — a big plus, since the American venture-capital market has slowed. This time around Brisco is looking to gather $5 million in funding. With that money she plans to expand the network of Asian agents and brokers that appear on the site.

Apart from a better product, Brisco will also bring more confidence. Just before launch she began to question her product when venture capitalists started suggesting that she tweak the site to include other features, such as health and makeup channels. Brisco finally got to the point where she just wanted to prove her plan — and stop talking about it. This time she was swayed.

"I realized that if I don't keep focused on my idea, I'm never going to get anywhere," she said. "Now I know the market more and have a clearer idea of what I want to do."

— Heather Stringer