Show HN: Job board to find venture capital jobs
venturecapitalcareers.com
venturecapitalcareers.com
Anecdatum: These days I’m getting 5+ emails a week asking if I’m interested in joining XYZ early stage startup.
It seems to be ruled by the mighty dollar, yet is like a force of crazy strength in its ability to naturally select out the strongest.
Sometimes that strength is existing connections and money, though there are those rare times where a truly novel idea breaks free, a truly beautiful design, or something truly good is made.
Is that worth the evil it does?
I don’t know, let the capitalists and socialists fight it out.
I for one will try and be like a hobbit.
Then we wonder gow come asset prices and house prices are so high.
But for some reason this money cant be directed into infrastructure we need to deal with climate change?
I work in this area (climate repair) and eventually came to the realization that the work must proceed despite the opposition of the US. I just tune out when colleagues and peers talk about discussions and coordination with various US government agencies and programs. I’ve seen enough Lucy-and-the-football episodes. The most that will ever happen on that front is lip service.
It is going to take a lot of failure. Government turns failure into finger-pointing. VC is comfortable with failure but only understands profit. We have a structural gap.
They want to know what percentage of ownership I would give up for this level of funding. I have no idea what is fair. Could the people here tell me what they think a reasonable percentage trade of the company would be typical. Also any other advice. I will give some ground on this because if I don't get this funding it will make it very hard to get it to market. And they say 100% of nothing is nothing.
(I don't want to talk the specifics of what it does but there is nothing like it on the market and I have done the market research. The only competition around does it badly.)
Then you will conclude that giving away more than 20% at each stage will dilute you into nothingness
Ofcourse the nature of the project, etc. matter a lot
1. Somebody they already know or is vetted by a trusted source
2. Somebody with a pretty specific background for entry level jobs (ivy league/mckinsey/banking) or an incredibly specific background for higher up jobs (successful founder or investor)?
You wont know you are being checked out either, lots of stock market listed companies do this to potential customers as a matter of course.
When you get wise to it, you can actually be unsettled by the techniques used because private investigators would use similar techniques, but when you are investing alot of money, these people like to know where their money is going, this isnt a confetti throwing party!
There is so much PR management in place to keep things discrete and quiet.
Ah yes, the well-known anti-real number discrimination ;)
Heck even in hedge fund circles there seems to be a meme around how cushy VC jobs are, but how it's very hard to transition into them. (Correct me if I'm wrong, this is my impression from IG hedge fund meme pages).
The role of VC job postings are (1) give a superficial appearance that it's an open process, which is importantly especially for diversity virtue signalling and (2) serve as a public notification to warm connections that there is a job opening up. But trying to get a job at a VC by blind applying will have a low % success rate.
USV does this for their analyst position, and they seem happy with the process.
What are VC jobs and what would you be doing on a day-to-day basis?
No, that's not what this thread's "Show HN" is about.
It is showing job openings at the VC firms themselves. E.g. a16z, Sequoia, etc. The typical job candidates would be interested in a career in finance with tasks that include investments due diligence, corporate research, market analysis, etc.
It is _not_ showing jobs at VC-funded startups. E.g. Snowflake cloud startup backed by VC Sequoia. Those typical job candidates would include software programmers, engineers, etc.
Some may argue that competition is a good thing :thinkingface:
Because they lose their thinking ability in med school and become dictionaries after STEP exams.
Selling a new fund to potential LPs and selling your VC to "hot" start-ups.
Nobody cares if you're "good at excel models".
If your mental models (not excel models) are better than other people's you have an advantage in making money because you undersatnd the world better. Not everything is all sales. sales is really important but it's not everything.
How do you convince others that your mental model can make more money than other VCs?
How do you convince a start-up to take your money because you're a better investor than other VCs?
That's all "sales".
Venture capital is very relationship driven. Not 100% of course, but it's almost impossible to do without it, at least at the beginning.
Source: I lead engineering at a VC firm. We’re hiring data scientists and software engineers! https://drivecapital.com/join for more, email in profile.
Checking that their product is being built with Kafka or whatever is worthless - you cam throw money at that problem later and fix it.
Your second paragraph is spot on, and I hinted at a similar idea in a sibling to your comment. Especially at series A and later, customers are an existence proof for the product not being vaporware.
So when we are involved in diligence, it’s usually near the end, and we’re getting to know the engineering leaders to see if we can help them speedrun a few iterations by sharing best practices or introducing them to other leaders in the portfolio who have been there and done that recently.
Here is one such example. https://www.frcs.co.uk/candidates.php
Relevant to the HN crowd, we’re also hiring data scientists and software engineers. It’s rare for a VC firm to have its own engineering team building a product, which is part of what makes it so fun. Do you think these technical jobs would be relevant to your board’s audience?