I come from another perspective, I have lost absolutely all faith in investors period.
In the early nineties (during a recession in the UK) I started my passion and dream of building a design, manufacturing and distribution company. It was one hell of a chunk to bit off. Imagine 2 years design period, manufacturing cycle is a min of 6 months from ordering components to final assembly, then you have to spend on marketing and get the product into the shops then wait 30 days from the end of month (and if they don't sell you'd be hard pushed to get the cash). So your looking at a 3 year cycle between initial investment, before you make your first dime (and a total investment of at least 200k). So you need rather large pockets or elephant sized balls. I had neither. I had no money when I started whatsoever, however I did succeed (and became the number 1 company in my sector within 5 years) despite external funders rather than because of them. How?
What turns me off from funders now is the experiences I had in trying to raise capital with this venture. The sheer amount of effort and time that went into funding proposals, business plans, meetings with false promises that actually set me back and at one point nearly killed the project before it started. The funders that I had available to me were business 'professionals' working for charities who would make small loans and give small grants of between 2k and 10k. The 10k ones were the worst. I wont go into all the disappointments in detail but there was enough of them for me to totally loose all faith in taking such chances again.
I did get 20K GBP together (40KUSD) in the end mostly by extortion from a very good bank manager who started with a small loan 1k then to 10k and because of all the nightmares along the journey ended up having to keep fueling me to 20K or risk the 10K. It paid off for both of us, I turned into one of his top business accounts and he got kudos of being the man who had the balls to back this nutter (me),
I want to give you 2 examples that give the essence of 2 different strategies for dealing with funding problems:
1) I was at a point where we had launched the first product, we had some first orders, but needed more money to buy more components before we could build them (by this time there was me and 1 other guy who risked everything to join me (another nutter)). I had an option to take a soft loan from a government backed charity who had the responsibility of distributing 400K to startups in an effort to encourage entrepreneurial spirit in the mids of recession. There is no doubt I had the best proposal on the table that they had seen, I was told in confidence that it was a done deal and just a matter of time before it came through. It didn't and shortly after the organization went bust giving precisely nothing to startups.
That left me unable to pay the employe for 3 months (who carried on working), and instead of paying for components I found a supplier who would take a chance on me and give me a 2K credit limit, we survived just and the supplier became one of our biggest throughout the business regularly taking cheques off me for 20K a month.
2) at the launch of the second product there was a crisis where one component was no good (manufacture fuckup), we had to reorder with a lead time of min 2 months even if we flew them in. This meant a 3 month delay with nothing for the 4 staff to do and nothing to sell This was all 3 months off but on the cards and no conceivable way round it. Instead I quickly designed (4 weeks) a single stand a lone feature and managed to get it into the shops within 2 months, (mostly using credit again and giving away the first 50 across the country to the shops) then blanket adverting in the best magazines. It worked and we made more money out of this venture than I could have imagined, like I was 50K up a few months later.
Moral of the story. If you can bootstrap it, you will be amazed at what you can achieve with foresight, luck and a little confidence shared by yourself and those that take a risk on you.