Going from PE to VC (Junior level)?

If you have a good enough PE name on your resume, I'm sure you'd get some looks at early stage funds, to my knowledge, most of these funds don't recruit in batches with the exception of some of the much larger institution ones, so your best bet is to likely hit up all of the recruiters, get on the list for any of the bigger VC funds they represent, and then predominantly do networking on your own and start to make some inroads into places you think might be interesting. You might have to go to a smaller fund to get some VC reps in before trying to move up.

Now with that said, a couple of thoughts I'd leave you with: What is your motivation to wanting to move to an earlier stage investing role? Assuming you've done banking to traditional PE, do you really think you have the right skillset to be a good Associate/Senior Associate? Having done PE and some shorter stints in VC/GE and entrepreneurship, I can tell you that being a good early stage VC is an entirely different skillset and background than being good at PE. While you can do the basic tasks of sending cold emails, writing up investment memos, etc you'll have no idea of what it takes to build product, be an entrepreneur, ideate around new businesses ideas, etc, which frankly wouldn't make you that useful of a VC Associate. The early stage investing is a more about networking, founder vetting, and product/market fit ideation among other things. It's harder to purely templatize like banking/PE. It's for this reason that product managers and former entrepreneurs typically make better early stage investors as they don't try to fit things into the mold of a financial investor and can instead empathize and understand how a business can grow out of an idea that may seen improbable.

Let's take Figma as a recent example, Peter Thiel saw promise in Dylan Field and gave him the opportunity to build something big. Figma toiled for years without finding the right product market fit, I think it was 3/4 years before they had any revenue, but according to those close to the company, Field was customer obsessed, passionate about the space, and had a vision for how to fix what he thought was antiquated tooling in the design software space. I think about some of the VCs who backed the business in the Seed+ or Series A rounds. Would you have enough ability to 1. Find a person/company like Figma/Dylan 2. Enough conviction to pound the table to commit money to a revenue-less company going up against the likes of Adobe in a competitive design software space, claiming that they could build a better version of that tool? How would you wrap your mind around that? How would you diligence it? A former founder or a PM at Adobe might be able to spot some things in the product market fit pitch of the business, but a banker who's instinct is to build a model, could probably never justify or understand how that business could get to being worth $20B.

That is obviously a crude and simple example, but something to think about. I like a lot of junior bankers/PE folks figure that VC looks like it's more fun and that they want to make the jump, yet they don't really realize what the VC job entails and particularly, what it will take to become a long-term successful VC. VCs can come from a variety of backgrounds and bankers/PE folks typically don't make for great early stage investors. Think about what you really like to do, where you think you can carve out a niche, what your narrative is for making the switch, and then start building your VC skillset.