Moving into venture from consulting

Consulting is the second most common route into venture and the one with the widest gap between how good it looks on paper and how it lands in the room.

The paper case is strong. You can structure an ambiguous problem, run a market study, hold a conversation with a chief executive twice your age, and produce work under pressure. Firms know this and they hire consultants regularly.

The room is harder, and for a specific reason worth understanding before your first interview.

What travels

Structure under ambiguity. A venture case study is a strategy case with a decision at the end. You have done several hundred of these. Most candidates have done none.

Market work. Sizing, segmentation, competitive mapping. A market map is a deliverable you could produce in your sleep, and it is one of the four exercise formats firms actually use.

Sector depth, if you have it. A consultant who spent three years on healthcare payers is genuinely valuable to a health fund. This is your strongest card and most people undersell it, because inside consulting that specialism felt like an accident of staffing rather than an asset.

Being unbothered by unfamiliar industries. Useful at a generalist fund.

What does not

Recommending is not deciding. This is the whole thing. A consultant is trained to present options with a recommendation, hedged appropriately, for a client to decide. An investor has to say yes or no and then live inside the consequence for a decade.

The tell shows up in the case study. If your deliverable reads as a balanced assessment of considerations, you have demonstrated the wrong instinct. Say the answer in the first paragraph, then name the two facts that would change your mind. That single change does more for a consultant's candidacy than any other preparation.

Rigour is not the constraint. Seed investing means forming a view on a deck, a founder conversation and whatever you can find in an afternoon. The information will not arrive. A candidate who says "I would need more data" has answered incorrectly, because the actual skill is deciding well without it.

You have no proprietary access. Consulting gives you exposure to large companies and almost no relationships with early-stage founders. A fund hires a junior investor to find things, and nothing on a consulting CV shows you can. This is the same gap banking candidates have and it is the one that decides most processes.

Frameworks do not impress. A named framework in a venture memo reads as a substitute for a view rather than a route to one.

Which funds actually want you

Not evenly distributed, and aiming badly is why capable people spend a year getting nowhere.

Growth and later-stage funds. The diligence looks like the work you already do, and the analysis is genuinely quantitative. This is the natural home.

Sector specialists in your sector. Health, climate, industrials, fintech. Your domain knowledge is the asset and it is scarce.

Corporate venture arms. Comfortable with consulting backgrounds and used to hiring people who can navigate a large organisation. Worth knowing that these seats are rare and posted late: across the corpus we read, organisations typed corporate venture capital accounted for two open roles.

Not seed funds, mostly. Seed hires founder credibility and proprietary access. A consultant reads as neither, fairly or not.

The two-year window

Post-MBA or two to three years in is the sweet spot, for the same reason it is in banking: valuable training, movable salary expectations, and no specialism yet that a fund has to work around.

By your fifth or sixth year you are expensive, you are close to a promotion that makes leaving harder, and the firm will wonder aloud why you are stepping off a track you were winning on. Have a real answer to that, and make it about the work rather than about lifestyle.

What to do before you apply

Build the access you lack. Angel cheques, a syndicate, a scout position, or simply becoming genuinely useful to ten founders in one sector. Elad Gil↗ is plain about how this reads: if you want to eventually work at a venture fund, the VC partners will look at your scout track record.

Publish one view. A market map in your sector, public, with a position in it. It converts your strongest asset into something a partner can read in four minutes.

Learn the vocabulary, not the modelling. Claire Biernacki↗ of BBG Ventures expects a basic understanding of management fees, MOIC and how carried interest is calculated. That is a weekend. Start here.

Price the trade honestly. Venture pays less, for years. Of the 298 roles open on the capital side, 0 publish a salary, so you may be negotiating without a public comparable. And carry is thinner than the industry implies at junior level.

The alternative worth taking seriously

Most consultants who want into venture are aiming at an investing seat that is rarely advertised. Meanwhile the operating seats inside funds, in strategy, operations and platform, are advertised constantly and put you in the same weekly meeting.

That is not a consolation prize. It is the door that is actually open, and consulting converts into it better than into anything else.

Related

Platform roles, the venture interview, or the firms hiring right now.