A path to Partner in VC: what I wish I’d known
Contents
NB. This is a long piece, so I’ve summarised the key sections here to help you find what’s most relevant to you:
Introduction
Setting the scene
Lesson 1: hone your soft skills
Lesson 2: be a good investor
Lesson 3: founders come first
Lesson 4: your working values are your imposter syndrome armour
Lesson 5: find a working balance that you can sustain
Conclusion
Introduction
I could only find three useful posts on the subject of how to become a partner in VC. That goes some way to highlighting how opaque the VC industry is not just from the outside but also from the inside.
What would become my career in VC, started without me even realising that my crowdfunding hobby could be a paid job. Outside of my mentorship at Playfair, I would have had consistently zero or limited idea of what the route from there to becoming a partner in VC actually looked like. I’d love to change that and support the next generation of investors to become decision-makers in their funds.
This should be relevant to anyone at any stage of their VC career — from analyst to principal or even for someone looking to break into the industry — especially since these lessons are often best built upon from day one. However, if you are more interested in the early stages of a VC career, I wrote another blog in a similar style covering my experiences as an associate here.
I’ve structured this post in a bite-sized format because 1) attention spans are dwindling by the second, 2) not every lesson will be relevant to everyone so you can skip to what resonates with you. I’ve also included specific examples in italics for almost all lessons to help bring them to life. My goal is to present what worked well or didn’t work for me — from the proactive to the seemingly obvious — which could hopefully help in your own path to partner in VC.
Setting the scene
An important caveat to this post is that what you need to do to be promoted to associate or even principal across most funds is relatively transparent and standardised between them, whereas partner promotions vary wildly from fund to fund. Every fund is different and will have very different criteria and timelines. The key factors include: size of fund, stage in fund lifecycle, size of the existing partnership, willingness of existing partnership to have a succession plan, fund’s investing culture.
I have written this predominantly from my own experience at Playfair — a £57m dedicated pre-seed fund investing in the UK and Europe — although many of the lessons below are in direct counterpoint to what I’ve witnessed as bad practice or advice in the industry.
Lesson 1: hone your soft skills
There are many things you need to have learned and proven to have the door opened to becoming a partner (successful investment track record, board experience, manager experience, clear USP within the partnership, etc) but to actually walk through the door you need to have nailed a non-obvious set of soft skills too. These are a large part of what makes the partner promotion harder than any other — it’s more holistic than a milestone-ticking exercise and you need to have embodied these soft skills over a sustained period of time for people to deeply associate them with you.
Lesson 1a: be proactive
In a world where progress is measured more on a relative than an absolute basis, being one step ahead is a big advantage. Being proactive simultaneously shows creativity, efficiency and drive, a powerful set of associations.
In my first year at Playfair, one of our biggest gaps was our network. One enabler of our efforts was the Notion database of funds and individuals I proactively built — it helped us know where we stood, where our specific gaps were and track our progress to our end goal.
Lesson 1b: show you care about the firm’s progression as much as your own
Being a partner means you are a shared owner in the fund. That means that the partnership is the fund and the fund is you. For the other partners to give you this level of trust, you need to show you care about the firm more than yourself.
This can be incredibly difficult in practice when internal politics often dictate that you need to win versus others. The mistake is not understanding the message behind this challenge: you can only win by running your own race and making that race how much you can personally impact the success of the fund.
When starting our Female Founder Office Hours initiative in 2019 with Chris and Joe, I could have nominated myself “co-founder” but this would have achieved nothing other than giving myself a LinkedIn medal. I wanted the personal value, if any, to come from this being a successful fund initiative.
Lesson 1c: do the job before you get the job
You can’t quite manifest yourself into a partner role, but almost. “Doing the job before you get the job” is one of the workplace’s oldest clichés; it’s also essential. This is because this role requires you to master additional soft skills above the pure execution of a job description: you need to figure out what a partner does to move the needle, what their responsibilities are, which time sacrifices they make, and how to balance growing without leaving too much unattended behind.
My partners Chris and Joe asked me to support the fundraise for our third fund last year. I knew we had a gap on the financial side of our team that I could fill so I set about building and running a fund model to forecast and operationally run our third fund. This has now become a core part of my partner responsbility as defacto Playfair “CFO”.
