The VC Field Guide

10Notes for Students

THREE ENTRY‐LEVEL CAREER PATHS IN VENTURE

When most people start in venture capital, they are asked to primarily help with three buckets of responsibilities: financial due diligence, market due diligence, or they are asked to help in what is often called “sourcing” or “scouting,” i.e., identifying companies and entrepreneurs to invest in, more of a sales or business development role. A useful way to think of these three pathways to venture capital is to look at the tools that we use: Excel, PowerPoint, and a customer relationship management (CRM) system like Salesforce. Over‐generalizing, investment banking candidates' differentiated superpowers are in Excel, consulting candidates are able to make PowerPoint sing, and people with a sales background are masters at keeping the CRM machine dancing.

If you come from consulting, you'll be tasked with figuring out how big is this market and who else is in this market, and how are they competing with each other? What are the trends related to this market? Another is looking for people who can help with actually “sourcing” or finding companies to invest in and filling the investment firm's pipeline with opportunities to consider.

I had an economics background and came from investment banking, so, in my first days at the firm I was most often working in Excel and modeling scenarios. For example, I would analyze situations where, if the company sells for $200 million, how much does every equity holder make? And by ...