Work at a VC guide

Do you need an MBA to work in venture capital?

Very few open listings mention an MBA. What the degree actually buys is a hiring calendar and a network, and both have cheaper substitutes.

4 minute read

In this guide

No. And that is the least useful true answer available, so here is the longer one.

Across the roles open on the capital side, very few titles mention an MBA. Whatever the degree does for a venture career, being a stated hiring requirement is not it.

But that is not what people are really asking. The question underneath is usually: will I get in without one, and am I at a disadvantage against people who have one. Those have different answers.

What the MBA actually buys

Three things, and only one of them is the education.

A hiring window that exists on a calendar. This is the real product. Venture recruiting is otherwise off-cycle and unstructured, with no season and no process you can plan around. Business school inserts one. Firms that recruit on campus do it at a fixed time of year through a known channel, and that is the only part of venture hiring that behaves like a normal job market.

A network you can buy in two years. The classmates, the alumni, the professors who invest. Getting a partner to read your email is the hardest problem in this industry, and an MBA is an expensive but reliable solution to it.

A signal that survives a CV screen. Mark Suster of Upfront Ventures notes that most firms hire associates straight out of MBA programmes. That is the practice, whatever the job descriptions say.

Notice that none of the three is the coursework. Nobody in venture will ask you about your finance elective.

What it does not buy

It does not buy you a partner track. The associate seat you get out of business school is usually the same fixed-term seat everyone else gets. Fred Wilson has been saying for over a decade that Union Square Ventures has no career path and people leave after a couple of years. An MBA gets you into the room. It does not change what the room is.

It does not buy proprietary deal flow. The thing a fund actually hires an associate to do is find companies nobody else has found. Two years in a classroom is two years not building that, and it is the gap most post-MBA candidates cannot close in an interview.

It does not help at all for most of the market. Of the roles open today, the large majority are finance, operations, engineering, marketing, legal and platform. In those seats an MBA is neutral at best, and in an engineering or design seat it is noise.

The arithmetic nobody does out loud

Two years of tuition and two years of forgone salary, against a job that pays less than the one you left and may last three years.

We cannot tell you the salary side of that equation, because nobody publishes it. Across all 298 open listings, 0 state a salary. And the carry that is supposed to compensate for the cash is thinner than it sounds: David Beisel of NextView cites survey data showing only 11 percent of analysts and 39 percent of associates receive any at all.

If the honest reason for the degree is the network and the calendar, that is a legitimate purchase and you should price it as one. If the reason is that you assume the door is otherwise closed, the rest of this guide is for you.

When it is genuinely worth it

You are changing continents or changing industries. An MBA is the most reliable way to relocate a career across a border or out of a sector where your experience does not translate.

You want a growth or later-stage fund. The further from seed, the more the work looks like the analysis business schools teach and the more the hiring looks like traditional finance recruiting.

You have no network and no obvious way to build one. If you are outside the main hubs with no founder relationships, buying the network in two concentrated years is a real option, just an expensive one.

When it is not

You are already an operator with founder relationships. You have the scarce thing. Adding a credential to it is a downgrade in signal, not an upgrade. Read moving into venture as an operator instead.

You want an early-stage fund. Seed firms hire founder credibility and proprietary access. A degree does not read as either.

You want anything other than the investing track. Platform, finance, engineering, marketing and legal seats inside funds outnumber investing seats many times over and none of them care.

What to do instead, if the answer is no

The three substitutes for the three things the degree buys.

For the calendar, build your own. Track which firms have hired at your level in the last two years and approach them before they post, because most of these roles are never posted.

For the network, do something publicly useful for founders and investors in one specific sector for twelve months. Slower than an MBA, cheaper, and it produces evidence rather than a line on a CV.

For the signal, get a track record. Angel cheques, a syndicate, a scout position. Elad Gil is direct about how this is read: if you want to eventually work at a venture fund, the VC partners will look at your scout track record. That is a signal an MBA cannot manufacture, and it is the one that maps directly onto the job.

What each level actually does, what the interview asks of you, or see who is hiring right now.