Lesson 1d: be aware of internal politics (because they exist everywhere)
It doesn’t matter if you’re “good” or “bad” at politics, you just need to figure out the rules of the game and make sure you stay in it. You basically need to know how to navigate the internal politics of your fund, implicit or explicit. Then you can get on with your day job and not let politics get in the way.
Having a no-politics culture at Playfair is one of our core values, so it’s hard to give an example here. But, I did have to learn early on which investors on the team had particular biases against certain sectors, business models, and weaknesses (e.g. defensibility, solo founders). The aim was to ensure the optimal sequencing of a deal through our process. I’d want to ensure we had strong answers to their expected biases before putting that investor in front of the founders to give them the best chance possible of securing funding from Playfair.
Lesson 1e: learn to work with people who don’t think or work like you
Early in your career, you’ll naturally gravitate towards people who think like you or work in a similar way. It’s the path of least resistance and that’s fine to get started. But, to get to the next level, you need to figure out how to adapt to the whole range and diversity of working styles and approaches you should have across your team.
The analogy is a sports team — it’s good to have a star, but what makes them truly great is when that star and the wider team gel to become greater than the sum of their parts. This comes from individuals understanding each other and adapting their game to suit the greater whole versus just optimising themselves.
One of my colleagues couldn’t be more opposite to my highly-structured, process-driven working style. It was really challenging for the first couple of years until I had an epiphany: I didn’t need to adapt them to fit how I worked, I needed to figure out how to adapt the processes I’d established for myself and the fund to get the most out of them. They ended up leading two rocketship investments in the next year and now we’re closer than ever.
Lesson 1f: be a mentor
Similarly to lesson 1e above, it’s so important to actively take on the role of mentor to the junior members of the team who join after you. Initially, this can be on a purely informal basis: being a deeply active listener so that people feel they can come to for anything from “stupid questions” to existential crises.
In time, this can become a formalised role, potentially managing an associate or analyst on your team, but you should still approach this as being closer to a mentor than a “manager”. Your goal should be to simultaneously find their “zone of genius” (the areas they excel at, relatively and absolutely) and ensure they’re covering their key weakness. If you can play a small part in enabling the incredible potential of someone else on the team, that’s a powerful signal of your future strength as a leader.
Lesson 2: be a good investor
This is seemingly so obvious, you might be wondering why I’m including it, but VCs can get so wrapped up in everything around their role (personal brand, halo networks, cliques, money) that they forget the most important skill by far is being a good investor in the first place. Average investors can survive for a few years, maybe even up to five, especially if they’re clever at riding investment fads or bubbles, but very few will survive in the long run.
Lesson 2a: always be sourcing
Always. Be. Sourcing. This doesn’t mean you need to spend your life actively sourcing, but you should be thinking about how any interaction could one day lead, even two or three steps removed, to that sourcing introduction that turns into an investment. VC is in large part made up of serendipity — the maxim “make your own luck” couldn’t be more true here.
I met Raffi at university and we always enjoyed a deeper chat often orientated around the future. After graduating, we started catching up over an occasional game of tennis — one time he told me about a new idea he had and asked for advice, another that he was considering quitting his job, the next that he’d jumped in. Ten years after we first met and six months after that first conversation, I ended up leading Playfair’s investment into his new company Passionfruit.
Lesson 2b: process is your friend
In the same way that the COO role in a startup may be one of the least glamorous from the outside but one of the most important on the inside, so too is an investor’s operational skillset. Learning how to efficiently and effectively move an exciting opportunity through the due diligence (DD) process from sourcing to Investment Committee (IC) is a critical yet overlooked skill. A few examples:
- Once you’re keen on a potential investment, time always seems to be against you so make the time from sourcing to the first meaningful decision gate (a first call) as short as you can.
- Learn to leverage whomever on your team is the expert in the potential startup’s sector/business model/stage/etc to answer the burning questions first. The goal is to get the clear no’s in quickly so you can triage and then double down on the few that remain.
- Run a tight ship on timelines, to-do’s, founder comms, internal comms, so that the only remaining uncertainty is one in your control: is this is a good investment that I’m passionate about?
