Vista Equity Analyst 2020 Program

I interviewed with and received an offer for the VEP analyst role. There is a massive amount of misinformation is this thread. There are many other specifically about, or mentioning, VEP on this forum that have answers to questions in here. Your job in PE is to uncover something unique about a company for a competitive advantage. What better practice than to prepare for interviews.

1) Analyst pedigree - Vista has analyst intakes from two routes: experienced hires, and campus hires. Your campus hires are pretty typical. You will see guys who were super pedigreed. Some have gone A2A.

You will also see guys who had non-traditional backgrounds (e.g., private debt, consulting, institutional sales, etc.) and then went in at the analyst level. Vista has a very unique screening system heavily based on a test that screens for attributes that you use to filter people that would be a good fit at Vista.

2) Nature of the analyst work. Vista is a B2B SaaS shop. As an analyst, you learn B2B SaaS non-GAAP modeling. I have written about this ad infinitum on this forum, and over the past year and a half specifically, it has been covered extensively. You will be doing cohort retention analysis, customer roll forward/back size analyses, you will be doing market sizing, you will effectively be doing everything but model. You slowly get model responsibilities over time (just like in any apprenticeship style role...) as you show you are capable. This is in direct contrast to typically Associate hires, who are almost always bankers with experience similar to GS TMT (someone who knows their salt in software modeling).

3) The culture seems fine. I know some guys who like it. It's hard at times, because they are constantly doing bolt-ons (literally constantly, it clogs up my newsletters) so you are seeing LOTS of reps. You should probably know about the virtuous cycle software M&A of borrowing against more revenue post-acquisition, bolstered by the fact that, in the words of Robert Smith himself, B2B SaaS contracts are better than first lien debt (as a quick aside, I have been waiting for the first recession to see if this is true; turns out, it is - people are quicker to default on their loans than get rid of the software you need to keep the lights on at your business). There are plenty of bad apples at VEP (just like other places) and that has been covered in another thread.

4) There are questions in the WSO database that I got in my interview, so shell out some clams and study up. Lots of questions are around understanding the software market, different "hot" areas, maturity of different relevant industries, etc. I talked about NLP, for example, but a perfectly good answer would have been frontier AI, etc. I get the sense that people with true passion for software are the ones that get the offers. It's pretty hard to fake it if you don't get turned on by B2B SaaS.

5) You will be sufficiently coveted by other MF shops if you recruit on-cycle as a VEP Analyst

6) Comp is lower than street. It's a slap in the face. But you get to work for VEP, so, tradeoffs.