9/23/24, 1:46 AM Breaking into VC

💌
Breaking into VC
The ultimate guide by Pietro Invernizzi
(@pinverrr)

Getting a job in Venture Capital ("VC") is hard. The industry is small

and very unstructured. Jobs are rarely advertised online and no one
really knows where to start.
With more and more people looking to break in every day, you can't be
like everybody else if you want a seat at the table:
"Venture Capitalists ("VCs") looking to hire you are searching for
someone who can help them invest in companies that they otherwise
would not have invested in without you." - Erik Torenberg
What will it take to be that someone and to stand out from the crowd?
Since I broke in a few years ago, I get asked that question a lot.
While my LinkedIn shows a somewhat straightforward path (Investment
Banking → Startup Advisory @ The Family → VC Investing @ [Link]),
it hides a ton of questionable tweets I tried to write; a bunch of social

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media posts I obliged all my friends to 'like & share'; a couple of failed
Iangel
was very lucky to have
investments; and alanded where
massive I did
pile of - and what I did is not
readings...
necessarily going to work for everyone - but here's what I've learned:

💡 There are 5 main hacks to stand out from the crowd and break
into VC - all of which you can start doing today (in no particular
order):

⒈ Develop your opinion / thesis about the world

⒉ Build your startup portfolio (real or fantasy)
⒊ Make yourself seen, by building your personal brand
⒋ Start helping founders right away
⒌ Don't ask VCs for a job; provide value instead

Before digging into these hacks and making them yours through
the chapters below, you should ask yourself whether you really
want to be a VC and what key skills you will need to become a
good one.

Once that's done and you've mastered these hacks, I've put
together a bunch of resources / further reads at the end of this
guide to practically help you get started.

Click on ▷ to unlock content

Pre-read 1: Start with why. Do you really want to be a VC?

‣

As for every career choice, the first step is to figure out what you
really want to do. Do you really want to work in VC? It is not for
everybody.
"I'm always curious about the reasons behind WHY someone wants
to go into VC. Many times, after digging deeper, it ends up just
being that they want to be involved in startups but want none of the
risk associated with it or the exclusivity associated with VC makes it
seem high-status. Those reasons are not strong enough: teasing
apart the core reasons why you want to go into VC specifically is
important because often that will be challenged if you're
interviewing for a role." - Nikhil Krishnan

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"Implicit in the question 'How do I get a job in VC?' is the assumption

that this job is easy. It’s been glorified through shows like Shark
Tank. We aren’t sitting on our thrones entertaining pitches from
incredible founders all day; we’re being inundated by requests,
emails, event prep, flights, pitches, painful portfolio problems, our
own operational issues, and new technologies that we have to stay
on top of. We are wading through the mud to find the gold. And only
very, very rarely do we find it. We are slaves to our calendars. Most
of our days are spent in service to our portfolio companies and in
fear of missing the next big thing.
Do it for the right reasons. That doesn’t mean money or power, even
if you may achieve those along the way. It’s the same for founders: if
you’re doing it because you see dollar signs and your ego needs
feeding, investors can see through that. A desire for money and
power won’t keep you working when your startup feels like it’s
failing. You need to care, deeply and legitimately, about what you’re
building and the people with whom you’re in the trenches." - Sarah
A. Downey
So, what's the good, the bad and the ugly of VC?

‣ ☀️The pros of being a VC

‣ 🌧 The cons of being a VC

(More on "the life of a VC" in Further read 2 below)
While the pros & cons I've listed are very broad, you should also
consider what type of firm you may want to join:
"The VC world is big and there are so many different types of firms /
funds and roles. The best way to figure out what you want to do is
understanding the nuances of the VC landscape and then start to
narrow down what might be best for you." - Amy Cheetham
For instance, if you work at a seed VC fund, you will work with
companies with undefined strategies and lots of company building
to be done. If you work at a growth VC fund, you'll have a lot of data
to base your decisions on and your entry price will matter a lot to
your financial return. Some jobs in VC will favour the analytical,
while others will favour the empathic: these are extremely distinct
features and definitely worth some analysis (more on this in Further
read 1 below).

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Based on these considerations, is VC for you? Would you perhaps

be better off career-wise as an operator? Or launching your own
startup?
I found it extremely helpful and eye-opening for me to write a
'memo' about myself and why I wanted to be a VC, including my
personality traits, every single thing I liked and didn't like in my
previous "professional" life (school, university, previous jobs etc.)
and then try to design my 'dream job' description based on those
inputs. Different from just "thinking you'll like it", the process of
writing it down will help you picture yourself in your future role and
understand how well it suits you.