For the latest investment I led at Playfair, my colleague João messaged me at 9pm on a Friday about a company he’d just been referred at a VC dinner. I messaged the founder the next morning after checking his profile and website, connected and set up a call for Monday morning. We started the memo on Tuesday, went to IC the following Wednesday and offered to invest. We were initially late to the party, but process caught us up.
Lesson 2c: know how to win when you want to invest
There is nothing worse than finding an exciting opportunity, writing a full memo, concluding it’s a future unicorn outcome, and getting approval at IC, only to be passed on by the founders.
The tables flip very quickly once more than one investor wants to invest so you need to start selling yourself from the first call. This is likely the moment you set yourself up for failure or success — the best founders with the most competitive rounds will start triaging their tiers of VCs from the initial first impression. It’s ironically also the best moment you have to pitch yourself and your fund naturally before you clearly enter “sell mode” territory and founders will start to glaze over your “value-add”.
You need to decide how you’re going to win ahead of time. Is it on speed, terms (financial or otherwise), brand, alignment of vision, specific support (e.g. hiring, GTM), network, etc? You also need to figure out as part of the process which of these will enable you to win with the specific set of founders and company at hand. Sometimes founders will prioritise what you can’t offer and that’s fine, you can’t win them all, but when your winning formula aligns, prove it as soon as you can and keep up the momentum.
My personal strategy for winning investments is the same as Playfair’s: we commit to sharing our ~30-page memo with the founders to transparently prove the depth of understanding we’ve acquired of their market and business, and how our conviction aligns with their vision. This also enables us to be the best strategic partner/mentor post-investment, giving deeply well-informed, contextual support. This sets ourselves an incredibly high bar, but if reached it is almost unstoppable — this was expressly the reason we recently won an investment against arguably the best fund in Europe.
Lesson 2d: the hard work really starts at the first board meeting
Board meetings are the ultimate playground for imposter syndrome: you feel you have no right to be there nor anything unique or valuable to contribute. The secret, however, is that the biggest impact comes from something everyone can do: take the time to fully read and digest the board materials.
The vast majority of investors either don’t have the time or willingness to spend at least an hour (maybe two when you’re starting) reading all the board materials in detail, coming up with key questions in advance, comparing progress to the last board(s) through the materials or your own notes, taking any key asks to your team or network in advance to have informed answers or suggestions, etc.
Building genuine experience across different companies and situations obviously can’t be shortcutted, but by doing the above, you can make up for years of experience across 80% of a good board member’s responsibilities. Both the founders and other board members will notice and respect you more for it.
Lesson 3: founders come first
Without founders, VCs don’t exist and without founders, you’ll never make partner either. The founders you choose to work with and those who choose to work with you are by far and away the best proxy for whether you have what it takes to be a valuable addition to your fund’s partnership. This is on both a quantitative and qualitative level — they’re equally important due to the long feedback loops in VC. You can control the inputs below; you can’t control the output that is your track record and reputation.
Shout out to the incredible founders who’ve entrusted me with their businesses and journeys to date, I have learned so much from all of you and am pumped for the journey we still have ahead: Victor, Peter, Ugo, Max, Dan, Ciarán, Raffi, Issah, Mark.
Lesson 3a: invest time to really know your founders
VCs wax lyrical about investing in “people”, but how many can genuinely say they’re truly close to the founders they’ve invested in? If you’re not close to them as people, how can you understand their motivations, their fears, and the context of their decision-making?
You don’t need to be best friends, but you should be an excellent active listener and you should know what’s keeping your founders up at night as clearly as what’s keeping them excited.
One day, the virtuous circle will hopefully reward the depth of your relationship — in the short term a glowing founder reference for a new investment, in the long term investing in that same founder’s second business.
One of my portfolio companies had a moment where the founders thought they might need to sell. They weren’t convinced the risk/reward for building out a new category without a proven exit landscape was there for them and they didn’t want to “throw away” years of hard work by ending up in no-man’s land (you’ve raised too much VC capital for a small exit, but you can’t grow large enough to IPO or be a major acquisition target). We did a lot of desktop work, but what really counted was being close enough as a team to be able to talk through the human emotions and motivations and figure out the right answer together. In the end, we did figure it out and I believe that process gave us the faith we now have in our ability to become that category-defining company in the space.
