Work at a VC guide

What a venture analyst actually does all day

Sourcing, diligence and an operational tail nobody puts in the job description. Plus why the word analyst on a venture board often does not mean the job you are picturing.

3 minute read

In this guide

The honest version of this job is less glamorous and more interesting than the outside view suggests.

You will not spend your days deciding which companies get funded. You will spend them finding companies, doing the work that makes someone else's decision possible, and keeping a lot of small things from falling over. That is not a demotion from the job you imagined. It is the job.

The week, roughly

Sourcing takes the largest share. Founder calls that go nowhere, inbound triage, conference lists, cold outreach to companies nobody at the firm has met. Most of this produces nothing and you do it anyway, because the whole model depends on seeing enough.

Diligence takes the second largest. Reference calls, cohort data, competitor teardowns, customer conversations, and a memo that a partner may skim if they have already made up their mind. You will learn more from the reference calls than from any spreadsheet.

Then the operational tail. The CRM, the pipeline review, the LP update, portfolio data collection, and at smaller firms the events and the newsletter as well. Nobody puts this in the job description and it can be a third of the week.

What you actually own

Very little, formally. A lot, in practice.

You rarely lead a deal and at most firms you do not sit on the investment committee. What you own is what the partners see. Every company that reaches the Monday meeting reached it because somebody put it there, and at a small firm that somebody is often you. That is real influence, exercised through selection rather than decision, and it is why the job is worth having even though the title is junior.

What the market says about the level

Analyst is the rarest advertised level in venture. Only a small number of analyst roles are open across the 298 roles at 63 firms in the corpus.

That is not a sampling gap. Analyst seats mostly get filled without a public posting, and plenty of firms skip the level entirely and hire straight into associate.

It is also worth reading the titles that do appear, because they are not what you expect. Of the analyst roles open today, several are investor relations, fund administration or investment banking analyst positions at capital-side firms rather than deal-team seats. The word analyst on a venture firm's board frequently does not mean the job you are picturing. Read the description before you get excited about the title.

What makes someone good at it

Volume with taste. Anyone can send a hundred cold emails. The analysts who get kept are the ones whose ten forwarded companies are consistently worth the partner's half hour.

Writing that decides. A memo that surveys considerations is a worse memo than one that says yes or no and names the two things that would change its mind. This is the skill that most obviously separates people in the first year.

Being useful to founders you are not investing in. It costs an hour and it is how a junior person builds a reputation before they have a track record. It is also, unglamorously, how the best deal flow arrives three years later.

Not needing to be told. The firm has no management layer. Nobody is going to run your week.

What it does not lead to, usually

This is the part worth knowing before you start. Analyst and associate seats are frequently fixed-term rather than the bottom of a ladder.

Lee Hower of NextView Ventures is direct about it: most of these roles 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. Mark Suster of Upfront Ventures describes the associate seat as usually a two to three years and out type of job.

Take the seat for the reps, the network and the pattern recognition. Ask in the interview what the last three people in the role went on to do, and treat a vague answer as an answer.

And the thing nobody warns you about

The feedback loop is close to a decade long. You can be right and have nothing to point at for years, which is a strange thing to sit with after an operating job where the work is legible daily.

Kate Stern of Homebrew names the version that surprises people most: venture can be pretty lonely compared with working at a startup, where most of your success is a function of your contribution to a team.

What each level on the ladder means, what the interview actually asks of you, or the analyst and associate roles open right now.