The Swiss Army Knife Internship
by Moritz Krah
When I was a young child, my uncle gifted me a Swiss Army knife. Its value was clear: it provided a complementary set of tools with innumerable use cases. Many years after that, at the beginning of my professional career, I started the Venture Capital Internship program at Paua. The experiences and learnings from that provide a highly applicable and diverse skill set — one that reminds me on the characteristics of the Swiss Army knife, but that will be orders of magnitude more useful to achieve the goals I have today. I gained insights, skills and a network that I will benefit from no matter where my journey will take me — and new friends in addition.
In fact, acquiring that kind of skill set was an important motivation to work for a VC. (Side note: YouTube channels/blogs of Y Combinator and Andreessen Horowitz or Reid Hoffman’s “Masters of Scale” podcast are helpful resources to dig deeper into the work of VCs and to prepare for the position). Reflecting on the experience at Paua, I am confident I made the right decision.
During the Internship program, you are a full member of the team from day one. Consequently, you get full-spectrum exposure to all activities of the investment team, while you can also work with portfolio companies. While that seems overwhelming in the beginning, it means the opportunity to work on new challenges and to advance your skills every day.
Those clearly include analytical and business skills. As identifying and analyzing promising companies is a key part of your job, you develop a sound understanding and flexibility to evaluate different companies from different perspectives (which aspects to drill down on and how to get the relevant infos). At the same time, you use that experience to support portfolio companies on strategic questions (such as how to design and roll out fundraising), which introduces you to the start-up perspective first-hand. Paua has close, hands-on relationships with portfolio companies. You can work directly with founders on different projects that can include Business Development or Intelligence. For example, I had the opportunity to work on a project using Python in that context.
Besides that, people and communication skills are equally relevant. Within the team, you constantly present companies, insights and your thoughts. In addition to that, communicating and building relationships with different personas such as founders, other investor, limited partners or industry experts is an important aspect of your day-to-day work as an Analyst. After all, a significant part of VC is people business. The interactions with highly accomplished people in different fields are an exciting part of the job and ideal to expand your network.
Moreover, you quickly develop a “taste” for interesting market opportunities through these interactions and insights on different companies/technologies. You can dig deeper and develop expertise in domains you find particularly interesting. No matter what you decide to do in your career, that ability to assess market opportunities is just another invaluable addition to your professional Swiss Army knife-like skill set.
If you are interested in the start-up/VC world and want to round up your professional as well as personal skills working with great people, look no further! :-)
About the author
Moritz joined Paua in February 2019. As an Analyst, his responsibilities covered all grounds from dealflow hunting and analysis to providing operational support to founders.
Following the time at Paua, Moritz will work as a Product Management Intern at Celonis. Prior to joining Paua, he worked in consulting and at a digitalization research institute where he wrote his Bachelor’s thesis about the application of distributed ledger technologies. He graduated from the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt and spent one year at Boston College, focusing on Information and Operations Management. In his free time, he enjoys soccer and powder skiing.