Lesson 3b: scale yourself
The VC-founder relationship is one of the least scalable parts of the job on both sides. It’s the personal, personalised touch that counts. However, you can still enable a supercharged version of that valuable time.
Every investor is always too busy, too stressed, and has too much going on at once so give yourself the support structure to focus on what really matters with your founders at the right time.
There is a lot of often-overlooked groundwork behind being a board member and mentor. I’ve built libraries of templates and examples for everything from financial models and metrics dashboards to pre-mortems, investor updates, board decks and pitch decks. I have a Notion timeline with pages ordered by time periods relative to fundraises (e.g. 1–3 months since pre-seed, 6 months to Series A) and by function (e.g. Hiring, Finance, Sales, Fundraising) to remind me what to keep top of mind and when.
Lesson 3c: take the chance out of fundraising
Your portfolio companies should never fail to raise because of a sub-par process. Of course, a number will fail because they haven’t proven product-market-fit (PMF), hit milestones, etc or because of unforeseen market conditions. However, your responsibility is to mitigate as many of these upfront as you can to put your founders’ destiny in their own hands to the greatest extent possible.
There have been many posts written on how to nail a fundraising process (First Round, Creandum), but here are my clearest learnings. As an investor I will guide my founders through all of these as well as support directly on almost all of them too:
1. Materials prep. Cut no corners when putting together your deck, FAQs, financial model and data room (commercial + legal). Done right, you shouldn’t have almost any additional work to do when asked for info by investors.
2. Warm up halo customer references. Make sure your top 3 halo customers are primed and ready to speak to your prospective lead investor(s). This is often the final, crucial gate in a VC’s process.
3. Practice pitch. Either you or ideally a colleague who’s less close to the business should do one or two practice pitches plus direct feedback before going out to market.
4. Investor masterlist. You should have a comprehensive investor list with these fields at a minimum: Fund, Individual investor, Wave, Introducer. Wave is important because your investor list should be 50–100 funds long, but you can’t speak to them all at once and ideally won’t need to. You should start with a few funds you think you have the least fit to further refine the pitch. You then hit the first two waves, give each a week, check the state of the funnel to “deep dive/diligence/etc” (5-10 funds here at any one time) and then move onto intros from the next wave as necessary.
5. Intro emails. You should have a template ready that you can customise for as many investors as you can — maximising speed and quality. You should send this easy-to-use template to all Introducers on the masterlist so there’s no gap in the waves.
6. Weekly check-ins. Sometimes this is a 5-minute conversation sometimes a 30-minute one, but you need to stay close to the founders and the process to understand how to adjust the pitch, when to activate the next wave of intros and to make sure your founders aren’t getting burned out or disheartened by the inevitable no’s.
7. Backchanneling. This is an important part of any process at the business end. You or your colleagues should have the network to be close to the funds that are at advanced stages with your company and it’s your job to present a balanced view of the thesis and anti-thesis to ensure the key risks and opportunities are noticed and understood.
8. Decision-making. If you’ve followed all the founder lessons above, you’ll probably be the first person your founders call for advice on which investor to go with. You’ll also be close enough to the business to be able to give informed advice. Ditto with negotiations from there, both on price and legals.
Lesson 3d: learn how to manage startup failure
Everyone knows that VC is a power law game, but very few actually process what that means in practice: most of your portfolio companies will “fail” (either go bust, or fail to exit as a venture outcome or fail to exit full stop). As an investor, you need to learn how to manage failure for your founders and for your fund.
For your founders, you need to be close enough to know when things aren’t going well and have enough time to do everything you can to turn things around (from bridge financing to product pivot to team changes). Once there’s nothing more to be done and depending on whether the company can continue trading profitably or has a looming cash-out date, you should figure out a new sustainable strategy for the company, leadership and team, or find a path to exit to at least protect the founders and team. Empathy and hard work are what you can give your founders at this crossroads.
For your fund, you need to secure the best financial outcome possible. Depending on why the company is failing, you should do everything you can to find an appropriate exit path or enable the company to reach a sustainable profitable state. Once you’ve figured out the future beyond the crossroads, extricating yourself from close management is a tricky but necessary part of the process to allow you to refocus your time and energy where you might find your fund’s fund returner.
