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Great book recommendations here.For a fundamental value investing approach, here’s my list.My criteria in determining whether a book is good or not is based on how much I retain afterwards and how practical it is. Too many books go a mile wide and an inch deep.I prefer “inch wide and mile deep” books.I also don’t list too many already popular books that everyone recommends like The Intelligent Investor, Security Analysis, Margin of Safety etc.EASY Investment Books for Beginners or to Brush Up OnEasy to read and understand books. Helpful to build knowledge for beginners and useful for experienced investors to brush up on the basics.Why are we so Clueless about the Stock Market?A very good book investment book introducing value investing, basic accounting and financial analysis.The section on valuation and DCF is easy to understand and the detail and clarity of explanations will benefit the first time investor and reader.F Wall StreetLiterally THE book that sent me down the road of value investing.Great investing book to follow Why are we so clueless about the stock market?. It dives into slightly more detailed and complex investing acronyms, concepts and investing ideas.Economic Moats: The Little Book that Builds WealthThis is a quick and easy investment book to help you understand durable competitive advantages - also known as moats.Read this book to get a good idea of how a business can create, sustain or lose its moat.The Dhandho InvestorWelcome to the world of "low risk, high return".This book goes through the "Dhandho" framework which Mohnish Pabrai uses to invest as it helped propel himself to guru status.The Five Rules for Successful Stock InvestingThis book has a little of all the books in the easy category. Understanding and applying what you learn in this book will be the equivalent of building a home on a solid foundation.The basics are solid and even seasoned investors should read this book to maintain their knowledge.Common Stocks and Uncommon ProfitsBuffett said that he is 15% Phil Fisher and 85% Ben Graham (the reverse is true today), yet most people have never heard of Phil Fisher.Phil looked for growth stocks to hold forever. Read this book to discover his methods and thinking behind the influence he had on Warren Buffett.]INTERMEDIATE Investment Books to Push Your Learning CurvePractical books that requires thought and practice.Easy to understand with emphasis on process and methodology.The Investment ChecklistA big fat book for investors that is chock full of practical advice and checklists.Every investor should have a checklist to reference when researching, buying and selling stocks.Full of checklists and questions to think about in your investing.Financial Statements: A Step-by-Step GuideA very good book investment book introducing value investing, basic accounting and financial analysis.The section on valuation and DCF is easy to understand and the detail and clarity of explanations will benefit the first time investor and reader.Active Value InvestingThe first half talks about why the market has been moving sideways and goes onto talk about how you can actively pick and manage stocks.It introduces the QVG (Quality Value Growth) framework using qualitative and quantitative factors to analyze stocks which is what Old School Value uses to score and rank stocks.You Can Be a Stock Market Genius!A "special situation" is an investment which relies on a catalyst and/or timeframe to realize a profit.Mergers, arbitrage and bankruptcies are ways to profit from without taking on market risk.This book will open your eyes to a new world of possible investments.The Art of Value InvestingThink of this investment book as the value investing manual. Everything you can think of within the topic of value investing is covered here.The book is also filled with interviews from the best value investing minds to pack quality wisdom and knowledge into your head.The Art of Short SellingThrough numerous case studies, read how a short seller identifies accounting and management flaws in companies.There is always a wealth of knowledge to gain by reading into a short sellers mind. Although the examples are dated, everything is applicable to today's stocks.What I Learned Losing a Million DollarsMaking money and building wealth in the stock market is fine.But another way to make money from the stock market is to not lose money.By protecting yourself from losses, you'll be able to continue investing and sleep well. Read this book to learn how not to lose money.The Art of Value InvestingA complete manual on value investing.Topics covered include deep value stocks, sum of parts analysis, magic formula investing, tracking gurus, quant screening, spin offs and more.You'll come away with plenty of new ideas and insight into the process of value investing.Berkshire Hathaway Letters to ShareholdersThe collection of Warren Buffett letters in a single neat book.Get the kindle version as it's only $2.99 and is updated yearly for free.Don't bother downloading the PDF's because you won't read it that way. Dirt cheap price for such valuable accessible wisdom.ADVANCED Investment Books for Experienced InvestorsHeavy in theory, practical application and deep thinking. Many of these books are dry because of academics involved. Take plenty of notes and go through it slowly.Value Investing: Graham to Buffett and BeyondRequires a solid understanding of accounting and financial analysis to fully appreciate this book.The book from front to end is about valuing companies using the Earnings Power Value method.One of the best investing books on valuation.Quality of EarningsLearn how to interpret the financial statements from an investors point of view and learn ways to determine the true quality of earnings instead of relying on the numbers provided by management and Wall Street.One of the biggest hidden gems that you can read.Financial ShenanigansThis book is so good that it is used as a text in business school.Uncover every trick in the book that companies will perform to manipulate and enhance numbers. Now you can catch it before it's too late.Detailed, thorough and practical. What more could you ask for?What's Behind