We are extremely grateful for the opportunity to interview Bill Reichert of Garage.com for our first *Ask the VC* interview series. Bill takes us from which startup ideas excite him to giving us excellent advice for what startups need to be doing in order to succeed.

Bill says, 1. You’ve gotta have a way to keep going without funding 2. you must be doing something different 3. You must have integrity, you must be trustworthy.

More from Garage.com:
Bill Reichert has over 20 years of experience as an entrepreneur and an operating executive. Since joining Garage in 1998, Bill has focused on early-stage information technology and materials science companies. He sits on the Boards of CaseStack, WhiteHat, ClearFuels, cFares, and ThermoCeramix. Prior to Garage, Bill was a co-founder or senior executive in several venture-backed technology startups, including Trademark Software, The Learning Company, and Academic Systems. Earlier in his career, he worked at McKinsey & Company, Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., and the World Bank. Bill earned a B.A. at Harvard College and an M.B.A. from Stanford University. He was a founding board member and a Chairman of the Churchill Club, and a Charter Member of the Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs. Currently he is the Chairman of the Small Fund Roundtable of the VC Taskforce and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

Garage Technology Ventures is a seed-stage and early-stage venture capital fund. We’re looking to invest in entrepreneurial teams with big ideas and a need for seed capital to turn their ideas into great companies.

We are willing to invest in unproven teams attacking unproven markets with unproven solutions. We’re not interested in teams that are creating the nth solution to the same old problem nor companies who are trying to improve things by only 10 or 20 percent.

On a more tactical level, the characteristics of the companies we invest in are:

Sectors: Software, services, clean technology, and material sciences (not life sciences)

*Funding: Seeking seed or early investments from $500,000 to $3,000,000

*Geography: California or Western US based

*Business model: requiring less than $5,000,000 to reach break even or sustainability

If this sounds like your company, please send us your executive summary. Before you send your summary, please review the following material: