Again I agree with Jay in regards to Venture Capitalists. They eventually want total control, and their money gives them the justification to take it. I think VC's are good targets to SELL your functioning business to, but not necessarily to involve in your business if you have any intention of remaining an active part of it.

I also agree with Jay that an idea, by itself, is not necessarily that valuable. A design or sometimes even a working prototype isn't always significant either, and the more the product is worth, the more that's true...

If it took you a year to develop your product and you think you can net sales of 10 million dollars, a business interested in the product would prefer to have 6 engineers develop it from scratch in 2 months at a cost of perhaps $300,000 and then be able to play with 9.7 million in revenue rather than buy the prototype from you and pay you 10% royalties, leaving them with only 9.0 million in revenue to play with. Your idea isn't worth $10 million, it's worth the $300k it'll cost them to do the same thing (perhaps a little more since they could presumably go to market two months earlier if they buy it from you rather than do it themselves from scratch).

Craig Steiner