1. Access to their networks. If we need something or someone and it or they did not exist inside of our existing network we have been able to use our investors to help us acquire the thing or person we needed much more rapidly than if we had not had them. This led us to being able to execute and or scale much more quickly than we might ordinarily have had.
2. An additional sounding board of experience to help us avoid most of the common pitfalls many start up businesses make when they just don't know any better. Sometime you have to learn from experience, however the more negatives we avoided by taking lessons from others and by evaluating the advice of our advisors the quicker we were able to succeed in our market place.
Our investors provided a lot of other benefits both tangible and intangible but at the end of the day we probably could have done without their money, however I am not sure we could have done without their advice, contacts, and resources.
The small things go a long way. Sending emails on news from competitors, checking in by phone a couple times a month, and connecting CEOs with other CEOs that they have invested in and can learn from is key. Given them some angels/VCs are funding dozens of companies, the ones that can remember your engineer's names really says something.
Lastly, it is all about chemistry. Every VC has its mix of partners, some better than others, You want to find someone who really believes in you, the team, and the vision, and work alongside you rather than trying to get a few percentage points more. A good indicator of time that they can spend with you is the number of board sets they occupy as well. If someone is currently on 8 boards, chances are that their mind is in quite a few places at once.