Today, I’m 24 working in venture capital.
Here’s a practical early career guide for getting into VC:
1) Don’t.
Your ceiling in VC is much higher if you have grass roots startup or founder experience. Instead, dedicate some years to building something or working at a startup. Build skills, make an impact, so when you actually get onto the investing side, you have the credentials and you don’t need to convince anyone to take your money.
2) Do the job before you have the job.
The idea here is turn yourself into the ideal candidate. The easiest way to do the job before the job is by making intros.
Any founder I met, I tried to find someone relevant for them to talk to. Any investor I met, I shared cool founders for them to meet. You do this a couple times, you’re an unofficial venture scout. Which will make it easier to be a venture scout. Which will make it easier to be a venture analyst. Which will make it easier to be a venture associate. And so on.
The hack here is to document these intros. Document your investor/founder network. Document any VC education you’ve had. Build the proof. VC is very hand-wavy. Anything VC-related you do, document it, and put it on display when applicable so that firms know you care and are serious about the game.
3) Go above and beyond in the recruiting process
Every time I applied to a job, I cold emailed multiple people at the firm to give my application more visibility. Every time I had an interviewer, I emailed every interviewer a thank you note. (Emailing them revised interview question answers is something I should’ve done as well.) In the sea of applicants, visibility is everything. Writing an effective cold email and/or follow-up email can make the difference. For context, to land my current role, I cold emailed the recruiter and followed up 3 times before landing an interview.
The sell is in the follow up. Always follow up.
During the interview process, I also drafted an entire “Venture Portfolio” documenting all I did in the venture space that included: founders I knew, investors I knew, events I attended, case studies, etc. The theme here is strong supplemental materials. This means potentially putting together a pitch deck on investments you would make, investments the firm should make, investments the firms shouldn’t have made, etc. The more deep dive-able and scrollable your application is, the more substance you display.
However, if you're starting out, some of that information may never be useful to the firm. In the end, these supplemental efforts could turn into a useless project, but you learn in the process. You build repetitions. And most importantly, it displays your potential to the firm.
And the truth is, a lot of early career recruiting is about finding someone willing to bet on your potential.
So give them every reason to.