A few months ago I started working on a next round of funding for our company, Splunk. As an exercise I decided to keep notes on the progress of the fund raising in hopes of looking back and perhaps sharing a thing or two with other entrepreneurs. I've raised a lot of venture money (this is my sixth venture backed start-up) and learned to avoid many of the traps most first time entrepreneurs fall into. This time around I had a chance to apply several best practices I've seen over the years and invent a few new tricks that really helped things go smoothly. We closed a later stage round of financing on outstanding terms in just sixty days from first conversation to money in the bank.

Splunk, a San Francisco-based provider of a search engine for logs and IT data, has raised $25 million in Series C funding. Ignition Partners led the deal, and was joined by return backers August Capital, JK&B Capital and Sevin Rosen Funds. The company previously raised a $10 million Series B round in early 2006 and a $5 million Series a in late 2004