the Numbers?A modern version to Quality of Earnings.What's Behind the Numbers is another book based on forensic accounting to detect financial manipulation and to prevent yourself getting caught with your pants down. Recent case studies and examples makes this book very practical and beneficial.It's Earnings that CountThis book introduces the Earnings Power Box which is a technique to identify companies and test the quality of a company with a wide gap between their accrual performance and earnings.An easy to follow tutorial along with details on specific ratios you should use to improve your returns.Creative Cash Flow ReportingBig thick text book focused on tearing apart creative cash flow reporting that companies use to mislead investors.If you want to know how to adjust cash flow statements for effective analysis and use adjusted operating cash flows to uncover earnings manipulation, this is it.Accounting for ValueCombines accounting principles to value investing principles.Unlike many books, Accounting for value is able to go through the accounting and link back to how it is used with investing.Learn about accounting quality and what is behind the numbers.The Most Important Thing IlluminatedCategorized as difficult because getting a hold of your emotions, investing tendencies and psychology is one of the most difficult battles you will face.Howard Marks is the authority on behavioral finance. Be honest with yourself as you read and reflect on these words.What else would you add to this list?Thanks for reading and to your success.

We ask many successful fund managers the question of how to get started in value investing. In those conversations, we have gathered much wisdom and advice for aspiring value investors. Below, I include some of those insights. Enjoy!Chuck Akre, CEO, Akre Capital Management“I’ll tell you a quick anecdote. There is a financial writer who used the nom de plume of Adam Smith years ago, his name is Goodman I think. And back in the 1980s, he interviewed Warren Buffett and he said, well, what advice can you give somebody who wants to be a good investor? Warren said, well, just learn about all the public companies. So he said, oh, you couldn’t possibly mean that? There must 7,000 public companies. Warren says, well, just do what I do, start with the As.Most of us are not blessed with the kind of mind and capability that he has, and so I would just say, it’s been hugely important to me to be curious and passionate about it. And if you go back and read…of things that Warren Buffett suggested that one had to have to become a successful investor. And among them were things like control greed and so on.Be curious and read everything you can get your hands on and try to identify the people who’ve been winners and then try to identify why they have been winners. What it is about what they’re doing that causes them to be successful? I mean that’s all I’ve ever done, and try to create a system that works for the way I’m wired and allows me to get along in the market. That’s all there is to it, be curious, interested and uninhibited.”Brian Bares, Founder, Bares Capital Management“Conceptually, from an investment process and philosophy standpoint, obviously the Berkshire Hathaway annual reports going back and even his partnership letters are a great source for understanding the concept of viewing a stock as a business, fundamentally, and understanding that to be successful in the stock market, you need to be successful in owning businesses that compound high rates over time. I think that’s the fundamental tenant that I took away from the Buffet/Munger philosophy.I think the more Munger influence of buying high-quality business over time that compound because of that convergence between stock price and intrinsic value is probably even more of a fundamental tenant of our process. I think anything by the two of them is great. All of the books that have been written about them I devoured in my early investing career.I like business biographies. Business biographies tend to just show how passionate people who live and breathe their business have created something out of nothing, such as the Sam Walton biography. I recently read a biography of In and Out Burger on the west coast, which I thought was really great. So, anything that you can get your hands on, modern business biographies have been extremely beneficial in understanding the characteristics of management teams that are exceptional, especially because they all don’t look identical but there are some common personality characteristics.I think the McKinsey book on valuation was very helpful in constructing our original DCF models. I think more than reading the entire finance section at Barnes and Noble, a better approach would probably be to start reading as many annual reports that you can get your hands on because that’s what’s really happening in American publically-traded small businesses. You start to get a feel for what exceptional looks like by doing that.Everybody in our office, oddly enough, even though it’s kind of an individual investor tool, reads Value Line cover to cover every week, the paper edition. It’s just mental weight lifting for us to get a sense for what returns on capital, returns on sales, and common-size financial statements look like for particular industries over time, and you can sort of see that “Hey, the precision instrument industry has really delivered fantastic results for investors over time” and “Hey, look the airline space has really done the exact opposite,” and you can start figuring out what industries and sectors are doing really well and which ones aren’t, and that can help hone your investment process a little bit and focus your time and energy on the right places.”Rupal Bhansali, Chief Investment Officer – International Equities, Ariel Investments“For someone who’s starting out, they should try to absorb a lot of information because you do need to have an antenna. Insights are developed when you connect the information, when you process the information, when you interpret the information. So that will come with experience and acumen and know-how. But it does not obviate the need for collecting that information. So it’s not