"Top Ten Lies That Blow Your Credibility with Investors"

Bill Reichert is president of Garage.com, the Silicon Valley investment bank whose business is holding the hands of startups through the funding process.

Below is Reichert's list of "Top Ten Lies That Blow Your Credibility with Investors"

1. "Our projections are conservative."

2. "Our market is $56 billion." (Reichert says a startup's actual market is almost always better defined as a targeted subset of a larger market.)

3. "Our contract with Oracle will be signed next week." (If you do have a deal pending with a big-name partner, wait until it's done before you bring it up.)

4. "If we only sell 40 percent of our company, we will still have control." (Reichert says if you've sold even one share, you've already lost control. Attempting to keep majority ownership means you're focusing on something other than building a strong business, and assuming that your relationship with investors will be adversarial.)

5. "There is no competition in our space." (If this is true, maybe you don't really have a space.)

6. "No one else can do what we're doing." (This is virtually never true and is a sign that the entrepreneur hasn't done his or her homework. If it is true, what you're doing isn't worth doing.)

7. "Microsoft is too slow to be a threat."

8. "We will become the industry standard." (If you business is built on that assumption, it's on very shaky ground.)

9. "We will have first-mover advantage." (See #5)

10. "All we have to do is get 2 percent of the market to have a billion-dollar company." (Reichert says he'd rather fund someone who aspires to get 20 to 30 percent of the market.)