Unicorn Startup Engineering Manager to IB or VC
Background:
- I graduated from a non-target school in the southeast with a BS in Optical Engineering in 2021. Since then, I have been working at a Unicorn startup in Greater Boston and have worked my way up to Engineering Manager level at the company. Comp is good, mid 100's, but do not like some aspects of engineering such as earning potential and general nature of the work. I have always been interested in Finance and am looking to make the career jump. The VC company that has funded multiple rounds of fundraising for my company would be my ideal job, but I understand that getting into a VC company without a top 20 MBA or founder experience is near impossible.
- I am currently enrolled in a graduate certificate program in Fin Engineering (finishing this summer) at a semi-target school in the Northeast. This consists of 3 master's courses: Econometric Analysis, Fin Modeling, and Derivative Securities. I just recently passed SIE and am looking to take Series 63 within the month. I have been toying with the idea of doing an MBA at a top 20 school but am unsure if the potential earnings will justify the cost. I know I have the mental aptitude to do anything I want but am trying to consider what is a good use of my time that will ultimately maximize my earnings over the next 10-20 years.
- The VC world is extremely attractive to me, given the climate of my current company. I really would be willing to go into anything IB, VC, or PE related but know that this will be extremely difficult to break into with my background.
Question:
My main question is do you think a top 20 MBA would be necessary, given my background, to break into IB, VC, or PE? If not, what other steps should I be taking to improve my chances of switching into finance?
Secondary question would be which of these industries gives the best opportunity for earnings growth? I know I might have to take a pay cut in the beginning to break into industry but where will I get the best career earnings in the next 5-10 years?
Just a side note, I have not begun the application process or began networking for finance related roles on Linkedin. I know I have to play to my strengths but would appreciate any advice on what weaknesses I should be working on!
Bump
For you I'd recommend some sort of do-over. The last three years of experience I'm sure have been extremely skill accretive and you've met great engineers to have in your personal rolodex. However I think from how you describe your experience most VCs won't care and given your background you don't have exactly eye-popping MBA admissions stats (which is fine - don't play their game, you don't need to). And the reason I say that is most VC outcomes to decent VCs are by way of Stanford, Wharton, and Harvard.
So, where does that leave you. You could try to go for another round by being an engineering manager at a sexy startup like Perplexity or Mistral or Pinecone or whatever and hope it does well and ride the wave. The more "career-accretive" the move is is directly related to how early you join the startup. But the earlier you join, the more subject you are to "power law" risk effects of the startup having a mediocre exit.
What I might recommend - and I'll caveat this by saying I never did banking myself, just tech buyouts before later joining a name brand VC - is to go to banking. I think you could network with some people at really good banks in San Francisco. I would suggest Qatalyst, GS TMT, MS Menlo, JPM (not sure if it's still their Internet group but their tech group is good), Evercore TMT I hear is good, etc. I think if you get 2-3 years of analyst banking experience, your engineering experience is much more interesting.
You won't get "credit" for it in terms of career progress. You'll be looking for VC Associate roles where they recruit the bankers that come from top banks. That's a very specific type of VC - IVP, Spark Growth, Meritech - but you'll have good looks because to them, you're a guy who has both the deal chops and some operating experience, which is a valuable combo. I suspect you'll also have some decent success at earlier stage places too because of the combination, but you're less in the zip code for those roles than say, a PM at Perplexity who rode the wave and became their head of product while you were in banking.
I've spent some time thinking about those two paths, just academically speaking, for the last month or two, so I might be biased. But I think those could be interesting. A top 15 MBA, literally worthless.
The more I think about this, the more I take back the point about VCs won't care about you being an engineering manager at your unicorn. I think I was thinking of it as like, you came into a company like Rubrik that has already zipped and you weren't there for the scale up phase. I think they actually will so long as you were part of the scale-up phase of the company and didn't just join once the rush to unicorn was over. There's a good chance if it's a sexy tech company you could go directly to VC. I might actually explore that first depending on the quality of the company and your network. A lot of times what VCs are looking for here is that you can analyze a company really thoroughly, product line by product line, how the different teams work together, how each product line goes to market, the quality of people in each team. This is different than how they evaluate hires from other investment firms, where they might want to know what you thought of all the major flagship deals last year and which were good and which were bad.
I do think though that the other thing they would want from someone like you is a network of other future founders you can invest in or who will be otherwise valuable to you as a VC. For example, hiring an engineer from Stripe many years ago is now, with the benefit of hindsight, a no brainer, given the status of Stripe as a talent mafia. Same with PayPal back in the day. So I would also put on that lens.
I would caveat this by saying, one tour of duty as an engineering manager --> VC = associate. Two tours of duty as an engineering manager, assuming your second tour of duty is another equally successful company that vibes for a few years straight --> some sort of level between associate and partner where they want to check you out for a while to make sure you actually have a network and can do deals. So at that point the network part is critical, even if for the one tour of duty --> associate path, you might be given benefit of the doubt as a smart guy who can move to the bay and build a world class network and have relatability enough with founders to bring in deal flow, and then they can teach you how to do deals.
Thank you, this is extremely helpful advice. My goal is to do exactly what you described, analyze early-stage companies by assessing their product lines, core IP, potential for growth, corporate strategy, etc. I have been privileged to lead a team with a product that began as a whiteboard sketch, transitioned to R&D work / design and ultimately was transferred to manufacturing. This technology is now the core IP of the company and will forever be a critical part of the business. I know what it takes to scale and stabilize tech and the resources required to bring in massive, eye-popping customers. I now want to begin leveraging this knowledge from the investment side of things. To be even more specific, I want to get into a group that is hardware focused rather than software. These seem rare to come by.
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