Summary List PlacementFor the past year and a half, Sam Jacobs, founder and CEO of Pavilion, estimates he was hounded by an average of one VC every week wanting to invest in his rapidly growing career networking company. He heard them all out. "I take every call," Jacobs said. But his answer was always a polite no thank you. "It was a point of pride that we'd grown basically at venture scale without venture financing," Jacobs said. "We were completely bootstrapped. We had no investors."