VC Firm Uni Prestige

Looking into going for a VC for next summer (Between Soph and Jr year). School is a non/semi-target for IB, but not a huge presence higher up in VC, at least outside of my schools geographic region. I'm looking at VC's in the San Fran/NYC area and seeing a pretty heavy concentration of guys from top Ivy's running funds. I guess my question is how do VC firms factor in school prestige compared to, say, IB?

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School prestige is a huge factor for VCs, even more so than for investment banks. I saw a study somewhere showing that Harvard and Stanford alone made up a huge proportion of VC's degrees. Out of ~15 partners at my firm, all but 2 of them have an MBA from HBS or Stanford GSB. Of the associates, only 1 is from a non Ivy or Ivy equivalent (e.g. Stanford, MIT).

 

Because VCs don't have the recruiting infrastructure that a bulge bracket bank or consulting firm has, since they don't hire hundreds of new grads per year. Some have 1 associate every couple of years. Even the largest growth equity shops hire 10 per year. And there are a ton of qualified applicants. When you're hiring so few people and incoming demand is really high, the filters are really strict. It doesn't make operational sense to look outside of the usual suspects to hire junior guys.

 
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