On: Why it's hard to answer “when to raise a series A”

[matt_lo]

If you're raising 1M+ in the midwest, it's straight forward. Get a meeting with a VC associate in the region (Chicago: HP VC, Origin, OCA) and they will tell you exactly what they're looking for in a Series A.

I've never had any success with getting institutional money at the seed stage, but if you do get it, it's even easier to bypass some of the troublesome checklist items you get in the A round.

[akharris → matt_lo]

All VCs are willing to give you a checklist of what they're looking for. I've never seen a VC actually willing to fund solely based on a checklist of objective metrics. This doesn't change based on region.