easy.They should read and learn from someone who’s been in the profession as up close and personal as they can. So the first thing they should do is try to find a job with someone who actually has a great long term investment track record because you learn from others. That’s why it’s like osmosis. You see people, how they process information, how they interpret it and it sort of gets into your DNA and your consciousness. It’s almost subliminal.And you will form your own rhythm, and you’ll apply that know-how and knowledge at your own way because this is a very creative exercise but at least you will have learned from someone so that will speed up your process of creativities, as I like to think about it, as opposed to constrain it.”Charles de Vaulx, Chief Investment Officer, International Value Advisers“Besides the classics, Ben Graham, of course, I think Berkshire Hathaway annual reports. One has to not only read them, but re-read them. I’m very fond of Vladimir Nabokov, the writer of Lolita. He said, “a good reader is a re-reader”. I think some of the books that are a must would be Peter Bernstein’s book about risk, Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk.I believe that awareness of history, in particular, economic history, financial history, history of how technological improvements and technological breakthroughs have impacted the world, and history of geography — are important, so I think some history books are a must. Financial history, there’s a wonderful historian who passed away a year or two ago, Charles Kindleberger, who many people know. One of his most famous books is Manias, Panics and Crashes, but he also wrote more in-depth books. One is called, The Financial History of Western Europe, and there are other books that are a compilation of many of his essays, and I think these are very valuable. There is a great book by David Kynaston called City of London. It goes back 300 or 400 hundred years and basically walks through the financial history of the world through what happened in the city of London.Some reading that delves into behavioral finance and psychology can be very interesting. Daniel Kahneman’s books should be read along with Poor Charlie’s Almanack, which has transcripts of many of the speeches that Charlie Munger has made over the years.Otherwise, for anyone who begins as an investor, I would recommend books by John Train. Some 20 or 30 years ago he wrote, The Money Masters, where you have a chapter on Ben Graham, one on Philip Fisher, one on Warren Buffett and so forth ,and then ten years later John Train wrote, The New Money Masters, with Peter Lynch, Mario Gabelli, and so forth. The advantage of those books is that you have one chapter on one money manager, and that book helps the reader understand that there are many ways, many recipes to invest money, and each of these ways has its own internal logic and own set of rules. If someone who starts as an investor reads the book, he or she will appreciate that there are many ways to do it, many ways to cook, and he or she will probably be able to, based on his or her temperament, identify and find some affinity with one of those investment styles, whether it’s George Soros or Paul Tudor Jones or Ben Graham with the cigar butts, or Philip Fisher. I think The Money Masters and The New Money Masters are great books to read to begin in our business.”Jean-Marie Eveillard, Senior Adviser, First Eagle Funds“When our younger daughter was six or seven years old somebody asked her at school, what does your father do? And Pauline didn’t have the answer. So that evening when I came home she said she was embarrassed, so she said, hey what do you do? And I didn’t feel like particularly at the end of the day, I didn’t feel like explaining to a six-year old money management, so I said Pauline, I will tell you how I spend my time.And I said to Pauline, half of my time is spent reading, because I had read or heard that Warren Buffett was a voracious reader, which he is. So I said to myself I don’t have his skills but if I read voraciously maybe it will help me too, which it did I believe. And the other half of my time I spend talking with my in-house analysts. And Pauline said, reading, talking, that’s not work. So I said sorry, Pauline but that’s just what I do.”Tom Gayner, Chief Investment Officer, Markel Corporation“I read endlessly. John Wooden, the basketball coach at UCLA during their dynasty is a hero to me. General Grant is a hero. Warren Buffett is a hero. Pick some good heroes and read everything you can about them.I also like reading about history, psychology, and human nature, technological progress and scientific thought. The world is a fascinating place and you will never run out of rich material if you want to keep understanding more and more.I think I saw a recent interview with Seth Klarman where he said something like, “value investing is the marriage of a contrarian and a calculator.” Some books, like Twain’s, the histories and biographies help you with the human nature and contrarian side of that equation. Some books, like the ones about science and technological developments, along with the accounting homework I did a long time ago, help you with the calculator side. Both elements are essential. Each is severely limited without appropriate balance and understanding from the other side.”Robert Hagstrom, Chief Investment Strategist, Legg Mason Investment Counsel“As students of the Buffett methodology, we’re becoming well-versed in the mechanics of it, well-versed in the procedures if you will. But we need to be spending a little bit more time on the issue of rationality. Buffett not only has the process and the mechanics down perfectly, but he has the rationality, the temperament that allows him to apply it and not get thrown off course.And the mistakes that people make as they adopt the Buffett methodology is they get thrown off course by the emotional aspects of it. The irrationality of it all. We need to spend more time talking about that.”Paul Lountzis, President, Lountzis Asset Management“Greg Alexander [at Ruane, Cunniff & Goldfarb] once said to me: ‘You really learn from your mistakes’ and he’s so right. And so I try to reflect on ideas over the