9. Paid for a Lobster dinner without raising any money

Incident: Keith Cowing, Co-founder of Seamless Receipts invited a VC to a top notch restaurant to pitch the idea. He was expecting to get a few ideas and consultancy, instead had to pay for the expensive lobster meal without any help from the other side.

Reaction: "I have a lot of respect for most VC's and consultants I've met. But this was ridiculous. I wanted to launch a nasty email to the consultant and the venture partner who made the introduction, but I decided to cool off and simply move on to my next slew of meetings. I won't be meeting with him again, and I will give an honest assessment of his character when asked. But it's a small world and your reputation is more important than anything, so I'm careful with my reactions," writes Keith.

Lesson: Keith suggests all the entrepreneurs to separate the bad apples from the list of investors they are eyeing on and meet only the genuine ones who will actually be interested in investing.

10. Acting Cheesy can be Painful

Incident: Instead of being personally involved in the pitching, the entrepreneur played the video of the pitch in front of a room filled with VCs.

Reaction: Mark Suster who was present in the room says, “Basically, the fundamental problem that I saw with the whole painful hour was that he was in ‘sales mode’ the entire time. He was so concerned with getting across his points that he failed to have a dialogue and engage us.”

Lesson: You need to engage your VC when you are pitching the idea and the best way to do it is in person and not through some lame video.

11. A few too many features

Incident: Jared O’Tool, co-founder of Under30CEO tells,” To many features. We thought it was great that we had incorporated all these fun features to the service all these ways people could share, react and get involved. What we failed to do was talk about and makes the actual service and the target market clear at all.”

Reaction: “The VCs were generally confused on the whole project because we spent more time trying to explain features than explaining the core offering and why people were going to use it," Jared recalls.

Lesson: Jared suggest,”Focus on the core and the market. Tell VCs what your doing and why people need it. An investor does not want a project that needs a revolutionary feature or promotional tactic to work”