Pre-read 2: The 9 skills you will need to become a VC

‣

What skills will you need to acquire to become a VC? What boxes do
we need to tick to get you your dream job? What will you need to
prove to the VCs looking to hire you? You will need to show:

1. 💪 A well-thought-out thesis and clear opinions about the world

2. 🤔 Analytical thinking

3. 👁 Mental plasticity and a broad peripheral vision

4. 🧠 Relevant knowledge, education or work experience

5. 🛍 Ability to source deals

6. 💅 A likeable personal brand

7. 🤝 Ability to sell and close

8. 🕸 A great network of founders, investors and mentors

9. 🤑 An investment track record

💡 While you can't have these 9 skills "out of the box", you can
definitely hack them together in a relatively short amount
of time. Follow the steps in the next chapters and in the
further reads below and, by the end of this guide, you will
have mastered them all.

Bear in mind that these skills are just the beginning. They are about
becoming a VC. After these, you'll have to learn how to be a good
VC (e.g. how to be a good board member, how to manage a VC firm,
how to make good returns, etc.), but there's plenty of time for that
later ;) (see Further read 4 below)

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Hack 1: Develop your opinion / thesis about the world

‣
To find a job in VC you will need to find ways to let the firms you're
'applying to' answer the following question positively: “Is this person
going to help us to invest in companies that we otherwise would not
have invested in without her/him?”
How to do this in a way that is unique to you? Observe what my
friend & mentor Balthazar De Lavergne made me notice a few years
ago:
Watch this video from 2010.

The two folks being interviewed are Fred Wilson & John Doerr, two
of the most legendary Venture Capitalists from the US. You'll notice
two things about them:

they have incredibly clear opinions, about everything

they are sometimes wrong

And that's exactly what makes them amazing VCs. In the same way
their well-thought-out opinions sometimes end up being wrong,
they sometimes end up being very right. And in VC being right once
will make up for being wrong 100 times.
Fundamentally, the role of a VC is to decide where to put money. To
do that, you'll need to have or develop clear and strong opinions
about the world, and at the same time adopt the mind of a learner,
accepting that you're wrong most of the time.
Starting to develop your well-thought-out, clear and interesting
views of the world today will help you stand out amongst the other
1,000 individuals looking for the same thing as you (a job in VC).
Having clear opinions is easier than you think, because there is a
ton of data out there to help you with it. Additionally, you're betting
on the future, not the present. This means that - in the short-term -
nothing you'll come up with as your 'view on the world' will be right
or wrong. It will just be you. So, let's get to work!
One of the most important things for a VC is their investment thesis.
Defined as "the strategy by which a Venture Capital professional (or
fund) makes money for the fund investors", your thesis will be a
guideline / set of principles that will drive your decisions as an
investor. While many investors see their thesis as the 'group of
industries or categories they are interested in', it doesn't need to be
limited to that. Many VCs have theses about the types of founders

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they look for and their personalities, the types of business models
they like or the geographies they believe are undervalued by other
VCs. Having your own thesis (written or very clearly expressed
verbally when questioned) can increase your chances of breaking
into VC significantly.

‣ 📓 Read these well-articulated investment theses

‣ ✍️ Write your own personal thesis

Hack 2: Build your startup portfolio (real or fantasy)
‣

If you've not been a VC before, one of the most useful things you
can do to break into VC is to show that you were able to invest in
some interesting startups, or that you would be good if you were
able to invest. Here are two ways to do that, depending on your
access to capital:

‣ 💰 Build an angel investing portfolio & anti-portfolio

‣ 💼 Build your fantasy portfolio

Hack 3: Make yourself seen, by building your personal brand
‣

A next step in building up your profile before becoming a VC is to

develop your personal brand.
Although not strictly indispensable (as many great VCs are not
particularly public people), developing your personal brand and
thought leadership can significantly increase your chances of
finding your dream VC job, as it will:
make you more visible to VCs, who will be more likely to know
about you
make you more desirable in their eyes, since your brand will help
them attract more founders and also positively impact their
fund's brand
Today, building a personal brand in the startup world for someone
who doesn't have any investing experience is mostly done through
online content.
While creating content may seem scary at first - because you may
think you have to find genius things to say or show - it shouldn't be:
many people have became very visible online without adding many
new ideas to the world, but just by enriching the content of other
people (or democratising it) in intelligent ways.