years that I’ve done right and especially those that I’ve done wrong: What could I have done better? What could I have known? What could I have not known?, and I find that very, very helpful to assess your performance and assess the exercising of your judgment. And that’s how you learn.”Atticus Lowe, Chief Investment Officer, West Coast Asset Management“For somebody that wants to get into the business, especially a younger crowd, interning is great, multiple internships to get different senses of different types of experience. We have an active internship program here at West Coast. And reading is a great resource whether it’s reading books on investments or just reading 10-K’s, annual reports, proxies – things of that nature, the more the better. We all have a passion for that, learning about businesses.”Howard Marks, Chairman, Oaktree Capital Management“I keep going back to what Charlie Munger said to me, which is none of this is easy, and anybody who thinks it is easy is stupid. It is just not easy. There are many layers to this, and you just have to think well. I can’t tell you how to think well. Some people get it, some people don’t.”“There is no secret method for any of this stuff. You just have to be aware of concepts, smart in their application, and it helps to be an old man, or an old woman, so that you have the experience that helps.”David Nierenberg, Founder, The D3 Family Funds“And so, what would you say to someone other than the fact that you want them to read and think extensively, and at the very same time that they do it broadly, to drill a “T.” So that in the vertical part of the “T” you also build substantive expertise in a far narrower domain where you can establish true competitive advantage relative to what other investors might know. If you do both of those things and you keep doing it and you keep learning, you’re going to be fine even if you don’t have a Yale degree.”Lisa Rapuano, Portfolio Manager, Lane Five Capital Management“You can practice this craft anywhere. I don’t think that if you’re young and you know you’re a value guy, but you’re stuck in a growth shop or you know you’re an Asia guy and you get stuck in the Europe shop or whatever, I think you can learn anywhere. Too many people spend too much time needing a defined path and this is a very fluid business. You have to just sort of go with the flow sometimes. It’s also really hard to get a job so sometimes you just have to take what you can get and do your best wherever you are.But I don’t think your job defines your philosophy necessarily, unless you get to run your own shop. Then you get to define your philosophy. But everyone works for someone, I work for my clients, everyone works for someone and so you’re always going to be able to be differentiate between what you are expected to do for your job and what you want to do for yourself, and you have to sort of figure out how to balance those things.Too many people hold out for the perfect thing, and too many people have very, very strident views when they’re too young to have strident views. You need to develop and you need to learn. You can learn from anyone, anyone who has been successful in his business has something to teach you. Even the technician, even the momentum guy, even an economist, there’s something to learn from all of these people.So I think that it’d be great to end up with the perfect match, with the perfect place that’s perfect for you. But in fact, unless you’ve started it, it’s not going to be perfect. So go with the flow, learn what you can, figure it out. Be glad that you’re somewhere and try to find the best from whoever it is that you’re working with.”Robert Robotti, President, Robotti & Company“As I always say…I’m not smarter than the average guy, I’m not more connected than the average guy, I’m not any of those things. And if I can be successful at investing, that means you can be successful at investing.Therefore, the capabilities are within most humans to be successful, if you have an idea of what are businesses, how do they run, what are the drivers in terms of future economics and can you identify businesses that the market isn’t looking at properly. And that’s easy enough to do in certain cases because the market does have a very short term focus. And so by having that longer term focus, it’s not so hard to identify a couple of companies that the market isn’t getting right.”Tom Russo, Partner, Gardner Russo & Gardner“Stretch out your time horizon. Think five years and not five minutes. When you are presented with ideas always ask critically about the prejudice that may be expressed by the source of an idea. That came to me from the study of history. And the quick answer there is to say whenever someone says “Truth,” say, “Who says?” Understand the bias of a person who tells you something. It’s very good for critical thinking.”Larry Sarbit, Chief Investment Officer, Sarbit Advisory Services“It comes down to one good place to start and that is read Benjamin Graham, read Warren Buffett’s annual reports to shareholders which are easily accessible on the web. They weren’t accessible on the web because there was no web when I started investing back in the 1980’s. Read those, and read them all, and then reread them because he presents the most rational, the most logical, and the most business-like approach to investing.That’s where I learned to invest was reading Buffett, reading Graham, or many other people who have written in this fashion and understand the power of this investment philosophy. That’s the place to start. If you get off in the right foot in this business and once you grab that concept that Buffett’s talking about and Graham’s talking about, it’ll guide you for an investment lifetime.But as Buffett says grabbing the concept of value and behaving in a rational business-like fashion is like an inoculation. It either takes you immediately or never takes you. It either grabs you or it will never grab you. It’s not something you learn gradually, it’s not something you pick up on a slow basis. You either get it or you don’t. So read that stuff and read it early. The earlier you read it the more likely it is to grab your mind, and it’s the right way to go in my