Looking to close its Series A round of financing, San Francisco EV startup BRD Motorcycles has had to rethink its investor-appoach strategy, as the venture capital market in California has gone through a reset as a result of the past economic recession.

“It has been brutal this past year talking to investors,” explained BRD Motorcycles CEO Marc Finegstein. ”In fact, it was actually easier to raise capital during the recession than it is currently right now. For the last few years, you just had to be bullish…you know, polish your PowerPoint deck, shift your paradigm, and make sure you were best in breed. But now, with all the bad paper that has been going through the market, the traditional funding sources have all but dried up.”

Countless dinners and evenings wasted, Fenegstein often returned to the office the next day with nothing to show for his hard work from the night before. Facing increasing production and development costs, it was clear that something had to change in the company’s funding strategy.

So, when asked what sort of measures BRD was taking to close its funding objectives for the Series A round, the young CEO exhaled slowly, sat back in his chair, and only hinted at BRD’s new investor-pitch strategy. “Let’s just say our funding strategy is more ‘hands on’ than it was before with our investment circle,” he said while staring blankly out his office window.

Polaris released some interesting info this past week to its stockholders, perhaps the highlight of which was how the Minnesota-based company views its acquisition of the Indian Motorcycle brand. Disclosing a brief summary of its plans, it’s clear that Polaris aims to go after the heavy-cruiser segment with a two-pronged approach, much in the same manner as we postulated back on Wednesday after news of the acquisition broke.

More important than stroking our own egos, two pieces of interesting insight came from Polaris’s SEC filing 8-K filing. First was a glimpse into what the purchasing price of Indian could be, as a slide to investors shows Indian’s 2010 revenue as being $11 million, which would peg a baseline asking price of about $9 million, though the perceived brand value could raise that price. The second juicy morsel is how Polaris sees Indian fitting in with Victory, showing the potential of tripling Polaris’s motorcycle sales in the future.

The news coming out of the Santa Cruz area today is that there’s been a management shake-up at Zero Motorcycles, as multiple people at the top of the company’s leadership have been given pink slips, including company Founder & CTO Neal Saiki. Recently talking to PlugBike.com‘s John Adamo, Zero Motorcycles CEO Gene Banman denied that Saiki had been let go from the company, saying that Saiki’s absence at the company was due to his child’s recent birth and Saiki’s desire to spend time with his newborn.

However multiple sources close to the company have confirmed to Asphalt & Rubber that Neal Saiki was a part of a larger management shake-up that was precipitated by the company’s lead investor. With many of the terminations expected to be finalized next month, and spanning more than one division at the California-based startup, there appears to be a considerable personnel and culture shift occurring at Zero at this point in time.