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Personal branding content can take many different shapes. The

most important thing is to pick a medium that makes sense to you
and that you can have fun with. You could be:

‣ 🎤 Hosting a weekly / monthly podcast about a certain topic

‣ 🖋 Writing a publication or weekly / monthly newsletter

‣ 📝 Writing a few, heavy-hitting articles

‣ 🐦 Building a great Twitter profile with a strong following

‣ 👾 Becoming a thought leader of a certain trend or industry

‣ 🥗 Mixing things up, as I did myself

You shouldn't worry about starting big. Content has incredible
compounding effects: small steps lead to great outcomes. Even if
you start with a very small following and nobody seems to be
consuming your content, the process of creating it will build your
muscle and knowledge. You can start with very small initiatives or
pieces of content and a year later you may suddenly realise you
have a blog or podcast. Start today.
If your content ends up not being particularly successful after all,
the process behind it can still be extremely useful to:

Stay updated about the startup world

Connect with people you admire and see how they think (for
free!)

Learn in a more structured way (e.g. Writing is one of the best

ways to show to yourself that you actually understood a
concept)

💡 No matter what medium you decide to adopt, you should

give huge importance to distribution.

Many people spend hours and hours on writing extremely thoughtful

articles or Twitter threads or recording podcasts, and then - once
those are "out in the real world" - they just wait for engagement to
magically happen.
Unless you have dozens of thousands of followers, engagement
doesn't happen that way.

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You'll need to make an incredible effort and invest a huge amount of

time in getting your articles / tweets seen by the audience you are
targeting. Here is how I do it:

I ask all my closest friends (even the ones that don't have much
to do with the startup world) to engage with my content (like &
comment on my LinkedIn posts, clap 50 times on my Medium
articles, retweet my tweets etc.). I do it quite shortly after I post,
as the first few minutes of a post's lifetime are the most crucial
according to Twitter & LinkedIn's algorithms
I text or email each article / tweet to every person in the industry
who has written something about the same topic in the past;
who is known to be interested in the topic; or who - in whatever
way - inspired my writing

I share it with every person I've mentioned in the article / tweet

Sometimes, these efforts literally take hours (e.g. personalising
each message / email), but they are always 100% worth it.

Hack 4: Start helping founders right away

‣

Of all the assets you can have to break into VC, one of the most
important ones is being referred to as 'someone very helpful' by
entrepreneurs, other investors and peers.
In fact, "Let me know how I can be helpful" is a sentence that VCs
use very often. So often that it's become the biggest meme in the
history of VC:

If you don't do it hypocritically, and you actually do genuinely prove

helpful to founders, they will remember you. It can become your
superpower.
While it is one of the hardest assets to build, it is also one that
generally requires no financial capital and is definitely worth trying
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out. Here's a few ways to do it (most of which I borrowed from Erik

Torenberg):

‣ 🆘 Directly helping founders

🗽 Building an asset or network that will make you helpful to
‣ founders

Whatever the approach you decide to take to help founders, the

process will teach you about the importance of being able to sell
yourself. Venture Capital is about seeing deals, picking deals and
winning deals.
As obvious as that sounds - if you think about it - that is also the
definition of a sales job.
While most people see VC as sitting comfortably on the 'right' side
of the table and having amazing founders pitch to you all the time
and just having to pick the ones you like, it very often ends up being
the opposite.
Since the number of VC funds out there is on the rise every single
year - and founders are increasingly becoming selective as to who
they want to work with - staying relevant and having a seat at the
table for top-tier deal flow is a very difficult game. It implies pitching
your fund in unique ways in every single conversation you have,
constantly building a brand, and hustling to get the best
entrepreneurs to engage with you and love everything about you
and your fund.

💡 Helping founders before you land your dream VC job is a

first way to train in 'selling yourself'. Here's a few resources
that can help you understand what selling involves:

Pitch anything

Never split the difference

Winning deals as a new Venture Capital fund

The truth about investors who win competitive deals in Venture

Capital
Why the Most Successful VC Firms Keep Winning

Hack 5: Don't ask VCs for a job; provide value instead

‣

The best way to get a job in VC is not to ask VCs for a job.

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Any top VC firm gets hundreds of hyper-qualified, super impressive

CVs / applications sent to them every single month, and many of
those end up forgotten because of such high volumes. Regardless
of your background, you don't need to go the conventional route.
There are many other ways in which you can stand out, and they all
involve directly interacting with your target market, VCs.
During your interactions, the VC you want to work with should feel
like you've already been working with them for years. As per Erik
Torenberg's thread I mentioned earlier, it's all about bringing value
to their table even before you actually work with them.

‣ 💌 Be great at cold emails

‣ 🎁 Send VCs good deals

‣ 🎒 Send their companies customers or talent

‣ 🎩 Invite their partners on your podcast or to your events...