estimation.”Kenneth Shubin Stein, Portfolio Manager, Spencer Capital Management“It’s very important to do something you’re passionate about. Life is highly unpredictable. We have no idea about our future health, our future wealth and a lot of things in life are just hard to predict. Therefore, it makes all the sense on the world to do things that we’re passionate about now and today.Suffering for a long period of time in the hope of some future payoff is generally not a good idea. One needs to do that to some degree to follow trades or professions and we all have to get through the grunt work to learn our crafts whether it be doctors, lawyers or investors. But it’s really important to follow passion I believe. Oftentimes, there’s a way to learn how to follow passion profitably. That’s not always the case but it’s often the case.With students, I always suggest that they go into fields they care about and they enjoy because it’s just much more fun if you enjoy the process. I love what we do, I love what I do. I really enjoy being part of my company, I love being part of Columbia and overall it’s all great. It’s a lot of work but I really enjoy it. If I did not enjoy it, it would just be torture because it is a lot of work.My first advice would be enjoy what you do. In terms of becoming a professional investor, one, I would say most people don’t need to. You can learn to be a very good investor and invest very profitably over your whole life without doing this professionally. Everybody needs to handle their retirement accounts and their savings accounts. These are very useful skills for everybody including just knowing you don’t want to be an active investor, and a very smart decision is for a lot people to say I’m not going to try to pick individual stocks and bonds. I’m going to go into index funds and you’re guaranteed to outperform more than half the professional money managers in the world if you just do that.Just understanding how this works is important. It’s very competitive. If you can do something else profitably and enjoy it, there are a lot less competitive areas to go into. And if you do still want to pursue being a professional investor, and try to outperform the market over a long period of time then it’s very important to be a lifelong learner, to have a passion for learning.Learning comes in all sorts of places. There’s experiential learning. There’s didactic learning. There’s a host of ways to acquire wisdom. Something Munger has talked a lot that I appreciate the longer I do this is this is not a business of who’s the smartest. There are a lot of very smart people that don’t end up doing well in our business. Being smart always helps if one is as smart as Buffett and Munger, I’m sure that’s fantastic but most of us are not.It is a business of acquiring some worldly wisdom and I believe all of us can acquire worldly wisdom over time by trying to get better at this and trying to think better. A book that greatly impacted me was Poor Charlie’s Almanack, along with the essays of Warren Buffett or his annual letters, and a lot of what Ben Franklin wrote. Poor Charlie’s Almanack pulls a lot of this together in one book. I’ve read and reread that book several times and each time I do, I seem to get something else useful out of it, some other nugget or pearl of wisdom. For me, that’s what’s been helpful.”Michael van Biema, Managing Partner, Van Biema Value Partners“Certain people have, for lack of a better term, I will call funny ways of thinking about the world. They naturally think in an off-colored or contrarian, or whatever you want to call it way. It’s both fun and fascinating to listen to these people and listen to how they perceive various situations and various companies. They perceive them in a different light, and where the rest of us may see a very standard manufacturing company they will see something that actually is quite different, intriguing and should be valued in a completely different way…The way we think about the world is basically a manager has two skills. He has the skill of being a stock picker or a good stock analyst, company analyst, and that skill is reasonably easy to identify and reasonably easy to document over time. The much more difficult skill is can he, does he know how to run a good portfolio and will that portfolio generate good returns over the long term?We have certainly had managers who are great stock analysts and lousy portfolio managers, and therefore generated poor to mediocre investment returns. It’s unfortunate because they have half the skillset there but they don’t have the entire skillset. You got a guy who has a lot of raw talent but not in the right places necessarily. He’d do better if he wasn’t quite as good an analyst than he was a better portfolio manager.”Amit Wadhwaney, Portfolio Manager and Co-Founding Partner, Moerus Capital Management“It is important that anybody who goes down this path be aware of a few things. Know yourself. There’s certain kinds of things that value investors do which are not fun. Fun in terms of patience, fun in terms of due diligence. This is grunt work, this is hard work, it’s very unglamorous.I would tell you growth investors have a far more glamorous life. That’s the fun end of the business. Their companies are always growing, they always look good, they have high ROEs. It’s always wonderful. We’re at the other end of the spectrum. We do the unpleasant stuff, we deal with these terrible companies, terrible countries, companies facing difficulties, companies which may need recapitalized. There’s all sorts of stuff. So know what you want to do. Value investing may or may not be for you. That’s item number one.But notwithstanding that, if you really think value investing is for you, there’s a lot of stuff that’s been written about value. Books that come to mind – again, this is in no particular order – obviously Marty [Whitman]’s first book, his original copy ofThe Aggressive Conservative Investor was, to me, a great book. As I said before and I will say without being bashful, the book’s a damn turgent read. It’s a deadly read but it’s a very bright book. It’s full of a lot of ideas. Then, of course, are the other books that he’s written, namely Value