From Ten Realities of Taking Venture Capital Money by Charlie O'Donnell:

If you take venture capital money...

1) You increase the chances that you may not be CEO of your own company one day--and that also might be the best thing for its long term success.

2) You are signing up to sell the company one day--to another company or to the public market, but definitely to someone.

3) You will almost certainly take more venture capital money after that.

4) You will almost certainly go cashflow negative, increasing the risk that your company will fail.

5) You now have the responsibility to report the progress of the company to others--and to consider their opinions and feedback.

6) You have prioritized growth and your company will be bigger next year than it is now.

7) Some of the people working for and with you now will not be suitable for a growth phase and will have to leave.

8) There are smaller exit opportunities you will not be able to take because your capital structure makes them financially unattractive.

9) You will own less and less of your company over time as you take on additional investment.

10) You will face more competition as venture investment signals that what you're doing may be attractive.

From Ten Good Reasons to Take Venture Capital Money by Charlie O'Donnell:

1) You really like the investor and believe they can add more value than you give up in equity.

2) You are growing, and if you don't raise, you won't be able to build the infrastructure required not to come apart at the seams.

3) You have the team in place or identified to build the product, you've done your homework by talking to customers that it is, in fact, the right product, and you're the best person to lead the effort, but you can't fund the build of the product yourself.

4) You've identified the best team, and while they're asking for reasonable startup salaries, you can't afford to hire them quite yet.

5) You've figured out how to get a sales funnel going, the flywheel is turning, you've got positive ROI on incremental salespeople or customer acquisition dollars and now you want to put gas on the fire.

6) You're on your way to building a network effect, you know how you'll likely make money because you've spoken to lots of potential sources of revenue, but can't monetize without critical mass.

7) You're making a ton of money at the company level, but haven't really ever made any money yourself personally. Might be time to let someone you want to work with buy your equity.

8) You're doing something disruptive that is going to have some regulatory or other kinds of hurdles that require human hours of changing the playing field.

9) You're doing something physical in the real world that just requires a certain amount of capital overhead.

10) You're doing actual science and R&D to build something that doesn't exist yet, but could have a huge outcome.

I've highlighted above a few statements that I think are key (and probably would be the hardest) to remember when thinking about taking on VC money.