JD Vance - how did he start his own fund so fast?

An article about JD Vance's VC career came out today in the WSJ. I was shocked how quickly he raised his own fund. It says he joined Mithril as a junior investor in 2016 and launched his own $120M fund in 2019. Especially for someone who didn't come from family money, this seems like a pretty insane trajectory.

How common is this sort of trajectory in VC? I'm much more familiar with PE, where you'd have difficulty raising your own traditional fund, even if you were an MD at a brand name mega-fund with 15+ years of investing experience.

https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/vp-pick-jd…

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He had some "special" help from Peter Thiel who arranged all these jobs for him.  What that relationship entailed on Thiel's part, we don't know.  Apparently JD failed in every place he worked at

 

Yes, I'd just add to this, that happens in a lot of different areas in a lot of different ways. 

For example, you might work with someone who buys a house two years out of college and you wonder how they did that? Or someone got a pretty big job out of school or put together a client list pretty fast. Sometimes this is people working really hard and pounding the pavement, but usually they've at least gotten some help in some ways. 

Usually just comes down to, its all who you know. 

 

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