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Answered some common questions I've received from first-year MBAs on breaking into VC in the following article. A handful of key learnings below
https://patrickharmon.substack.com/p/breaking-into-venture-capital-faqs
https://patrickharmon.substack.com/p/breaking-into-venture-capital-faqs
1/ Network early and often. Don't be afraid to reach out cold and remember that you are building relationships for the future, not having one-off transactional conversations.
2/ Follow-up. One conversation during a 2-year MBA does not a relationship make. You need to nurture your network with periodic check-ins and get to know people over time.
3/ Read, read, read. Start consuming newsletters, blogs, books, and even VC Twitter to figure out what the current trends are and determine what you are interested in. Let this drive your search.
4/ Starting building a database of deals. Take your learnings and use that to look up deals in your ideal range (e.g., seed, series A, series B). Categorize these deals by company characteristics and try reaching out to founders.
5/ Use your database to have more productive conversations with VCs in your outreach. Bring a perspective and share actionable deal flow if possible.
6/ Be genuinely interested in meeting other people. Be genuine about who you are when you meet people. In other words...be yourself). You're having conversations with future friends, colleagues, co-workers, and mentors, so don't pretend to be someone you're not.
7/ Work while you study (sorry). Unfortunately, there's nothing quite like being in live deal flow, and reaching out to companies you like with a .com email address vs. a .edu email address is invaluable. Transaction reps are invaluable and trump in-school learning.
8/ Don't be too quick to eliminate cities from your search. This is a numbers game, so expand the top of funnel as much as possible and optimize for the type of fund you would like to work at.
9/ Thank the people that helped you land a role and were a part of the process. It takes a village to land a role in VC, so be humble and be gracious.
10/ You will make mistakes throughout this process (some of mine still make me cringe when I think about them). Always reflect, recognize mistakes, and look for opportunities to improve.
