To bring all in perspective lets start with breaking down the venture as an investment opportunity into elements contributing to its expected result.

A venture works as a profit-making machine that consumes various resources as input and produces certain financial profit as output; that presented as “a function of time”. While this may sound obvious, many still ignore the time dimension as an important investment factor and make investment decisions based on a two-dimensional snapshot in time.

The time dimension and type of return varies depending on the stage, type, and strategy of a venture. Investors should always keep the timeframe and return type in mind. The return can be immediate or delayed and manifest as growth or cash flow.

The venture’s management team is responsible to plan the venture for maximum profit and minimum risk and to convey the plan as a convincing case to investors. Many investors have specific preferences in regards to market opportunity that do not necessarily correlate to the quality of the deal. That may be contributed by investment style, expertise or resource availabilities.

Some other attributes of the market opportunity are:
Industry, Size, Location, Current Status/Stage. Too often a profit machine can satisfy more than one market opportunity. And it would be a challenging
task for entrepreneurs and investors to assess the actual market need or acceptance.

While in some cases professional investors may leverage their expertise to reposition the profit machine based on more attractive market opportunities, but in other cases a great opportunity may fail to attract investors because of bad positioning or lack of a clear target.