Here’s how you can become a Venture Capital Analyst in 6 weeks
My review of the Venture Capital Analyst course at EntryLevel
Having working in and also founded start-ups for many years, I was always curious about the personalities and actual job on the “other side” — the investors. As a founder, you’re likely to be exploring the prospect of funding and Venture Capital is often one of the most popular pathways to get the cash kicker you need to reach your next growth milestone. But.. what do VC’s *actually* do?
My good friend and partner on the Snooze Strategist Youtube Channel, Ashen Vithana, recommended that I check out the Venture Capital Analyst course on EntryLevel as it was something that he had recently attempted.. yet failed to complete. Well.. I’m up for a challenge. So I leapt right in!
What’s this all about?
EntryLevel is an educational platform that offers online courses designed to help jobseekers get in on the “ground floor” — hence “entry level”. The courses are aligned to current market trends/demands and include Product Management, Data Analysis, Financial Analysis, UX Design, Venture Capital Analysis and more.
The course prices are incredibly reasonable with the VCA course being AUD$299 for the 6 week course (as of early 2023). This amount seems to drop closer to the intake date but most importantly — you can get it refunded if you finish the course! They call it a commitment bond and rather than being a course fee it’s designed to motivate you to complete the course. Why would they do this? EntryLevel also have a strong educational purpose behind it which I love as this approach makes learning accessible. AND — because I’m not always great at finishing what I start!
What was I expecting?
I’d call myself a seasoned “online course” taker having completed at least 4 IDEO courses and also a Harvard Business Online course amongst many other. They all have the key components of a learning platform and a community.
I was hoping to specifically learn how VC’s research, identify and evaluate start-ups to invest in. Prior to the course I’d say I was already highly confident in my research and evaluation skills that I’d learnt from corporate life but I had no way to knowing how these skills lined up to “industry” standards — after all — who doesn’t like benchmarking themselves.
So for a 6 week $290 course — I expected some insights from an industry insider, some homework and a community — in a nutshell. Would I be hunting for a VCA job straight after? Unlikely — but I was keen to sharpen my skills in this space — and one learning through the course was that “Venture Capital Analyst” roles are incredibly rare here in Australia.
What was my experience?
Onboarding
I eagerly created my account and paid a few weeks early so I was limited to a web portal holding area which directed you to, in due course, join the discord community and I could see the series of lessons lined up but currently “locked” until the cohort was ready to begin. Fairly smooth at this point.
Discord is a hugely popular community/chat app that was borne out of the gaming space. I use it to chat to my Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes guildmates but you can also see that the AI Image tool Midjourney also uses it as a user interface. So, being familiar with the tool it was fairly simple to get set up but I noticed that a few people struggled with validating their EntryLevel accounts as it must be new to them. Luckily there is community support who were hugely valuable in helping everyone get set up and feel engaged (Great work fifi!).
The Learning Experience
The Venture Capital Analysis course consists of 12 lessons (called Missions!) with each Mission consisting of 1–2 short videos explaining the content — typically in the format of the instructor verbally explaining the concept. A clever consideration with this course was that your assignments all ladder up to building a portfolio report for yourself which you can use for job hunting purposes.
At the end of each Mission there are a number of short prompt questions to test that you’ve been paying attention but also to start directing you towards building out the assignments. Along the way you’ll have short assignments to complete — i.e. based on the lesson, conduct your own analysis of a given emerging space i.e. digital health, fintech, edutech etc.
The Struggle
Ok — sure it’s a course designed for those looking for “entry level” roles and here I am a 20 year professional.. but.. I still struggled — and this was less about the course and more about my own capacity to study while working fulltime :)
The Pace — 6 weeks, in theory, is a long time if you factor in doing 2 missions a week with buffer space for doing the assignments. Note that these assignments, as you would expect from conducting analysis, are heavy on the research side (lots of googling and reading industry reports etc.).
Brisk talking pace — I’m a native english speaker and yet I struggled with catching everything that the lovely Giulianna Crivello (one of the instructors) said — she has an American accent and speaks quickly. Keep in mind that the concepts require some financial understanding which my brain is slow to process unfortunately. I found that lowering the speed of the video playback helped though!
The Shame — I actually gave up 2 weeks before the completion date as my job workload was getting heavy and I felt like I’d never finish the assignments with a level of quality that I wanted. I actually announced this to the community on discord and I was quite surprised when I had 3 peers pop up and contact me giving me words of support. With one of them giving me a daily check-in during the final week to see how I was progressing. That was gold.. Thank you so much Sokari! And yes — I finished!
Highlights
- Incredible value for the price — even if you didn’t aim to work in venture capital, what’s covered would be valuable for anyone who wants to work in ecosystems, in start-ups, in partnership programs, in industry building or any area where identifying trends and who are riding the wave matters.
- The community was the game changer — Week 5 encouragement from my new friends! (kudos to having experienced and patient community managers who worked hard to maintain engagement, encouragement and support with some of the tricky assignments)
- High participation from Africa — For an Australian Start-up I was expecting to be surrounded by other Aussies but the rest of the students were 95% from Africa— so there was plenty of opportunties to make some new global friends.
Would I recommend it?
- YES! It’s perfect for those wanting to develop a portfolio and learn a workflow/process to analyse a market, identify trends, conduct due diligence on a potential investment and draft an investment memo (useful even in corporate!).
- Just a tip for this course — I found that taking notes on Miro was helpful for me to translate the learnings and to keep tab of key concepts.
