Platform roles, the door into venture that is actually open
One in eight people at a venture firm now works in a function that barely existed in 2000, and it has no established pipeline. That absence is the opportunity.
5 minute readIf you have spent a few months applying for associate roles and getting nowhere, here is a number that should change what you do next.
Across 63 firms on the capital side, 22 investing roles are open. In the same corpus, operations, marketing, product, design and legal roles came to several times that. The investing seat is the one everybody applies for. The seats around it are the ones actually being advertised.
A large share of those are platform.
What platform means, and why the word is unhelpful
Platform is the venture industry's name for everything a firm does for its portfolio that is not writing the cheque. Talent, community, marketing and brand, business development, events, founder education, and increasingly data and internal tooling.
The word is unhelpful because it describes a budget line rather than a job. In practice a platform role is one of about six quite different jobs, and firms use the same title for all of them. Before you apply, work out which one the listing means, because a platform hire at a seed fund running events and a platform hire at a growth fund placing executives are not doing similar work.
This guide is about platform as a way into the industry. If you want the role itself in depth, including how the day runs and what it pays, our sister site has a full guide to the head of platform role.
It is not a side function any more
The growth is real and measurable. According to survey data reported by VC Stack, 52.8 percent of venture firms now have moderate or significant platform teams, roughly double the proportion in 2000. Platform professionals made up 13.1 percent of core team members in 2022, up from 6.4 percent in 2000.
That is the trend line that matters to you. One in eight people working at a venture firm now sits in a function that barely existed when the current partners were starting out, which means the hiring for it has no established pipeline and no obvious pedigree filter.
That absence is the opportunity. There is no equivalent of "two years of banking" for platform. Firms hire on evidence that you have done the thing.
Where platform people come from
Almost everywhere, which is the point.
Tanaz Mody, Head of Talent at Lerer Hippeau, describes the motivation rather than a credential: she was drawn to the field because of how much early stage companies need a people leader.
Meryl Breidbart at At One Ventures describes the more common route, which is lateral drift into the gap: she started her career as a designer and founder, and when she joined as an investor she naturally gravitated to filling the platform holes.
The pattern in both is the same. Somebody who had done a specific operating job well noticed that a fund needed that job doing, and did it. Recruiting, community, content, events, developer relations, executive search and increasingly internal data all convert.
What the work is actually like
Three things worth knowing before you decide it sounds easier than investing.
You are measured on other people's outcomes. A platform lead's work shows up as a founder hiring a good VP, or a portfolio company finding a customer. It is real value and it is hard to put on a slide, which is why the good roles are at firms that have already decided platform matters and the frustrating ones are at firms still deciding.
The team is small and the surface is wide. At most firms platform is one to three people covering six functions. You will be running an events programme and a talent pipeline and the newsletter in the same week. If you like depth in one discipline this will grate.
Proximity is the compensation. You sit in the same meetings as the investors, you meet founders early, and you learn how a firm actually decides. That is genuinely valuable, and it is available to you two or three years sooner than the investing track would be.
Does it lead to an investing seat
Sometimes, and you should not take the job assuming it.
The honest position is that platform is a good career on its own terms and an unreliable stepping stone. Firms that promote platform people into investing roles exist. Firms that treat platform as a permanently separate track also exist, and from the outside they look identical.
So ask directly, in the process, and ask it as a factual question rather than an ambition: has anyone moved from this team into an investing role, and when. A firm that has done it will tell you who. A firm that has not will tell you about culture.
The same caution applies to the investing track, incidentally. Mark Suster of Upfront Ventures describes the associate seat as usually a two to three years and out job, so neither door comes with a guaranteed corridor behind it.
How to be a credible platform candidate
Show the function, not the interest. A community you actually built, a hiring process you actually ran, a founder programme you actually delivered. Numbers help. Being a person who finds venture interesting does not.
Pick the sub-function and say so. "I want to work in platform" reads as unfocused. "I have run technical recruiting for three seed stage companies and I want to do that across a portfolio" reads as a hire.
Aim at firms whose portfolio needs what you do. A deep tech fund needs different platform work from a consumer fund. This is checkable in an afternoon and almost nobody does it.
Look past the firms you have heard of. Small funds carry a wider brief per person, which means more of the job is yours to define.
Where to start
See what funds are hiring for outside the investing track, or go straight to operations roles across the capital side.
If your background is technical rather than operational, engineering inside a fund is a separate door again, and one of the least contested in this market.