‣ 🎨 Innovate on format / content delivery

‣ 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Look for good mentors

Further read 1: Who to target / choosing your way

‣

The beauty of the VC world is that - while getting in is very difficult

- once you're in, you're an insider and it will be very possible to work
your way up to your dream job. There are so many great
organisations through which VCs help companies grow, any of
which will make you an insider and give you a perfect feel for how
everything works in the startup world. Here are the various types of
firms you could aim at joining to break in:

‣ 🚀 Accelerators & Incubators

‣ 🏗 Venture Builders / Startup Studios

‣ 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Talent Investors / Talent Accelerators / Launchpads

‣ 💰 Crowdfunding Platforms

‣ 🦄 Venture Capital Funds

‣ 🏦 Alternative Funding Providers

If you work at ANY of the organisation types above, it is very likely
you will be involved in finding ideas or startups to support, talking to

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founders or soon-to-be-founders to help your team assess whether

they make sense for your firm and your firm makes sense for them,
and helping founders with fundraising from angel investors, VCs and
other funding providers, etc. Although they differ from firm to firm,
all these can be extremely fun and intellectually-stimulating ways to
spend your time.
Additionally, once you have your foot in the door - with the right
amount of hustle and community building - you can get to meet the
most amazing founders and investors anyone could ever wish to
meet. As an insider, you now have an excuse to talk to ANYONE you
may want to ask for advice, bounce ideas off or become friends
with. This constant meeting new people could also mean that your
next dream job is just around the corner.
Having a very clear idea of which type of organisation you want to
work for, and why a certain firm type fits with your personality, is a
crucial first step to finding your dream job in venture. Make sure you
spend enough time digging into it and into why you are 100% sure
you want to be in the venture investing / advising space (as
opposed to - say - joining a startup as an employee, founding your
own startup, or just doing something completely different).

Further read 2: What does the life of a VC look like?

‣

There's plenty of articles out there about what a 'day in the life' of a
VC looks like and also about what struggles VCs have to sometimes
go through. Here's a couple that I found interesting:

What is the day in the life like for a Venture Capitalist? - Quora
(and part 2)
Fear and loathing in Venture Capital

Saying "no"
A day in the life of a VC

5 Things About Careers (in VC) Nobody Told Me

How has it been being a career VC?

What the heck does a VC do all week anyway?

This tweet and the original quoted tweet give a funny & fairly
realistic picture of it too
...and many more

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Further read 3: What are the backgrounds of people working in

‣
VC?

Other than the people who hacked their way in, what are the
backgrounds of people who work in VC today? There's a multitude
of different backgrounds out there, but here's a few worth noting:
Having worked in a deeply analytical role (e.g. investment
banking or consulting)
Having worked at a fast growing startup

Having launched and run your own startup (regardless of the

outcome)
Having worked in a very niche field, which will make you
attractive to a sector-specific fund (e.g. rocket scientist → space
tech VC)
Having made some angel investments (as discussed above)

Having made some investments as a scout

Being the best writer in a certain category (e.g. crypto, or

something even more specific like privacy coins...) (as discussed
above)
Breaking in straight out of university (ideally having studied
something that will give you an edge)

Having the reputation of someone who helped a lot of founders

along their journeys (as discussed above)

Further read 4: Perusing the VC library

‣

We're lucky enough to live in an era where:

"Almost all [people] own a smartphone or a computer.
Each device contains the library of Alexandria.
The sum total of all world knowledge.
You can learn anything. Why don't you?"
This is even more true in the world of VC, where everyone is a
philosopher or thought leader, super active on Twitter, Medium and
blogs, and where knowledge is 99% open source.
Use the content below to build your VC-specific knowledge (as
introduced in point 1 of pre-read 2) (Note: this should not be read all
in one go, but perhaps act as a knowledge base you can refer to at
any later time)

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‣ 🗣 Master the VC lingo

‣ 💫 Know the ins & outs of the most iconic tech companies

‣ 🏋🏼‍♀️ Become technical

‣ 🌊 Be on top of tech trends

📜 Read the most crucial articles that have been written in the
‣ industry

‣ 🗄 Study the Sectors you like

‣ 📗 Know about the main Startup Books

‣ 🎬 Know about the main Startup Documentaries / Movies

‣ 🎥 Watch the most Interesting Videos

Note: This guide is Open Source
‣

My plan is to keep updating this guide on a regular basis so that it

can become the go-to piece for everyone thinking of starting a
career in VC. If you identify gaps in the content that you think
💌 Breaking into VC
everyone would like to see filled, please let me know!
If you found the guide useful, please tweet about it, share it
anywhere or send it to any friends of yours who you think may find
it handy on their journey towards breaking into VC 🙌

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Breaking Into VC, by Pietro Invernizzi

Thank you Fred Destin, Harry Stebbings, Gaby Goldberg, David

Obwaller, Mario Gabriele, Erika Batista, Max Kufner, Lola Wajskop, Akash
Bajwa & Clara Power for helping me structure my thoughts.

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