Investing, A Balanced Approach. Those will get you going. And then, of course, Seth Klarman’s book, The Margin of Safety which also came out, I believe it was in the early ‘80s, if I recall. Seth’s book was a fabulous book, a great book. It’s a much more user friendly book. So there is that.Then, of course, if you enjoy special situation investing, there’s Joel Greenblatt’s book [You Can Be a Stock Market Genius: (Even if You’re Not Too Smart!)], it’s got a very odd title. It’s actually a very bright book. I think it’s a very clever book. Again, I’m not a fan of mechanical investment formula. If that’s what you do Joel has another book about that. Most recently there’s Howard Marks’ book. Howard Marks is a great writer. The book is a very nice, easy summary of what we do, what he does. There’s no question there’s lots of wisdom encapsulated in Howard Marks’ book, which is a really worthy read.So if you’ve made it through all that stuff and you actually read Graham and Dodd’s book, you really want to pursue it, the only way to do it is by doing it. Doing it is, I believe, a process of some degree of apprenticeship with somebody who is going to actually teach you. You can learn generalities. There’s an art of recognizing these things. There’s an art of not being freaked out by these things and these auctions where they’re staring you in the face. There’s an art of recognizing things that are sometimes very subtle, things that could hurt you. That’s very important. You can only learn that by doing and you do it by ideally working with an experienced person. I mean, it’s obviously easier said than done, finding the right person who’s actually looking for somebody, or the right temperament to be a mentor. But that’s probably the way to do it.”

To begin with, it is important to understand some basic facts about the world of entrepreneurial finance:There are many more entrepreneurs than there are investors, with the result that only one company out of every 400 that seeks venture funding actually receives it.As such, the competition from an entrepreneur's standpoint is very, very tough. In order to be competitive, a company needs to have just about everything in place, from its product to its team to market traction, before it is ready to seek funding.Given this imbalance, the fact is that most VCs are reactive rather than proactive. That means they spend a lot less time actively seeking out new deals than they do responding to inbound deal flow. A typical VC might see 500 opportunities cross his or her desk every year; for larger, more prominent ones it could be 2,000.VCs therefore use whatever heuristics they can in order to triage the deal flow. One of the primary ones is the referral source. This means that by far the most effective way to reach a VC is to be introduced by someone who knows both of you and thinks it would be a good match.The answer to the original question, therefore, is that an entrepreneur should use Gust as a set of powerful tools to organize, support and smooth the fundraising process, rather than expecting it to be a magic bullet. No matter what you may have heard or read in the blogosphere, there is simply no platform in the world where you can post a profile and expect money to start flowing.With that background, here are 30 tips to help you make the most of Gust:Subscribe to the Gust Blog, and go back and read the past posts. We have spent a great deal of effort to pull together some of the smartest experts in the money-raising field, and the blog is carefully curated to be useful specifically to entrepreneurs seeking funding. Among the contributors are Quora regulars including Tim Berry, Antone Johnson, Martin Zwilling and me.Browse through the many hundreds of video answers to startup questions that we've filmed from the world's leading VCs and angels. They have taken the time to do this so that you can understand exactly how they think about things, and why. Luminaries contributing to the Gust video library include Dave McClure, David Hornik, Esther Dyson, Howard L Morgan, Josh Kopelman, Mark Suster and many others.Take the time to read, cover to cover, The Definitive Guide to Raising Money from Angels, by the legendary Bill Payne. A download link is sent to you automatically by Gust once you create your profile, and the book is exactly what it says. Starting to raise money without understanding the world into which you are stepping is the quickest route to frustration.A wonderful resource for startups in fundraising mode that most people don't know about is the Frank Peters Show, the only weekly podcast that is all about (and onlyabout) the world of angel investing. Gust sponsors it because we think it's an invaluable contribution to the industry, and in fact we require that all members of the Gust team listen to it each week. There are 450+ back episodes online, and it's safe to say that if you listen to it regularly, within a few months you will know more about what makes angel investors tick than do 98% of the rest of the world...including other angels!Create your Gust profile to show off your venture in the best possible light. That means it should be complete, thoughtful, accurate and always kept up to date. I am continually surprised at founders who spend ten minutes throwing up a barebones profile and are dismayed that money doesn't start flowing in. At the very least, answer ALL the profile questions, include your company's logo, create a two-minute elevator pitch video and upload your presentation deck.Before you start entering your profile information, decide what language you would like to work in. Gust is fully localized in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian and Chinese, and will automatically use for its interface the primary language chosen in your browser. Changing languages in your computer's or browser's preferences will change the language in which Gust works with you.Make full use of the fact that there are two parts to your Gust profile: the public site and the private site. The goal of the former is to get you maximum exposure; the latter, to provide all the information that investors need to take a relationship to the next step. As such, your public profile should include