This week's "Tips for the Entrepreneur" video features serial entrepreneur Jerry Kaplan describing "the five biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make."  At some point it will disappear from the MyVenturepad homepage, but here's a permalink to the external site where the video is housed.

I was particularly struck by his mistake # 3, which is badly labeled in the video description.  The summary says # 3 is "Greed - doing it for the money," but the actual point that Kaplan makes is a lot more subtle and substantial.

I liked it so much I made a mini-transcript: 

“One of the most common [mistakes that entrepreneurs make] is not raising enough money.  ‘Oh, we can do it on the cheap, we don’t really need that much capital.’  And the reason people try to do that is they’re trying to keep their equity. … The question you should ask whenever you go out to raise money is, ‘Is my company… going to be worth more after I raise the money – is my share going to be worth more – than it’s worth before I raise the money. … If you can take in a million dollars and you can convert that into $2 million in value, everybody wins – regardless of how much of the company you had to give up to get that million dollars.”

The phrase beginning “regardless” overstates its case -- it's certainly possible to give up so much equity in exchange for capital that it becomes a bad bargain -- but makes a legitimate point nonetheless, methinks.