Results: Venture Capital Quiz

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There are plenty of half-baked startups looking for salvation in a sale to an eager--and addled--buyer.

Take our fourth Quiz subject, for instance. This company (which will remain anonymous) wanted a piece of the pain-relief business dominated by giants like Pfizer (nyse: PFE - news - people ), Merck (nyse: MRK - news - people ), Bayer (nyse: BAY - news - people ) and Johnson & Johnson (nyse: JNJ - news - people ). Its founder, a serial entrepreneur, had developed a flexible harness lined with electrodes that quelled pain by delivering precisely controlled electrical impulses to the sore area. Its long-term promise: training the human body, through repeated treatments, to ease pain for good. The device had been approved by the FDA but was still in clinical trials to prove its long-term efficacy. The company had raised--and torched--$1.5 million in two years and was looking for another $2.5 million to stay afloat.

For a glimpse at how a venture capitalist would view things, check out the following "radar" graph, courtesy of The Venture Alliance, which coaches fledgling companies on attracting funding and also provides the candidates for these quizzes. The larger lightly shaded region represents the relative importance of each of the 12 elements that TVA deems critical in assessing a particular target's viability (and fundability); the smaller, overlapping darker region shows how the company stacked up relative to those maximum benchmarks. In this case, while the candidate had a juicy market opportunity, its management team and financial projections were dubious."

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