Back in January, Larry Chiang wrote an informative piece over at GigaOm on which venture capitalists to avoid.

No names are mentioned, just their characteristics. He offers a list of nine VC archetypes you’ll definitely want to avoid, just as soon as you hit the $900,000-mark.

Here are the first three to get you in the mood:

1) Mr. Armchair. He’s a Friday afternoon Chairman. He knows exactly what he’d do as board member of facebook, Google, MySpace.,YouTube. Too bad his portfolio company’s don’t get the same enthusiastic coverage.

2) Mr. One-Hit-Wonder. Yes he sold Postage.com for $200 million (and kept $15 million) so if you wanna hear war stories from the ’90s, take this GSB alum’s money.

3) Mr. Spray-n-Pray. He cites being founding CEO as his Operations experience. (Translation: He was a interim CEO for his last venture firm before company/portfolio implosion and subsequent fund implosion. His fund is a catch-all and he tries to participate in every Sequoia backed deal.

Read the rest of the article here.

If a venture capitalist offers you a certain sum of money in exchange for a shareholding in your startup, what are the rules governing these deals and how much of your business should you part with?

Paul Graham has done a pretty good analysis of this perennial teaser for new business owners. The answer apparently is :

1/(1 - n)

Whenever you’re trading stock in your company for anything … the test for whether to do it is the same. You should give up n percent of your company if what you trade it for improves your average outcome enough that the (100 - n) percent you have left is worth more than the whole company was before. For example, if an investor wants to buy half your company, how much does that investment have to improve your average outcome for you to break even? Obviously it has to double: if you trade half your company for something that more than doubles the company’s average outcome, you’re net ahead. You have half as big a share of something worth more than twice as much. In the general case, if n is the fraction of the company you’re giving up, the deal is a good one if it makes the company worth more than 1/(1 - n).

If you were in this scenario, you would already have gone through a lot of hoops to get there. You should bear in mind from the outset that a VC company like Sequoia gets about 6000 business plans a year and funds around 20 of them.

Face it, you’re going to have to be good to get the cash, so you are entitled to drive a hard bargain. According to Graham, Sequoia will allow you to do so.

Read Paul Graham’s account of VC funding options in full.

Jamie Murray Wells, 24, Old Harrovian friend of Prince William and Kate Middleton, sells glasses on the internet at one-tenth of the price they retail in the High Street.

So successful has his business become that he has attracted £3million ($6m) of venture capital funding. His next plan is to take on the lucrative American market

Jamie started out with only his student loan, and some help from his father, who is also an entrepreneur. Simon is an investment analyst, while his mother, Alison, buys up cottages for holiday renting and, for good measure, imports local products from Morocco. His maternal grandfather, Wendall Clough, helped bring Ford and Chrysler to Britain.

In the past few years, Jamie has gone head-to-head with High Street giants like Specsavers and Vision Express for dominance of Britain’s multi-billion-pound glasses market.

He says, “We currently sell 300 to 400 pairs a day. This injection of cash means we could be selling thousands.”

Enterprising he may be, cheeky he certainly is. He recently bombarded Newcastle city centre with men in sheep costumes implying the High Street was “fleecing” consumers. “I love the fact that this business is causing trouble,” he says. “At school I used to behave terribly. Even at university I’d do things like make the campus Christmas tree disappear, watch the uproar and then mysteriously return it.”

Glasses Direct was conceived while he was reading for his final exams at the University of the West of England in Bristol. He set up the website after he discovered the huge cost of spectacles on the High Street, although they cost as little as £7 to make.

He remarks, “I would walk out of the examination room and go straight to the library to use the computers for my business. What gives me kicks is bringing something new into the world. I’m not into starting up just another optician. I want a market-changing business.”

Jamie employs 30 staff in Wiltshire, England and is recruiting for a new London office. Turnover is predicted to rise to £10million by 2008.