Lesson 4: your working values are your imposter syndrome armour
This section is the closest I’ll get to tackling imposter syndrome. I’ll never fully overcome imposter syndrome and I actually think it’s healthy not to. However, I’ve realised in the last year that since figuring out what my working values are — the fundamentals that inform how I see and act in the world of work — I feel very close to comfortable in my own skin. You need to reach a certain level of self-belief in your worldview and way of operating at partner level. If everyone agrees with or likes you then you probably don’t stand for anything in particular.
These are the core working values that underpin everything I do. Yours should be your own, but hopefully these can help you figure out what they are:
Lesson 4a: execution trumps ideas
Over the last four years, I must have heard thousands of “great ideas”. Maximum a handful actually came to fruition and even fewer still exist today (Riding Unicorns, The Atomico Angel Programme, Female Founder Office Hours). It’s ironic that VCs preach focus and execution to their founders, but so few practice this themselves. Ideas are totally free, the best are often well-known; it’s the execution of them that drives value and can set you apart.
Proving that you can execute over a sustained period of time to drive real impact for a mission and for your fund is a massive asset.
On our team offsite back in 2019, my colleagues Chris, Joe and I came up with the idea for office hours to support women founders. This wasn’t new (https://www.femalefounders.vc/ had existed for a couple of years, various accelerators and funds ran occasional office hours), but we saw a massive problem and no coherent, consistent solution at scale. That meant there was space to execute properly.
We started with a small first event of a dozen friendly investors and 50 founders in our offices. Within 6 months, the third edition had grown to 800 one-on-one office hour meetings for 200 female founders with 60 VCs. Four years later, we’re hosting our 9th edition where we expect 300 female founders and 165 VCs to join for over 1,200 meetings. This has taken a huge amount of effort behind-the-scenes building processes, mammoth Notion templates and timelines, team responsibilities, and now it’s a machine in 5th gear that largely drives itself forward, edition to edition. The impact is building too: the latest funding data shows that over £600m has been raised by companies that have attended one of the previous editions.
Lesson 4b: always be investing in future you
Given the long feedback loops in VC and the hiring/retaining pressures within funds (often you only have 2–3 years as an associate to make an impact), you should be focussing a good portion of your efforts on short-term results. However, an easy mistake to make is to focus entirely on them. If you want to make partner it’s a long game and often the seeds you sow in your first year as an analyst, or even before, are those which will bear fruit during those crucial years as a Principal, whether at your original fund or not.
Some practical examples to get the creative juices flowing: upskill yourself with a course on a specific sector, business model or trend (I recently took Sameer’s Network Effects course); read and note that startup book you’ve had on your shelf for months; digest every portfolio update from across your fund as if you were the deal lead; think about building a network for the next 3–5 years, not just someone who can share a deal today.
I’ve founded multiple small side hustles since I was a kid including a startup, RendezVu, while at university, all of which have ingrained an entrepreneurial mindset to how I work within VC at Playfair. Since my first few months, I’ve been obsessed by improving what I’ve come to see as the Playfair “Product” (what we’re ultimately selling to founders, other investors, and LPs). I started by building a fully automated inbound pitch form and backend process with low-code tools. Last year as part of our fundraise, I built a full product roadmap for the fund which encompassed over 100 component features which we assessed for the equivalent of PMF and then iterated on. This didn’t yield anything initially, but now we’re up and running with Fund III, we’ve found another gear from that investment last year.
Lesson 4c: curiosity is King
The day I stop becoming curious is probably the day I’ll hang up my boots. Curiosity is the kindling that enables you to imagine that crazy new vision of the world a founder presents to you, or kickstarts that crazy new idea within your fund.
Many investors can fall into a knowledge or expertise trap where they start to feel that because they’re an expert now it means they will remain so forever. Curiosity keeps you up-to-date, keeps you relevant. You need to make sure curiosity is an innate part of how you think and operate to be given the opportunity as a partner.
