This is a great excerpt from an interview with open-source entrepreneur Eric Sink, of SourceGear:

Welcome to the MSDN Library: A Weasel It seems like ancient history now, but during my AbiWord and RADish days I really wanted to get some outside capital funding. I was watching the dotcom bubble produce ridiculous valuations and I wanted my company to play, too. I pitched my business ideas to all kinds of investors. When that didn't work, I decided to hire someone to do the fundraising. This turned out to be a big mistake. I should have heeded the advice of Doug Colbeth. Prior to starting my own company, I worked as a programmer for Spyglass, where Doug was the CEO. Around the time of the Spyglass IPO, Doug humorously explained to us the hierarchy of the world's true scumbags: * At the top of the scumbag pile, as the lesser of four evils, are the lawyers. * Just below that you've got the people who cheat senior citizens with scams. * A bit further down, you find the pimps. * Finally, at the very bottom of the scumbag hierarchy, you find the investment bankers. Of course, not all investment bankers are bad eggs. Still, there is some irony in the fact that Doug's joke turned out to have a grain of truth in it in my experience. When I was in my "funded company" funk, a guy whose firm specialized in raising private placement capital for small companies contacted me. I ended up signing an investment banking agreement with this guy who promised to connect us to some investors who had a whole bunch of capital. As you can already guess, this guy's help gained us no investors. Lesson learned: The negative connotations of the word "middleman" are often deserved. Believe it or not, this tale gets even worse. I failed to have an attorney review this agreement, and it had a big problem in it. We ended up paying this guy $40,000 cash to cancel the agreement.