Consulting or Banking for Venture Capital

Way too much unknown here to answer that. Depends on the actual company, the group you're in, your performance, whether you actually get hired, etc. Congrats on the interview though. Dominate it.

Just to clear anything up. I have already accepted a SA offer at a low tier BB bank (DB, BarCap, BAML, Citi, UBS) working with debt. Last summer I worked at a tech start-up in the transportation industry. I like the smaller company feel, which is why I am looking at elite boutiques and MBB moving forward. m2, could you explain why the training of MBB would be better?

If you are interested in a typical, seed-stage fund I would think that MBB would prepare you much much better than banking would for that role. Bankers get hired into VC, but it is typically very late stage funds that are more growth equity than VC. Venture Capital funds want associates who can 1) Understand how a tech start-up works, and articulate what differentiates their product 2) Understands strategy and competitive landscapes 3) Knows a lot about tech

This is why their preferred background is successful tech entrepreneurs, but you'll notice that the description alligns much closer with MBB than banking - where your skillset is almost entirely useless as seed stage funds dont rely on excel the same way PE funds do.

@"CRR", essentially @"jss09" is making very good points here. Examples across the portfolio company lifecycle from areas I worked on recently:

1. While you're assessing a potential investment, you need to be able to quickly understand new business models, size markets, analyse competitive advantages and their sustainability, evaluate founder teams, challenge marketing and distribution strategies, look at the underlying technologies in varying degrees of detail and become an expert in technology X in rapid time, conduct industry-level analysis (supplier and buyer power) and so on.

Yes, there is certainly a lot of process management work (coordination of external due diligence as well as commercial advisors, managing your own investment committee) and some financial modelling indeed, however focus is clearly on the points I mentioned above. I have absolutely seen ex IBD guys getting good at looking at all these points as well, however I feel you develop an edge in these areas if you see how professionals do this - and after all, this forms a part of the bread and butter business of MBB.

2. Once you have invested in a company, as a VC you will spend a lot of time coaching your team. You will need to be (or become) good at seeing where team members are not up to snuff (say, a sales guy actually not being able to right-size the direct distribution team or partnering with the wrong kind of firms), you will need to intervene in case of fights between the team members (this will be a lot of late phone calls but you can actually defuse critical situations by doing this). We spend a lot of time looking at the product strategy of our firms and compare that to competitors and sometimes the buyer universe and adjust.

There is certainly also M&A-type work - I have helped our management teams with a few bolt-ons - but mostly you look at organic initiatives and again, you will work on organic growth (or restructuring) initiatives in consulting. I led a portfolio review and right-sizing (meaning we killed products) and restructuring exercise (where we let go of about 1/3 of the portco) around 8 weeks after joining my VC firm and found it useful to have that functional experience (albeit absolutely not in that sector) from my previous job in consulting.

3. Exit is often process-driven indeed but you get a lot of help in this from the M&A or ECM teams that run your exit, obviously.

Certainly nothing here is rocket science but I find having done this before - and most importantly, knowing how to attack the unknown in a structured manner - gives you a lot of confidence in this job.