Write a thoughtful e-mail to set up a conversation. If you’re still having trouble finding entrepreneurs in your area, search your city on AngelList, a platform that largely consists of startups and investors. If you have Twitter, you can generally reach out to an entrepreneur by replying, “ hey, do you have an e-mail I can send a quick note to?” LinkedIn is also a decent way of connecting with entrepreneurs. If you haven’t yet, reach out to an entrepreneur in your area, someone who has founded a startup and has been through at least an initial round of funding or seed round. Most of the time, entrepreneurs and founders are genuinely friendly people and will hop on the phone with you for a 15-minute call or share some of their wisdom through an e-mail. I researched dozens of companies in the transportation technology space (Luxe, Juno, Chariot, Gett) and reached out to their teams while preparing for VC interviews in order to get a sense of who was continuing to disrupt the industry after Uber and Lyft.
If you’re building relationships with entrepreneurs in your area, you’re already on your way to understanding technology companies and learning how to think like an early stage investor.
Here are my 4 tips on how learning to think like a technology investor can help you break into venture capital. These are just two quick ways I learned how to build value for some of the most sought after individuals in the tech space in order to break into venture capital. Whenever I heard of an early stage company that I considered a good fit for these firms, I could also make an introduction since I now had their attention.
So now whenever they thought of hiring, they would think of myself and the organization. After I gave them an overview of the program, a majority of the firms were open to accepting students from my organization for internships throughout the year. This gave me an excuse to run around New York City and meet with partners at some of the most established venture capital firms in the city. The program, Columbia Venture Partners is a 10-week education curriculum that teaches students how venture capital works, how to pitch a company, how to understand technology markets and how to evaluate startups. Since I was at school, I started a campus organization dedicated to teaching students about venture capital. If you show initiative, passion and knowledge before interviewing, it makes a VC firm’s process a lot easier since they have thousands of eager candidates to choose from. To get a job at a venture capital firm, you have to separate yourself from the noise and prove yourself. In order to find great companies to invest in, VC firms need highly intelligent people who have a passion for technology and an eagerness to reach out to and understand young and emerging companies. The job of a venture capitalist is to source early stage companies that will offer a great return for the firm in seven or eight years. It took about a year for me to figure out how to enter the industry but I succeeded and I’ll outline everything I’ve learned below. With this advice in my back pocket, I tried a summer in finance but quickly found it wasn’t for me.
To get a job in venture capital, I was told I needed to work on Wall Street first or go into consulting. I didn’t have the words at the time, but I wanted to break into venture capital and learn how to think like an investor. When I entered college I knew I wanted to lean more about startups and really touch the process of creating a product. I always preferred the adrenaline rush of being around entrepreneurs and other passionate people who were giving up the safe haven of a corporate job in order to build the future.