So you want to be a venture capital associate? Here is what has worked in the past…

I was interested in answering the question: what attributes are similar across venture capital associates at “the best” funds?

Methodology:

• I took the list that CBInsights made of the Top VC Investors in the Unicorn Club (7/12/15)
• Then I took the best funds from this list since “the top 20 firms generate approximately 95% of the industry’s returns.” However, I only did the top 10 since it is very time consuming to go through each of these funds. If there is demand for me to finish this analysis with 20 funds, I will finish entering the data.
• Funds included from the list: Sequoia, a16z, KPCB, SV Angel, Accel, Founders Fund, NEA, Khosla, Greylock, and Benchmark.
• Not included from the list: T. Rowe Price, Wellington Management, Fidelity Investments, Goldman Sachs, and Tiger Global Management as they are banks.
• Then I went through each of their websites and fund LinkedIns and found people who looked young to identify who their associates are (I am going to use the word “associate” to refer to any low level investment professional who has not yet gone to business school). I looked up each of these associates on LinkedIn to determine the following metrics about them: Fund, Name, College, Major, Year Graduated, Did they intern in a venture role previously, Years of full-time work experience before venture, Type of work experience before venture, and Additional education. I recorded all of this in a spreadsheet. In total, there were 31 associates.

Here is what I found:

NEA has the most associates, which makes sense since it is a growth fund and needs associates for modeling and due diligence. Benchmark did not have any associates that I could find.

Out of the 7 that went to UPenn, 4 went to Wharton.

Almost half of associates did finance, computer science, or economics. But the other half came from various backgrounds (storytelling, history, stats, classics, etc.) Also, there was one student who did Computer Science and Finance who is recorded twice in the graph above and one student lumped into “Other” who did not have his major listed.

Average is 2011.5

10 out of the 31 associates had an internship at a fund at some point.

Average is 1.98 years.

About 30% of associates specifically came from technology investment banking. (I lumped in the one associate from private equity into the banking group)

Correlation != Causation. But, if you want to follow what has worked for others in the past…

• Go to UPenn or Stanford.
• Major in some combination of Finance, Computer Science, or Economics (maybe all 3?).
• Intern at a venture fund.
• Work for around 2 years in technology investment banking.

Acknowledgements

• I could have easily missed associates and data that is not public. For example, someone who did an internship that turned into a full-time role may not have put that internship in his/her Linkedin.
• Many associates fell outside of the “normal paths.”
• Does not take into account the relationships the associates had with the venture community, which is very important to landing a job at a fund.
• Perhaps this project would be better if the data was crowdsourced.

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