everything non-confidential about your business that may attract the interest of potential investors, and your private profile should contain complete, accurate information about all the details of the business that will lead investors to request an in-person meeting with you. Remember that you will have total control over who can see this material.Make your public profile as sexy, comprehensive and enticing as possible, adding a short, well done, elevator pitch video (think "the kind of video you see on great Kickstarter campaigns") and listing your full management team. And don't forget the ability to customize your profile's background. Choose one from our large library of thematic and designer backgrounds or, even better, upload your own.Your private profile is where investors will look with a critical eye on everything that makes you a business rather than just a product or a sexy idea. The ten questions that make up the core of the Gust executive summary (and that in turn comprise the bulk of the 'One Pager' that investors print out for screening and review sessions) are only the distilled tip of the iceberg. You really should have spent a heck of a lot of time beforehand in thinking through all of the issues surrounding your startup. One excellent way to do this (with a good bit of help from the experts), is to create a draft business plan using LivePlan from Palo Alto Software. Based on the seminal work of Tim Berry, it's the best business planning software available, and they've provided Gust users with a 50% discount for your first two months to try it out.Because Gust is the word's most comprehensive database of high-growth startup companies (in terms of size, larger than Crunchbase and AngelList combined), it is increasingly used as a source for third party listings and directories. Having a good public profile on Gust means that your company's public (never private!) information will end up being disseminated broadly into other sites based on geography, industry, etc. This added exposure can result in indications of interest (investment, acquisition, partnership, etc.) from people and organizations that you didn't even know existed.Gust allows you to take all the time you want in order to polish up your profile before publishing it. Using the controls on your profile's home page, you can edit and update your information, preview the way it will appear to investors and the public, and ultimately publish it once it's ready for primetime.Because Gust is so universally used, it can be a great source of competitive intelligence for you, during both the planning and execution phases of your business. Make sure to browse through the public pages of other startups on the platform using keywords relative to your venture, in order to see what your colleagues and competitors are up to. Keep in mind that investors will likely be doing the same thing, and knowledge is power.Use Gust to research funding sources. Investor profiles on the platform are created by the investors themselves, and tell you exactly who the group's leaders are, and what they are looking for. There's no use banging your head against a VC's door with a social network venture if they only invest in biotech companies.Gust takes advantage of the cloud, and you should, too. Connect your LinkedIn account to your Gust account, and you'll unlock a nifty feature: whenever you view an investor profile, you will be able to see how you are connected to them, giving you the chance of seeking out a 'warm' introduction. This will almost always be the best approach to an investor.While VCs are the toughest nut to crack, there are many other (often better) sources of seed capital that may be available to you. Gust is used by over 1,000 angel investment groups, accelerators, business plan competitions and support programs to manage their applications. Rather than limiting your search to venture funds, therefore, consider the full range of startup options.In addition to the fact that it is often easier to get accepted by an accelerator, or to make it to the finals of a business plan competition, or get funded by an angel group, those vehicles frequently serve the role of "curators" for the later stage financing world. That's why investors attend Demo Days and look for acceptance into such programs as one of several 'validators' of a startup. On Gust, these organizations create "Collections" of the companies with which they are working (which are accessible from the main Startup browse page), and companies in these Collections receive, on average, 37 times as many views as other companies.Once you have your startup profile fully completed and up-to-date, and have carefully identified logical potential investors, it's time to reach out to them. In the case of the 1,000+ organized or institutional investors using Gust, simply find them on Gust, and click "Share your Venture". All of your material will then be automagically entered into their deal flow management system, ready for them to review.If the fund or group has additional, specific information that they request with an application (such as who referred you, or how you qualify as part of a specific demographic), you will be prompted to answer additional questions, which you should do just as carefully and completely as you did for your core profile.Note that investors have the ability to set 'filters'using Gust, so that neither they nor the entrepreneur wastes the effort of going through the process for a venture that is outside their own, specific criteria for investment. These can be based on things like location (some only invest in a particular country or state), industry (a Life Science fund is simply not going to invest in a new social network for real estate agents), or valuation (a seed fund will not usually invest in a company that is advanced enough to warrant a $10m pre-money valuation), etc. If you share your material with a VC and get a polite response that you are out of their range, you should double check the investor's profile page. In the vast majority of cases the fund's criteria are described explicitly in their profile, so that's a hint that you should probably spend more time researching and targeting your