Fake it till you make it: how to get a VC job
Getting a job in Venture Capital (VC) is tough. Really tough. Even with tens of billions of dollars under management, VC teams tend to be small, and very rarely have dedicated recruitment programs for students. That doesn’t mean they won’t hire juniors – but there might be a more imaginative way to do so.
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“Traditionally,” explained Patrick Blumenthal, a Zurich-based investor with American VC firm Draper Associates, "you work in banking or consulting, maybe do an MBA, and then join a VC fund. Or you work at a startup first."
The problem is that, more often than not, those banking skills are useless to beginners. Founders in early-stage startups “come to you with an idea, but most of the time there’s no product, no revenue, nothing. You’re just betting on the founders,” Blumenthal said. “At that stage, banking experience doesn't help much.”
As such, getting into VC isn’t as simple as showing off your deck-making or model-building abilities. What distinguishes a VC, especially a junior VC, is the ability to find investments. “If you look at what a VC does, there are four different steps. The first step is sourcing,” Blumenthal explained. “You need to be able to find startups, and that’s basically what they’re hiring you for as a junior.”
His advice is to start doing that sourcing before anyone hires you. Pick three to five partners at a few firms you want to work for, study their investment histories – stages, industries, geographies – and “every week or every second week, send them an email with a startup you found and find quite interesting,” Blumenthal suggested.
“You say, ‘Look, I just saw this startup,’ or ‘I talked with them. The name is [X].’ Then you list three to five bullet points: what the company does, the team, what’s so special about them. The last bullet point should be about why you personally think this is a good startup.” Eventually, this works, according to Blumenthal. “If you send the partners an email directly every week or second week with one specific deal, a lot of them will respond and say, ‘Oh wow, please connect me with this startup. I want to talk.’ And if you do this a couple of times, they see how valuable you are.”
Usual copywriting rules apply; keep the message short, “in plain English,” Blumenthal explained. "Write it in your own words. Partners can tell straight away when something was written by AI, and they skip it."
The last step is to do that research, and just publish it. “I would start writing in public – on LinkedIn, a newsletter, Substack, a blog – because then people see you,” Blumenthal said. “If you do this entire loop for three months, you’re not asking for a job, because you’re already doing it.”
Of course, there’s always networking, Blumenthal said. It’s how he got his first role in VC, after all. “Just go out and tell everyone you want to work in venture capital, because you never know if someone knows someone who can introduce you.” Sometimes, the old ways are the best.
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