Cold Emailing Into a VC Analyst Position
I am a junior at a non-target and currently work in startup and SME consulting for a F100. We regularly work with local angels and venture capitalists to raise funding for our clients. This summer I will be interning at a local private equity/venture capital firm (1bn Aum), while also working part-time in the startup consulting role. I will likely continue working in startup consulting until I graduate next May. However, I would like to move out of my home state after graduation to pursue bigger and better things. I would love to start my career in consulting and transition into venture capital after 2 years. Unfortunately, I go to a non target that has only ever sent one graduate to MBB, so I can't count on this working out. Networking for consulting has been very difficult.
I do have a list of emails and phone numbers for ~200 venture capitalists, including quite a few partners at big name firms. I am passionate about startups and investing, so it makes sense to try to work my way into the industry. I know most venture capital firms don't hire analysts, so I'm unsure how and when I should cold email these contacts.
Do not cold email VCs asking for a job. To be 100% transparent, given you are at a non-target school and in consulting at a non-MBB, your odds of entering venture in 2 years is close to 0%. Your best bet is to try joining a startup in a product or biz ops role after a few years and then transitioning to venture after that, or trying to get into Stanford GSB or HBS in a few years and then joining a venture firm post MBA.
I will be working part time at an art tech startup to work on their monetization strategy as well as a few other things. I am also involved with a very high level ongoing consulting project related to cultural entrepreneurship and the 2016 and 2018 Olympics. It has started to receive some press coverage and we have gotten some big name partners and sponsors. I am a 4.0 student, so I believe that my biggest overall challenge is breaking into MBB consulting from a non target. I will be taking the GMAT this summer to hopefully boost my chances. Would a tier 2 firm like ATK give me the opportunity to pursue VC? Would it be worth it to attend a target/semi target like USC or UT Austin for an MSF with hopes of breaking into consulting and eventually transitioning into VC?
You will have a much better shot getting into venture coming out of a high quality growth stage tech company (think something like Slack) or a traditional PM role at a large tech company than from a tier 2 consulting firm. The problem with doing consulting out of school is that you will be bucketed with the myriad of other applicants who are applying out of consulting and banking, most of whom will have worked at MBB/bulge bracket banks and have gone to school at Stanford, Wharton, MIT, Princeton, etc. Try to do something different. At my firm we see hundreds of applicants a year that have done the Ivy League + business analyst route. We see very few who have built products at successful companies, and those always stand out.
Makes sense. I'm studying finance, so I don't have much of a technical background outside of some basic Java and C++ classes I took in high school. I imagine this would make it difficult to get a PM job. Is my background significant? I will have VC internship experience and I currently work with startups and national labs in tech transfer and commercialization. This almost always involves seed funding from angels and VCs. Will having this experience make it easier to break into the industry?
http://www.nextgenpartners.org/faq
The best way to get well-knit in the VC/startup community is by attending various meetup and startup events. I have met 1000s of entrepreneurs and Venture Capitalists. I usually stay in touch with them and try to connect the companies I think would be a good fit with many of the VCs I have networked it. Many of these VC analysts, as a result, stay in touch with me and are likely to open the door for me when the time is right (if you get good at pattern recognition, you can really help these analyst out).
Btw, I am also non-target so it is definitely doable.
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