potential investors.In addition to sharing your site with institutional/organized investors you find in the Gust database, one of the platform's most powerful features is that you can use Gust to share your materials with any potential investor, provided you know their email address. Simply enter their name and email, write a good cover letter, and click the share button. The suggested draft cover letter is a good place to start (I wrote it :-), but take the time to personalize it to your specific company, and each specific investor.Note that because of Gust's well-known brand, scammers are increasingly trying to take advantage of eager entrepreneurs by claiming some sort of affiliation with the platform. Every investor on Gust is an Accredited Investor that has been provided access to the system by either an official angel group known to Gust, a venture capital fund, or another startup in which they are investing. Any legitimate investor who finds you through Gust will also contact you through Gust! If you receive an unsolicited regular email from an "investor" or other party claiming that they saw you on Gust, either ignore it, or ask them to contact you through the platform. If they're legitimate, they will. Otherwise, you can be 99.9999% sure that they're just out to scam you.With your fundraising program underway, you should now be using your Gust Entrepreneur Dashboard on a regular basis for keeping track of how many people are viewing your site, for authorizing new investors to access your materials, and for monitoring your ongoing interactions with all of the investors with whom you're working (whether institutional, group or individual). There are tabs for each category of investor (ones you've invited, are actively engaged with, have withdrawn, been declined, etc.) Within each category, all investors have cards on your dashboard showing their current status, latest activity, and date you first engaged.For more detailed information on a specific investor, clicking on their relationship card brings up details of their activity, including which of the pages from your site they've viewed, which documents they've downloaded, and, in the case of angel groups, which of their members have specifically expressed an interest in learning more about your venture.As you update your presentations, plans, financials, and other aspects of your business, be sure to upload them to your Gust site. One of the reasons that investors use Gust is that they know they can always find the most current information about a company simply by clicking on its Gust document vault. A smart entrepreneur will use this area to share not only the latest versions of his or her pitch and executive summary, but also the current weekly or monthly status reports, major customer lists, and product roadmap. (Remember, access to this area is limited only to investors you specifically authorize, you can see exactly who accessed what document when, and you can remove both documents and access at any time.)In addition to general company documents that are available for viewing to all authorized investors, you can also use Gust to upload documents to only specific investors or groups. Use this feature to supply documents in response to investor questions, or to provide additional information specific to one group that you might not necessarily want to share with other potential investors.When you are working with an organized angel group (and Gust is used by more than 80% of angel groups worldwide), there is an additional set of tools that you can use for communication and collaboration with members of the group who are interested in working with you. This includes a private investor message forum for each VC or angel group with which you are engaged, that is devoted just to your company. Although you can't access it directly (that's why it's private), you can answer questions posed by members of the group that will be seen by all of the group's interested investors.From the group investor perspective, a very important feature of Gust is that it is used to track the interest level and status of every member who is considering investing in your company. Investors indicate their interest and the amount they are considering funding, and as the negotiations/diligence progress, the platform keeps a running tally of how much has been funded, committed, soft-circled, etc. Again, although this 'sausage-making' is internal to the group, you should proactively work with your lead investor/champion to understand where you are in the group's process.Once you've gotten to the negotiation stage with a VC or an investor group, you and your lead investor should use your Gust data vault to share copies of the relevant term sheets and closing documents with each other and with other investors. Having all the deal documents in one placemakes life infinitely easier for all parties, and avoids the need for mass emailing, external document control, and the other friction-full administrative steps involved in getting a company actually funded.After you have successfully raised money from one or more investors, Gust then turns into the company's ongoing investor relations tool. As all of your investors are now corralled in one place (that happens to already be the location—as per #24 above—of all your updated corporate information) this is the way to file your monthly, quarterly and annual reports with your VC and other investors. It makes the information available for everyone in one place, avoids having stray documents floating around by email, and lets you track who reads each report, and when.Finally, a tip that is overlooked by many entrepreneurs: once you have investors in your corner, pay your good karma forward. As noted above, most investors find most of their best investments through recommendations from people in their network, and that network now includes...you! When you come across another startup that you truly think might be a good match for one of your investors, by all means use the "Forward to a Friend" button on the company's public Gust page to refer it. Both parties will appreciate the introduction, and good deeds like this will come back to help you in the future. Trust me.