Getting into venture capital as a student

You have the one advantage nobody else in this market has: firms will talk to you specifically because you are not asking for a job yet.

That window closes the day you graduate. This guide is about spending it well.

Start with the honest picture

Internships and entry-level roles are real, and the market is small. That is a market where a considered application to eight firms beats a generic one to eighty, and where being early matters more than being polished.

It is also the only part of venture hiring with anything resembling a calendar. Internships are the one level where firms hire in cohorts, which means you can plan around them. Everything else in this industry happens whenever somebody leaves.

The four routes in

Internships at the firm. The most direct. Sourcing, market maps, portfolio data, sometimes a term, sometimes a summer. Look at what is open on internships.vc↗, which is part of the same family and reads the same firm boards, or at the internships listed here.

Campus funds and student-run vehicles. Real money, real decisions, run by students. Dorm Room Fund is the best known and there are dozens of others. This is the fastest way to have made an investment decision before you have a job, and it is the single most useful line you can carry into an interview at twenty-two.

Fellowships and training programmes. Structured, cohort-based, often free or paid, usually with a hiring pipeline attached. The reading list here carries 10 European training programmes for wannabe VCs↗ and five African fellowship programmes for aspiring VCs↗, which between them cover most of what exists outside the US.

Scout programmes. Rarer for students, not impossible, and the only route that produces a genuine track record. Worth applying to if you have real access to founders on campus, which more students do than realise.

What actually gets a student hired

Not your degree, and not your grades beyond a screening threshold.

Evidence you can find companies. This is the whole job at the bottom of the ladder. Ten companies you found early, with what you thought at the time and what happened since, is worth more than any cover letter. It is also a sourcing exercise you can start today with no permission from anyone.

Something you built or ran. A society, a newsletter, a small business, a research project with real users. It does not have to be a startup. It has to show you finish things.

A specific interest. "I want to work in VC" reads as a wish. "I have spent two years reading everything published about robotic manipulation and here are the six companies that matter" reads as a hire. Depth in a narrow area is free to acquire as a student and almost nobody does it.

Proof you talk to founders. Not investors. Founders. The students who get in are usually the ones already helping people on their campus build things.

Use the thing you will never have again

You can email almost anyone in venture right now with a genuine question and get a reply. That stops working the moment your email reads as a job application.

Two rules that make it work. Ask something specific that their published thinking suggests they would enjoy answering, and never attach a CV. The conversation is the point. If they like you, the job conversation happens later and they will start it.

Sending twenty of those a month for a year is a better strategy than any application, and it costs nothing but the discomfort.

The thing to know before you build your life around this

The industry is small and it stays small. Lee Hower↗ of NextView Ventures put it plainly: there are perhaps a couple hundred hires made in any year in US venture capital. Across the entire industry.

And the seat you are aiming at is often a fixed term rather than a career. Most junior investing roles run two to three years by design, and as Hower also notes, most of them do not offer a long term trajectory to becoming what he calls a genuine partner, but one can get training, mentorship and resume credibility in VC.

That is not a reason to skip it. It is a reason to take it for the reps and the network, to have a second plan, and to notice that the operating seats inside funds are more numerous, more open, and lead somewhere too.

What to do this term

1. Start the list of ten companies. Today, badly. Improve it weekly.
2. Find the campus fund or student investment society. If there is not one, that is the thing you build.
3. Send three genuine questions a week to people whose writing you actually read.
4. Look at what firms have open right now and notice how many are firms you had not heard of. Those are the ones who will reply.

Related

What each level means, how to get a job at a venture firm, or the internships open now.