Capital Questions Do you stand a chance of getting venture capital? Take this test and find out.

The devil of getting venture capital lies in the semantics ofthe situation. While almost every emerging enterprise requires adollop of venture capital to get to the next stage, venturecapitalists are not the source of this funding about 99.44 percentof the time.

The fact is, the vast majority of venture capital comes fromsources other than venture capitalists. Where most entrepreneurserr is in pursuing the latter rather than the former. Thedistinction wouldn't be so important if the six months to ayear most entrepreneurs take learning this didn't kill as manycompanies as it did.

There just isn't enough venture capital to go around. The$7.4 billion or so the nation's venture capital partnershipsstarted with last year is just a fraction of the $50 billion to $60billion America's emerging high-growth companies need eachyear, says Jeffrey Sohl, director of the Center for VentureResearch at the University of New Hampshire in Durham.