The VC Playbook: An MBA’s Journey into Venture

“At the end of the day, you have to prove that your thinking is stronger, your network is more extensive, your personality is more receptive, and your deal flow is more proprietary than the other 500 candidates that are applying.” –- David Selverian, Bessemer Venture Partners

Published in

Startup Grind

11 min readApr 13, 2018

VC fuels most startups, small and large, today, and is of vital interest to any business student or entrepreneur seeking funding. But what about business students who want to be on the VC side of the table/equation? How does a new MBA learn about this space and break into a career path in venture?

Let me first start by saying that there is no standard path for breaking into venture. This playbook is just one example that students have followed in order to enter the industry. I’ve followed this playbook and the details I will share are a combination of personal anecdotes and conversations I’ve had with successful venture capitalists who have entered the industry post-graduation.

This playbook is structured around:

Positioning your prior experience
Differentiating yourself from other candidates
Building relationships
Leveraging tools and resources

Within each section, I will share stories from friends in the industry; in a future post, I will recount my own journey of breaking into VC by following this exact playbook.

Position your prior experience.

Looking at the prior work experience of my Wharton Class of 2019, I would bucket students into one of three main verticals, which to my surprise is quite evenly split: industry, finance, and consulting (excluding the “Others” bucket).

Each vertical has its own specialties, and a student wishing to work in VC can play up their strengths to match. In venture, having deep strengths is more important than being a jack of all trades, as is commonly thought. You have to have something that differentiates yourself, on which you can develop a personal brand.

Industry

For people who have worked in industry, it’s important to identify your skill set and your contributions to the company and the industry as a whole. For me, that was being a data scientist at Google. For someone else, it could be deep marketing experience in consumer-facing e-commerce. Identify your key differentiated skill and really play up its relevance to VC. For example, if you have a data science background, you could help with tech diligence on opportunities, or if you have a marketing background you could evaluate marketing-driven companies.

Finance

If you’ve worked in pure finance, your skills could be valuable to early-stage startups. There are very few bankers who leave banking to join an early-stage startup. A lot of these startups have difficulty with their books, so most of them engage outsourced CFOs since it’s hard to bring in solid finance talent early from outside the organization.

Your strategy is to try to find an internship and/or part-time school experience where you can provide your services to early-stage startups. If you’re really lucky, one of those startups will start to get hot during that window, and you can ride that reputation when you are job-searching.

Consulting

Similarly, for consultants, it’s important to find your connection to the startup space. Take time outside of classes to help early-stage startups with things like business development, market assessment, strategic partnerships. These opportunities not only give you exposure to the startup ecosystem but also allow you to hone your skill set while potentially improving the trajectory of a company.

What do you do that is different or unique?

Ultimately, you have to figure out what your unique background brings to the table and clearly demonstrate how it can be applied to the job. However, just spinning a prior experience isn’t going to suffice. It’s just as important to do all the stuff no one else is willing to do to indicate your deep passion for the field. The last thing you want is to be that person who wants to break into the industry but is half-hearted about it, and isn’t willing to put in the time and effort to demonstrate their commitment. The next section describes how to follow this path.

Differentiate yourself from other candidates.

“You have to do things that other people aren’t willing to do in order to set yourself apart.” — Roger Chen, Silverton Partners

Although there is an element of luck when it comes to VC, you have to make your own luck. And the only way to do that is to just put in the work. For instance, most people haven’t done what Roger and I did before coming to business school: taking a pre-MBA internship. Most students see the summer before business school as their last months of freedom. We could have been on vacation, too, and no one counseled us to do a pre-MBA internship. This is the mentality you have to carry with you throughout the whole process.

Thought Leadership

“Come in with examples of being scrappy and resourceful and prove that you have access to proprietary deals and markets. Demonstrate your skills and knowledge through subtle language throughout the interviews and conversations.” –- David Selverian, Bessemer

If you know for sure that you want to break into venture after business school, you simply have to do things that other people aren’t willing to do. It takes a lot of work, no one’s going to tell you to do it, and you’re not going to get paid for it, but taking the initiative on some of these fronts will set you apart. Here are some examples.

Many people schedule coffee chats with VCs asking for advice. Asking for advice is good, but your goal is really to engage with the VC at a much deeper level, demonstrating value before you make a request. For example, with my background in data science, I could put together a deck that highlights my perspective on artificial intelligence (AI) and some companies that I find exciting within the space.

This presentation should be tailored to the individual and it should be directed to a specific partner’s roadmap. In fact, most partners at venture firms have specific investment areas they are deeply looking into that year; through building relationships with investors, you’ll come to learn the focus areas of specific investors.

However, don’t be superficial: simply doing a Google search is not enough. To make it credible, you need to have talked to people. Let’s take Silverton Partners’ Roger Chen, for example, and say his roadmap is AI. Since he’s based in Austin, he can’t easily talk to founders of AI companies at various stages in San Francisco.

If he can talk to a student like me, who not only did part-time work for one of the spoken-to startups but also reached out to all the companies when creating my presentation, that gives me a ton of credibility. Now I’m bringing something to the table that Roger can’t do himself.

Once you have this presentation, don’t be afraid to publish your content. Although it may be scary to think about publishing your ideas for the world to see (or, if you’re like me, you struggle with the process of writing), think of it this way: forcing yourself to create content also forces you to think deeply about an industry, practice concise communication, and develop a brand that people can associate with you and can, ultimately, set you apart.