I keep a running list of articles to read on Pocket. I rarely discover something that’s new or interesting when I’ve got headspace or time to really engage with it, but I do know when my curiosity is piqued. I love knowing that Pocket is a place to jump into that creative world of new ideas and challenges.
Lesson 4d: be humble
The privilege any investor has is ridiculous and with that power comes responsibility. I don’t see any excuse for an investor not to be humble.
In the long run, you’ll gain respect from founders and investors alike by being humble. If you genuinely see your career as a marathon not a sprint, this is a value to embrace.
Lesson 4e: being wrong (in the short run) is the best way of being right (in the long run)
By far the biggest lesson I’ve learned so far in VC: being wrong in the short run is the best way of being right in the long run. To take this lesson on board, you need to buy into its open-to-fallibility mentality. It’s hard, it takes a lot of courage and I still continue to fail to stick to it because it’s easier not to.
I believe that being open-minded to the idea that you can be wrong at any point about anything is the only way to keep yourself fresh and ahead, and to ensure you’re always learning the new definition of ‘right’.
Literally this morning, we had a team dealflow meeting where my opening thoughts on a company were that it was likely out of scope given we generally avoid AdTech and E-commerce. It felt like a feature more than a product, and I couldn’t see why the tech giants wouldn’t build this into their offerings.
One of my colleagues listened and then presented an alternative vision where this was actually a software company enabling online businesses to solve one of their most burning painpoints (paid acquisition) as they’d learned from board experience with one of their portfolio companies. The tech giants also had no incentive to reduce the amount spent on their ads or signal that they weren’t already optimising the ads on their platform.
Simply put, I was wrong, and I loved it. I didn’t have the ego to dig in when a better answer was clearly there and I believe my future analysis of any midly similar company will be better as a result.
Lesson 5: find a working balance that you can sustain
In my early years in VC at Playfair, I was semi-burned out and close to full burn-out more often than in investment banking despite having an incredible work-life balance and loving my job today vs the exact opposite before. The limitless nature of VC coupled with the vast freedom you have in how you allocate your time means it’s extremely difficult to figure out what enough looks like. Figuring out how to work smart — what is the most efficient choice of inputs to achieve the maximum output towards a specific goal — is the difference between someone who is like an athlete ready for the Olympics and one who got injured in training and has to wait another four years.
Lesson 5a: find your working style
As a VC, your job involves constant juggling of multiple responsibilities. You, therefore, need to figure out how you work best, lean into that style and stick to your self-set rules.
Personally, I love the flexibility of being able to work bite-size wherever I happen to be — at my desk, on the tube, lying on the sofa, or on the plane back from a work/holiday trip. I like filling the small gaps in my time to create extended blocks of time for both deep work thinking (memo writing, strategic portfolio work) and personal time (switching off early at 5pm for an evening with friends, family and no phone). I’m obsessed with being hyper-efficient when I’m in the work zone to give me this space, but it doesn’t mean I need to be hyper-efficient in everything I do.
Lesson 5b: make room for the chaos factor
Following on from the lesson above, if you’re only ever in pure blinkered execution mode, you’ll never give yourself any space for the creative chaos factor. Just like the founders we invest in, VCs need to think about the next category-shifting innovation — whether on a personal, fund or industry level — to stay ahead of the pack.
I’ve often adjusted the 80/20 rule to a 90/10 mindset: 90% execution mode, allowing 10% of my time and headspace for the chaos factor that will never be efficient or organised but could have massive impact.
Conclusion
The best part of venture is that there is no single path into the industry (see our team’s routes here and here), nor to the top of it. I hope that at least some parts of my experiences will speak to you — whether to agree or disagree with them — and ultimately allow you to envisage or refine your own path to partner in VC.
I want to say a huge thank you to the entire Playfair team who have become a true family to me over the past 4 years. I wouldn’t have been given this freedom or opportunity anywhere else, wouldn’t have learned these valuable lessons, and I definitely wouldn’t have had as much fun along the way. 🙏 Fede, Chris, Joe, Jeevs, Simon, Sheff, Clare, João, Alie, Jez. Here’s to many more years of the same 🙌
ps. If you made it to the end, thank you for reading, I hope it was useful. I always love meeting new people who are passionate about venture and tech so please do reach out with a message :)
