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Rating: 
Summary: Don't be fooled or you will lose...
Review: "Financing the Venture" is difficult to read and comprehend. The presentation and illustrations are not always clear. It is hastily bundled together in an attempt to impress the reader about a few innovative thoughts (developed by others) and rearranged by an amateur writer. The book has two themes: how to prepare a business plan to an investor, and learning how and where to obtain financing.First, if anyone dares to write his or her business plan HIS way, beware, you will be rebuffed quickly! Second, if you carefully review the writer's experience at raising capital, he seems to contradict his own methods for raising capital. Case in point: Mark Long sponsors lectures about how to make "quantum leaps" for entrepreneurs, yet he struggles, in one of his own projects, to raise just $350,000 of seed capital from forty-five investors! Do not use this as a primary guide. For the one star rating, there are some ideas that may help focus your thoughts. Use this book as an auxilliary tool to complement your ideas and visions for preparing final plans and strategies.
Rating: 
Summary: Riddled with self-promotion
Review: "... make a commitment to relax and surrender to the reality that the emerging business capital market is limitless and that this book can show you how to get ready to receive your fair piece of the capital pie." pg. 39 I think the above quote speaks for itself. I bought this book together with "Fundamentals of Venture Capital" and "Start-Up" and read all three. Compared to the others, this book is full of inane, unsubstantiated, or simply mystifying concepts (many of which are trademarked). I really don't know enough about raising capital to state that this book is nonsense. But if there is valuable information in this book, the author has done a remarkable job of hiding it.
Rating:
Summary: Don't be fooled or you will lose...
Review: "Financing the Venture" is difficult to read and comprehend. The presentation and illustrations are not always clear. It is hastily bundled together in an attempt to impress the reader about a few innovative thoughts (developed by others) and rearranged by an amateur writer. The book has two themes: how to prepare a business plan to an investor, and learning how and where to obtain financing. First, if anyone dares to write his or her business plan HIS way, beware, you will be rebuffed quickly! Second, if you carefully review the writer's experience at raising capital, he seems to contradict his own methods for raising capital. Case in point: Mark Long sponsors lectures about how to make "quantum leaps" for entrepreneurs, yet he struggles, in one of his own projects, to raise just $350,000 of seed capital from forty-five investors! Do not use this as a primary guide. For the one star rating, there are some ideas that may help focus your thoughts. Use this book as an auxilliary tool to complement your ideas and visions for preparing final plans and strategies.
Rating:
Summary: Too Few Ideas(tm), too many words
Review: ... I have started businesses, I have secured financing and I have read this book. This book is extremely difficult to read as it is full of cumbersome sentences, unexplained catch phrases and unnecessary acronyms. I don't dispute that the author presents some good ideas but they are hardly innovative - old standards gilded with unending lists and inane, obscure illustrations. This book is far from revolutionary as some of the "reviews" here suggest. Don't bother!!
Rating: 
Summary: Trying to raise capital? READ THIS BOOK FIRST!
Review: As an entrepreneur who has built and sold four businesses in the last ten years, I found this book to be a goldmine of ideas and information. It offers a clear, systematic and easy-to-understand approach to raising capital. The author explains his "Visionary Business Builders" model for financing and launching a new venture. His description of the new paradigms for doing business in the information age is simply fascinating. During my entrepreneurial journey, I spent hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars on fees paid to lawyers, accountants, consultants and other "experts". I learned more from this book than from all of them combined! It is a "must read" not only for those seeking financing, but for anyone who has a passion for business. (P.S. Also check out his affiliated web site, www.bbuilder.com.)
Rating: 
Summary: Too Much Fluff - No Content
Review: I have read many books on financing and founded my own tech company securing funding from angels, VCs, and investment banks. This book was non-practical and filled with too much marketing fluff with page after page of trademarked terms that made no sense whatsoever. I know for a fact that if any of my VCs read this book they would literally laugh. It was like Tim Robbins trying to write about venture capital. The bottom line is that investors don't give you money based on what you say but rather what you do -- walk the walk.
Rating:
Summary: Don't bother
Review: This book not contain much useful information. What's more, it's structured very poorly and what little value the book does contain is hard to extract. Read Baird's Engineering Your Start-Up and Nesheim's High Tech Startup instead.
Rating:
Summary: Not useful - buy something else
Review: While there are a few interesting tidbits of information in it, pass this one by. I've never seen a book before with so many trademarked phrases and words. The "TM" appears on almost every page, and often many times on a page. Phrases like "Investor Financing (TM)" and "Capital Relations (TM)" appear so often as to distract. This book is excellent at showing someone how to use the superscript "TM" symbol religiously. The content of this book is complicated, and the complex process they suggest is generally impractical to use in any way. Perhaps the partners at the author's investment company are skilled at facilitating such a process, but I believe the "K.I.S.S." technique (Keep It Simple, Stupid) is more likely to get you financed rather than this unusual process.
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