????如果你從來沒有當過風投公司的合伙人，那么，你第一次為種子基金融資時有三條途徑可選：

????1. 自己手握數百萬美元。

????2. 為持有數百萬美元資金、同時又希望自己酷勁十足、銳意創新的公司工作。

????3. 四處轉轉（就我來說，是騎自行車），接觸投資者和初創型企業，同時向他們兜售你的策略，付諸執行，把一只手籌到的錢放到另一只手中，因為你既籌集資金，又要運用資金來印證你的策略……同時要在至少一年的時間內忘掉賺錢這回事。

????如果我必須從頭再來一次，我想我會選擇讓自己的口袋里有數百萬美元資金。但我同樣可以說，通過困難的方式也能獲得回報，對此我很高興。我剛剛宣布了我的基金Brooklyn Bridge Ventures Fund I完成募集的消息。它的總規模為830萬美元，專門投資于紐約市處于種子階段的初創型企業，而且已經投資了12家公司。

????盡管我在2001年就進入了風投行業，但在這次融資過程中，我仍然學到了很多新的東西。我曾經是機構有限合伙人——通用汽車（General Motors）退休基金的一名分析師。我還為風投公司合廣風投（Union Square Ventures）和First Round Capital工作過。我曾經是一名得到資金支持的企業家，也曾在風投注資的公司里當過產品經理。

????但籌集資金完全是另外一回事——特別是就我的規模來說。相對于傳統的機構投資者而言，Brooklyn Bridge Ventures的規模太小，而完全依靠天使投資又顯得有點兒大。

????所有涉及資產類型的問題中，這是最讓人沮喪的一點，也是為什么長期回報不能達到應有水平的原因之一。人們都很愿意建立一只規模較大的基金，就算這樣做意味著你將偏離自己的專業領域。要建立一只大得多的基金應該會容易得多，原因是那樣的話你會非常清楚去找誰，而且知道自己能拿到金額要大得多的支票。而保持較小規模的話，我就得精挑細選，從家庭辦公室和高凈值個人那里找到一些比較大但又不能太大的資金。這些家庭辦公室和高凈值個人不會讓自己勞神，甚至未必會有足夠的人手來大量接聽電話。

????不過，保持較小的規模是我的核心策略——如果我對自己在通用汽車工作的日子還有任何印象的話，那就是，風格的偏移對經理人來說就是滅頂之災。偏離了自己的重點，往往就會一敗涂地。我在First Round Capital工作時的特長就是能先人一步發現投資對象并，據為己有。在這家公司的頭兩年中，我負責了七項投資，其中兩項實現了轉讓——GroupMe以大約7000萬美元的價格轉讓給了Skype，SinglePlatform轉讓給了Constant Contact，據說轉讓價格為1億美元。雖然我負責的其他投資同樣表現良好，但我無法想象成為長期投資者的情形，比如說在公司擔任董事長達八年，直到它首發上市。我撰寫本文的目的不是告訴你怎樣把公司規模擴大到300人。以往的經歷表明，我把目光投向這些公司的時候，它們還都看起來什么也不是。我甚至出現在了Twitter孵化記》（Hatching Twitter）這本書里，內容是我在電子郵件里提醒合廣風投聯合創始人弗雷德·威爾森注意這項新興業務，它在2007年3月的西南偏南大會（SXSW）上表現火爆。

????小貼士：培養和富人的關系。我還是一名年輕分析師的時候，在私募基金行業遇到了許多合伙人。現在想來，我本應該和他們保持聯系。這些人都來自黑石（Blackstone）、Apollo這樣的公司。這一點聽上去顯而易見，對吧？然而，在24歲的時候，你會把自己期望的謀生手段作為評估潛在人際關系的基準，而不怎么去考慮結識這些人能讓你在以后做一些自己想做的事。當時我并不想涉足并購領域，因此確實沒怎么用心去經營這些關系。和他們保持聯系的價值絕不僅僅在于他們手里有錢，還在于他們中的許多人確實很有意思，而且見多識廣。除了以后可以把他們作為兜售對象以外，我本來還能學到其他的東西。

????There are three ways to raise a first-time seed fund when you've never even been a VC firm partner before. You can:

????1.?Have millions of dollars.

????2. Work for a company that has millions of dollars and wants to be cool, innovate, etc.

???3. Go running (or in my case, biking) around town chasing down investors and startups all at the same time, simultaneously pitching your strategy and executing it, taking money from one hand and putting in the other as you both fundraise and prove out your strategy by deploying capital… and forget having an income for at least a year.

????If I had to do it all over again, I think I would have started with having millions of dollars. But, happily, I can say that doing it the hard way still paid off. I just announced the close of Brooklyn Bridge Ventures Fund I, with a total of $8.3 million dedicated to investing in seed-stage startups here in New York City. The fund has already invested in 12 companies.

????Along the way, I learned a lot of new lessons, even though I had been in venture since 2001. I had been an analyst at an institutional LP--working for the General Motors pension fund. I had worked for Union Square Ventures and First Round Capital. I had been a funded entrepreneur and had also worked at a venture-backed company as a product manager.

????Raising for a fund, however, is a very different animal--especially at my size. Brooklyn Bridge Ventures was too small for the traditional institutional investors, and would have been a bit large to do entirely with angels.

????That's the most disheartening thing about the asset class--and one of the reasons why long term returns aren't where they should be. You're highly incentivized to raise a bigger fund, even if it means drifting from your expertise. It would have been much easier to raise a significantly larger fund, because then you know exactly who to go to and you can get much bigger checks. By staying small, I had to thread the needle of finding some bigger, but not too big, checks from family offices and high net worth individuals--all people who don't put themselves out there and who aren't necessarily staffed to take a lot of inbound.

????Staying small, however, was core to the strategy--and if I remembered anything from my GM days, style drift kills a manager. Stray from your focus and you tend to get crushed. What I had been good at while at First Round Capital was finding deals early and planting my flag. Within the first two years of my job, two of the seven investments that I led were sold--GroupMe to Skype for about $70 million and SinglePlatform to Constant Contact (CTCT) for a reported $100 million. While my other investments were doing well, I couldn't tell a story about being a long-term investor who sits on boards eight years until an IPO. I'm not here to tell you how to scale to 300 people. My track record said that I pointed to things when they hardly looked like things. I'm even in the Hatching Twitter book, nudging Fred Wilson by email on this new hot service coming out of SXSW in March of 2007.

????Pro Tip:Cultivate your relationships with rich people. There were a lot of partners at private equity firms that I met as a young analyst that I wish I had stayed in touch with--people from places like Blackstone (BX), Apollo (APO), etc. Sounds obvious, right? Well, when you're 24, you're evaluating potential networking contacts based on what you want to do for a living--and less how knowing that person might enable you to do what you want to do later on. I didn't want to go into buyouts, so I didn't really put much stock into these relationships. It wouldn't have been worth staying in touch with these people simply because of their money, but many of them were really interesting, knowledgeable people that I could have learned from in addition to being able to pitch them later.