Moving into venture from investment banking
Your training opens doors that stay shut for other people, and carries assumptions that work against you in the room. Both halves matter.
5 minute readBanking is the most common origin story in venture, and the most commonly overrated one.
Both halves of that sentence matter. Your background genuinely opens doors that stay shut for other people. It also carries assumptions that will work against you in the room if you do not notice them. This guide is about both.
Why the door is open
Venture firms hire from banking because the training solves a real problem cheaply. You can read a cap table, you know what a term sheet does, you will not embarrass anyone in a diligence call, and you have been trained to work at a pace most people find unreasonable.
That is not nothing. Claire Biernacki of BBG Ventures sets the technical bar for candidates: she does not expect people to nail it, but does expect a basic understanding of management fees, MOIC and how carried interest is calculated. You already have that. A large share of the people you are competing with do not.
Pedigree also travels further at this level than anyone likes to admit. Pre-MBA venture hiring leans on brand-name firms and universities, and if you have those, they are doing quiet work for you throughout the process.
Where the door actually is
Two years is the usual window, and after that the fit gets worse rather than better.
Analyst two to associate one is when your training is most valuable and your salary expectations are still movable. By your third or fourth year you are expensive, you have specialised in a product area that may not map onto a fund's thesis, and the firm starts wondering why you are leaving a track you were succeeding on.
There is a second window after an MBA, which is the more structured route and the more expensive one. Mark Suster of Upfront Ventures notes most firms hire associates straight out of MBA programmes. If you are already three or four years in, that is often the cleaner path, and you should price it honestly.
Aim at the funds where your training is the point. Growth stage funds, crypto and fintech funds, funds of funds, and anywhere the diligence looks like the diligence you already do. Seed funds want founder credibility more than modelling, and that is a harder sell from a banking desk.
What works against you, and what to do about it
Four things, in the order they will hurt.
You have been trained to be thorough, and venture rewards being early. A banking process rewards catching everything. Seed investing rewards forming a view on two thousand words of deck and a founder conversation. If your case study reads like a diligence memo, you have demonstrated the wrong skill. Show a decision with the reasoning visible, not an exhaustive survey.
Your model is not the answer. The mathematics of venture is not precision, it is distribution. Firms are asking whether a company could return the fund, which means the analysis that matters is whether the market could plausibly support a very large outcome, not whether your revenue build is right in year three.
You have no proprietary access. This is the real gap. Banking gives you deal exposure, not deal flow. A fund hires an associate to find things, and nothing on a banking CV proves you can. Fix this before you apply, not during: angel cheques, a syndicate, a scout position, or a genuinely good market map published in public. Elad Gil is direct about how that is read: if you want to eventually work at a venture fund, the VC partners will look at your scout track record.
People assume you want the money. Venture pays worse than banking for years, sometimes for good. If the interviewer thinks you have not modelled that, you look naive. Say the number out loud yourself and explain why you are taking the trade.
What the money actually does
Expect a cut, and expect the story about carry to be less exciting than it sounds.
Only a minority of junior investing roles carry any at all: David Beisel of NextView Ventures cites survey data showing 11 percent of analysts and 39 percent of associates receive any carry. And what carry exists typically vests over six to eight years, against a job that Suster and others describe as lasting two to three.
That collision is worth understanding before you take a pay cut in exchange for upside. The full version is here.
We cannot show you comparative salary data because it does not exist publicly. Of the 298 roles open on the capital side, 0 publish a number.
The part nobody puts in the job description
You will be less busy and more uncertain, and the second one is harder than people expect.
In banking, effort and output are legible. In venture, you can work for six months, be right, and have nothing to point at, because the company you found will not be a real answer for years. Kate Stern of Homebrew names the version of this that surprises people most: venture can be pretty lonely compared with working at a startup or a company, where most of your success is a function of your contribution to a team.
She also names the part that takes longest to sit with: many portfolio companies do not become runaway successes, and everyone spends more time discussing the wins than the losses.
And the honest alternative
Before you spend a year on this, look at the shape of the market. Of 298 roles open across 63 firms, 22 are investing roles. Most firms hiring have no investing seat posted at all.
A banking background also converts well into the finance and operations seats inside a fund, which are advertised far more often, sit in the same meetings, and get you into the industry years sooner. That is not a consolation prize. It is the door that is actually open.
Next
See which firms have a seat open now, or read what each level on the investing track actually does.