Relationships, not just money, are at the heart of successful matches between venture capitalists and entrepreneurs.

That message was at the heart of the stories venture capitalists and the entrepreneurs they funded told Wednesday at the "Xconomy Forum: New York’s Venture Emergence." The all-star cast included such entrepreneurs as two of the founders of flash-sales shopping site Gilt Groupe. On the venture side were Fred Wilson, the founder and managing partner of Union Square Ventures, and Todd Dagres, founder and general partner at Spark Capital, among others.

Speakers covered the gamut of venture-funded startups, from life sciences to e-commerce and big data. But whatever their focus, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists alike returned to themes like honesty, patience, chemistry, and openness as the heart of success. Here's some of the bits that caught my attention:

Honesty

“The relationship between the entrepreneur and the VC is a loaded relationship,” Wilson said. Venture capitalists have to look out for the money they have invested, on top of being occasional business mentors and networking helpers for the entrepreneurs.

And there’s always the possibility that a venture capitalist might have to move a company’s founder out of a top position in the company they have created. “Someone’s gotta do the right thing for the company, and oftentimes it falls on our plate to do it,” he said.

For those reasons, Wilson said one thing he’s looking for in a relationship with an entrepreneur is forthrightness. “I think you should, in the (venture) business, be honest,” he said.

Dagres, of Spark Capital, agreed with that sentiment, and added that the easiest entrepreneurs to work with aren’t always the best. In fact, he said, his experience has shown the opposite.

“The most painful, challenging, agonizing entrepreneurs I’ve worked with tend to be the best moneymakers,” he said.

Patience

One of the most difficult sectors for venture capitalists and entrepreneurs alike is life sciences. It’s one of the places where patience is truly called for, said Dennis Purcell, senior managing partner at Aisling Capital.

It can take 10 years or more to develop a successful drug or treatment and can cost millions of dollars.

Though payoffs can be huge, both in terms of solving a problem of disease and financially, “It’s a bit of a longer slog” than most other arenas for venture capital, Purcell said in a presentation with Sapan Shah, CEO of ARMGO Pharma, a company his firm is backing.

Shah, for his part, said it was key that venture capitalists understand how tough the science and regulatory burdens are for bringing new medicines to market.

“We need patient investors,” Shah said.

Intuition

So how does the magic happen when a young company lands funding from venture capitalists?

In the case of Gilt Groupe, the online flash-sales site that's been both a darling in the industry and a case study in growing too fast, it happened as soon as the founding team walked into Nick Beim’s office at Matrix Partners in Boston.

“Venture capital is a very intuitive business,” Beim said. “I loved it right away. When these guys came in, we knew we wanted to invest.”

He said the things that attracted him to Gilt Groupe were the team of founders and the flash-sales business model. “Individually and collectively, they had everything,” he said.

Among the founders were strong technologists and experts in both e-commerce and high-end fashion in Alexandra Wilkis Wilson and Alexis Maybank.

For Maybank, the strength of that team wasn’t just in the expertise each member brought to the group, but the fact that its members saw the world in similar ways. “Not having the right starting team initially is one of the biggest causes for things to derail,” she said.

But when it came to landing funding and working with venture capital partners, she had this advice for startup entrepreneurs: Build desirability and mystique into both your pitch and your company.

“Fundraising really is more of an art than a science,” she said.

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Kent Bernhard Jr. is News Editor of Portfolio.com