thinker481

has anybody broken into this field? what kind of background do these firms look for?

harvardman1988

a successful businessman once told me, you need to have money to make money. venture capitalists are just ppl with no creativity trying to scam college kids ideas??

please educate me on this subject area.

thinker481

i dont know that much about the whole situation, but i do know that large firms seem to have groups that participate in the VC area. check out this site, they go through the top ones. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv...10_111302.html

thesailor

70% of venture capital on earth is located on Sandhill Road by Stanford in Silicon Valley. So if you want to get in this business, stay away from new york and come to Cali first.

each venture firm only have about 5-20 partners who are usually mega-wealthy themselves. take kleiner for example. They don't take on newbie or kids straight out of college.

futurenyustudent

I don't know about you, but Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt (founder of Google), etc etc etc all had little or no money. They're all billionaires now.

thesailor

Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt (founder of Google), etc etc etc all had little or no money. They're all billionaires now.


They are not VCs, the VCs invest in those people. And by the way, Eric Schmidt is not founder of Google that is supposed to be Larry & Sergay. Eric is just some random dude they hired when they got bored working.

dcfca

VC is extremely hard to break into right out of college. For clarification, some places do offer analyst positions to those who enter right out of college, but these end up being **** positions where you just cold call and go to conferences trying to source deals.

Usually you will fall into two types of categories to get a VC shop.

1. You were an engineer / science type at some innovative company, preferably a start up, and you're going to join a VC firm to lend your expertise to them. Maybe you've got an MBA (but still that prior science/tech background)

2. You were an investment banker and you're going to use your finance skills for evaluating potential companies to give VC funding to.

note, #2 is the weaker of the two types of potential VC employees.

Take a look at most major online/tech companies. They were VC funded.

Sequoia Capital is probably #1 in terms of picking winners. Apple, Google, Atari, and so on were funded by Sequoia.

thinker481

so they basically do very extensive research on companies and fund them?

thesailor

no they don't do that much research.

I've been to kleiner myself they basically have 100 or so people lined up per day outside their office asking for VC funding and they listen to their ideas. If you are able to persuade 'em your business plan is profitable then 1/70 times they might invest something in you.

Or you are such a hot shot that they will actually come wait outside your office (or dorm), this happend for Facebookf or example.

Basically this is not a "job" for young graduates. I've never seen any VC parner under 40. (of course there is the back office staff and office **** but they are not VC partners).

mattistotle

my friend just got an internship at one, i think its called greenhill or something? They are actually teaching him to be an analyst and paying $15, $20 after a month if hes any good. You definitely will need to know IRR, EBITDA, discount rates, and other financial concepts such as that going into interviews though. He got it by just giving out his resume to every finance place he could find.

thesailor

Greenhill is an investment bank not VC

VC is more about tech entrepreneurship than finance, that's why most VCs are in sand hill road, silicon valley as opposed to wall street new york.

while investment bankers are self proclaimed "masters of universe", VCs are usually low key people, though it can't be argued that they make even more money.

thinker481

how do the vcs get their money and how much money can these people make if all they do is listen to peoples ideas? or is it more than that? like they have done a lot of the "back office" type of stuff and now they can be wit the clients making deals and raking it in? is it just how to allocate funds or give capital?

BostonEng

its a numbers game. they might find 100 promising tech ideas and a couple make it big.

yet they will give funding to all 100 hoping that the "big winners" will more than cover the losses.


the workers at the VC are usually people that have been successful at a start-up or the like, and would thus be qualified to really understand when an idea is feasible and a possible winner.


the reason they make $$ is because they are very good at identifying the "next big idea"...a lucrative talent.

if this is your dream, major in ECE and head to the bay area and try to find others with a start-up mindset and give it a go

mattistotle

well alot of places don't make money, its a very asymmetric market, so the big guys get to see all the good ideas first/ can recruit the better people/ have more skilled people so the big people make ALOT and the smaller people usually have to go through years of negative IRR, something that doesn't really happe in financial markets. But the fact is, most VC's don't really make money

TooRichForAid

Male dominant, typical have MBAs from top schools. Either that or marry to one of the Google guy, Sergey Brin's new wife is a VC with an undergraduate degree in biology from Yale. It could be biotech not just engineering.