I’m pleased to announce that we closed our first round of outside funding for FōnCloud. (Jason and I have been covering the costs ourselves until now.)

I won’t give any details here, but I will say that it feels great to have investors believe in us at such an early stage of our development. It’s exciting to see the team grow and also get back some familiar faces from our Streamcheck days.

To other entrepreneurs — I don’t recommend trying to close a deal in August. Vacations and general summer sluggishness makes response times very slow. Of course, we didn’t plan to close in August, but that’s another story.

And, by the way, why are wire transfers still so kludgy? PayPal has had this figured out for years. Why can’t the banks streamline this process? Well, at least they charge outrageous fees to go with the slow performance, so the per-hour rate you’re paying isn’t that bad.

We didn’t raise a ton of money but I am still taking to heart this advice from Marc Andreesen:

So what should you do if you do raise a lot of money?

As my old boss Jim Barksdale used to say, the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing — be just as focused on product and customers when you raise a lot of money as you would be if you hadn’t raised a lot of money.

Easy to say, hard to do, but worth it.

Continue to run as lean as you can, bank as much of the money as possible, and save it for a rainy day — or a nuclear winter.

Illustrate that point by staying as scrappy as possible on material items — office space, furniture, etc. The two areas to splurge, in my opinion, are big-screen monitors and ergonomic office chairs. Other than that, it should be Ikea all the way.

Generally speaking, act like you haven’t raised nearly as much money as you actually have — in how you talk, act, and spend.

Yep… we bought new monitors and chairs for the team, and the rest of our furniture is Ikea. (Has anyone else noticed that Ikea’s product ID’s look a lot like IP addresses?)