Extracurriculars / Classes

Be selective and make your participation meaningful. Rather than simply signing up for every possible club available at your business school, choose extracurriculars that will help you build your network with VCs. Keep in mind that the goal isn’t to pad your resume: it’s to build relationships. In my opinion, the best positions in clubs are not on the executive team but the trek leader, the panel organizer, the person who interfaces with the VCs.

Ultimately, it’s about doing things that you enjoy doing. David Selverian of Bessemer did not start Scottie Ventures, a student investment group based in Pittsburgh, for the sole purpose of getting into venture. He did it because he’s always been passionate about entrepreneurship.

For him, the point of starting Scottie Ventures was to make sure that the next generation could get a well-organized experience with VC, so they could see what it’s like to work in the industry and speak knowledgeably about that experience.

In addition, he says, having to teach a weekly lesson on venture capital to a core group of 15 students while acting as the filter for the work they produced and the fund itself was a good exercise in management. As a byproduct, he was able to build on those relationships and broaden his network, bringing value to Bessemer as a firm.

Or take Jeff Ellington of Fuel Capital. Jeff was a history and philosophy major during college but took it upon himself during his MBA at Wharton to double major in statistics (not conventional for someone doing “business” school). It was the extra stats class that allowed him to be able to have a real conversation with a company using applied machine learning as a technology for a business application.

It was the extra stats class that allowed him to understand cohort analysis and benchmark CAC / LTV when evaluating the next Warby Parker. Most people that get into this business have found ways to build up skills in other places.

The reality of VC jobs is that VCs have way more really qualified people inbound than they can ever hire. So you have to do the extra work to show that you have something special. Faking it won’t make it in the venture world.

Approach “Networking”

Personally, I don’t like the term networking.

Networking seems to imply that you’re building relationships for the sole purpose of advancing your career. It’s important to make this component more personal and be intentional about how you “network.”

Before reaching out, figure out how to deliver value before it is asked (this ties back to our earlier section on how to differentiate yourself).
Coffee is better than a phone call, which is better than an email. Do your best to come in at the top of that food chain.
When sending emails, keep it short and to the point. Show, don’t tell, who you are, what you do, the value you can bring, and why you want to be a part of the firm.
Don’t ask for too much time (15–20 minutes).

Finally, a lot of this process is about relationship building. You need to demonstrate that you’re smart and that you’re well networked.

You will want to show that you know how to get access to professional, efficient conversations with people in your network across the investment spectrum, across different stages, across different markets. Perhaps most importantly — demonstrate that people trust you. When you have a network built out, you can bring that value to any firm.

Leverage Tools and Resources

Daily newsletters

Any person trying to get into VC should have certain specific resources delivered to their inbox every morning and should scan through every single one of them to see who’s getting funded, who’s doing the funding, what markets are exciting, and what models are coming to fruition.

Those should be no brainer automatic reads every single morning and it should be something you should do naturally because you want to. If you’re resisting doing this, give this career path some more thought. You may be forcing yourself into this role because it seems shiny to you from the outside, but if the day-to-day work isn’t appealing and doesn’t come naturally to you, you are probably not going to enjoy VC or do well in it.

Here’s a short list of the resources you should be eagerly scanning every day:

Job Tracking

One of the most valuable resources for tracking down jobs is John Gannon’s blog, which includes a job board that’s updated quite frequently. It also includes dozens of links, which take you to insider resources about how to break into the industry.
Tracking who is raising funds and what firms are investing in — there are a few Google docs circulating in the venture community that identify firms that have recently raised funds (New funds raised, Firms by thesis).
These kinds of firms are probably looking to hire, because they now have more management fees coming in, especially if their fund size has increased fund-over-fund. Reach out to these firms with a warm intro. In addition, be on the lookout for funds that haven’t raised in a while and offer to work for them for free. Funds typically raise every 5–7 years, so it’s good to stay ahead of the curve.

You can look for funds that are raising new capital, but keep in mind, it’s impossible to time hiring. What you want is to be top-of-mind for them when they’re ready to hire so you can jump on opportunities as they come available.

Again, you’ve got to make your own luck, and the only way to do that is to put in the work. If you’re willing to do that, people will recognize it. Yes, it’s hard, there’s no doubt about it, especially while you’re in business school. But I know that you can do it. You just have to make the time and hustle hard.

Two parting thoughts to leave you with:

You’re never too good for a job. If you really want to get into venture, it’s important to take on any experience you can get (unpaid, part-time, remote, etc.) and be appreciative of the opportunities that come your way.
Always be willing to help others. It sends a signal about your integrity, it will make you a better person, and you never know when an act of goodwill might end up benefiting you enormously later. It’s not a quid pro quo: don’t expect others to immediately pay you back in kind. But if I’ve learned anything in business school about the business world, it’s this: what goes around really does come around — when you help others, unexpected (positive) things can happen.

If you’re in business school and facing another week packed with team meetings and problem sets, this may seem more like a play encyclopedia than a playbook. But if VC is the right path for you, you’ll find a lot of these components come naturally to you and are even enjoyable.

Start by taking some time to think seriously about how you can position your prior experience and differentiate yourself from other candidates. Once you’re clear on that big picture, leverage the tools and resources you need to be knowledgeable and credible, and get started building relationships.