Why I just launched an academy for aspiring VCs
It was 2008. Lehman hadn’t crashed yet, and Joe the Plumber (Remember him?) was still a big deal.
I had just finished b-school and waggled my way into a venture capital associate role with a firm in NYC — after 18 months of coffee meetings, internships, and plain ‘ol hustle.
When I got the job — just like all of those analysts and associates (and partners) who were cool enough to take my calls and meet with me for the previous ~2 years — I started meeting and talking to folks who wanted to crack into the business themselves.
Back then, this was the only way to get into venture.
(If you weren’t someone who could bring ops chops as a former startup founder, lots of cash to invest, or LPs)
You met a ton of people, you trolled the web to find advice across the (relatively few compared to today) VC blogs out there, and you tried to help startups and VCs however you could. And maybe things would break your way.
What struck me back then was that:
- the people who came to me were all asking the same kinds of questions.
- I was continually pointing them at the same blogs, etc that I had looked at when I was searching for my VC gig.
Which led me to this realization:
Despite all of the awesome content out there about being a VC, there was no central place for people who wanted to be a VC to find the content that they needed.
It was then that an ugly web page (and some other stuff) was born…
I started collecting links and other resources that would help people find jobs in venture capital and hung them off my personal blog on a Craigslist-looking page:
A few years later I launched a VC jobs email newsletter and wrote a book about how to break into VC.
What I’ve learned about the VC job market over the last 8 years
Between my own experience getting multiple job offers from VC firms and what I’ve heard from the hundreds of people I’ve coached over the years through content and in person, here’s what comes through loud and clear:
- It’s still way hard to crack into VC. Some VCs even say that the odds of getting into VC are equivalent to the odds of cracking into pro baseball. This is true even with the recent explosion of new firm/fund formation, particularly at the seed stage.
- Many firms still don’t publicly post when they are looking to make a hire. Especially when you get above the analyst/associate level. (However, in the last few years you’re seeing more firms post jobs.)
- Networks matter. Even if a firm is running a public hiring process, you can bet that if someone who wants that job can get an intro to the firm from a trusted source, that person shoots to the top of the resume pile. It’s happened to me personally.
- The best source for VC gigs is other VC job seekers. Back in b-school I would swap leads with the (few) other folks in my class who were also looking for VC gigs. After all, if a firm told me “No” there was no reason for me to cling to that lead. We probably all would have found our gigs faster if we were trading leads with job seekers not just in our school — but with those in other schools, too.
- VCs will meet with VC job seekers to give them advice, but won’t mentor them weekly over an extended period of time. From what I’ve seen most VC job searches (if successful) take about a year of concerted effort in network building and interviewing. Some VCs will open their network in a huge way but they’re never going to be able to focus on someone’s search on a continuous, frequent basis.
These are things that weren’t being solved via the things I’d built/launched/done in the last 8 years.
Enter GoingVC
GoingVC is a paid membership group that helps people get a job in venture capital — and is designed to tackle all of the challenges I just mentioned.
- We give our members a way to access investor and entrepreneur networks outside of their geography — through their fellow VC job seekers and through my GoingVC colleagues. This gives seekers access to more job opportunities but also dealflow from other members — dealflow that can be a great way to get in front of VC firms that are hiring.
- We funnel off-the-radar VC job opportunities to our most qualified members and introduce them to hiring firms. Because I’ve run the VC Careers page for the last 8 years, I get a lot of first looks (and therefore, so do the folks who are members of GoingVC). And we’re already seeing GoingVC members sharing non-public opportunities that they’ve found on their own, too.
- We host weekly private workshops and Hangouts with VCs. In those sessions, members can learn from and interact directly with investors they might not otherwise be able to connect with on their own.
- We foster a network of peers to support one another. Through weekly Hangouts and a private Slack group, members can swap job leads, get feedback on their resume, share news that can benefit the other members, or celebrate an interview opportunity or an offer. We’re literally with them every day of their journey (and so are their fellow members in the cohort).
We launched this past week with a great group of members around the US (and one person in Italy!) who have top tier MBAs, CS degrees, great work experience — and in many cases who also have VC internships or prior VC experience under their belt already.
Membership by application only
Since this is the 1st cohort of GoingVC, our new members will shape how the service and community evolves in the next 12 months — maybe even more than myself and the team working on this.
So we limited the size of the cohort and made sure that everyone we accepted was someone that we knew could help us build something great.
What’s next?
We’re going to see how many people we can help get into VC over the next 12 months…
…learn a bunch, make mistakes, and feel the excitement (and the fear) that comes with starting something new.
If you’d like to keep up or raise your hand to join us for a future cohort:
Sign up for the GoingVC mailing list.
And please comment inline, offline, etc — I would love to hear what you think of what we’re building.
[Update: In the year since this post went live more than 40% of the 1st GoingVC cohort landed investing roles with corporate and financial VCs, as well as with family offices.
Special thanks to Nic Poulos at Bowery Capital and Manu Rekhi from Inventus Capital for helping us to kick our 2nd cohort off this spring.]
