How to pick the right VC firm to work at

A friend of mine once interviewed at a venture firm that no longer exists (funny how that works). Every alarm bell that could possibly go off was going off during the process. Red flags everywhere. Sirens blaring. And yet, he pressed ahead anyway. 

One of the junior team team members invited him out to drinks with two other associates. My friend showed up at the bar, and one associate was already there. The other two hadn't arrived yet.

The first guy looked at him and said, without preamble: "What are you doing? Under no circumstances should you come here."

The associate proceeded to explain that the firm was a dumpster fire, the partners hated each other (like, actually hated each other, not just had "creative differences"), and he was actively looking for a job himself. How dysfunctionally broken does your venture firm need to be for an associate to tell a complete stranger—who would potentially be senior to him—not to take a partner job?

And yet, there are many firms like this out there. You might even be working at one of them right now.

All of this is to say that if you’re going to be a VC, picking the right firm to work at early in your career is one of the most, if not the most, consequential decisions you’ll ever make. Whether you are trying to break into venture or already in and trying to figure out where to go next, here is my advice from 2 decades of hiring and promoting junior VCs.

Why this matters: VC is the big leagues

Despite what people are saying on X, venture capital has some of the smartest, hardest working, most driven people you will ever meet. It's also a game where there's a scoreboard that everybody can see. There's a lot of ego in it. There's a lot of money in it. It is, without a doubt, the big leagues.

You cannot be a tourist in venture capital. This isn't a generalist role at a tech company where you can poke around for a year and move on. When you are in you are in, and from the moment you start you are on that scoreboard, like it or not.

Trying to “dip your toes” in venture is like saying you want to get to the NFL just to see what being a quarterback is like. You know how hard you have to work your entire life to be good enough to be the “emergency” (3rd) quarterback on an NFL team? You can't aspire to be the guy in the shadows when you're in the big leagues. You're either on the field or you're not.

The amount of competition for any slot in the VC game right now is absurdly high. If you're entering venture, there's really only one goal: making it to the top. The top can mean lots of different things, but don't get into this if you're not trying to make this your career. You're fooling yourself otherwise.

The Sydney Sweeney problem

So you've decided you're serious about venture. Now comes the hard part: what should you actually look for in a firm?

Most people approach this completely wrong. It's like when a friend comes to you after a breakup and says,

"You know what? I think I want to go out with Sydney Sweeney."

And you have to be the bearer of bad news. She's kind of hard to get right now. Apparently she’s dating someone else!{{how-to-pick-fn-1}}

The same thing is true of venture funds. There is no shortage of shiny objects around — massive firms with huge brands and rosters of incredible portfolio companies. A lot of people go straight to the "brand" and treat it like their Sydney Sweeney. This is the hot firm right now, so I'm interested. But they don't ask themselves: Do I actually like what this firm does? Do I care about the things they invest in? Do I want the kind of day-to-day I'd have there?

Then there's the flip side. Just because you want her doesn't mean she's going to want you. Venture firms have highly specific and networked ways of hiring, and those highly specific and networked ways of hiring might make it very difficult for you to get in.

If you know what you actually want, you should go after firms that match those criteria. Not firms that look good on a LinkedIn headline.

What to actually look for in a venture fund

Venture firms are partnerships, not companies. They're massively idiosyncratic in a way that companies tend not to be. There's so much more volatility between how rewarding a good fund can be and how brutal a bad fund can be. You do not want to discover you're at a brutal fund two weeks in.

Assuming you've done the self-awareness work and you have multiple offers— here's what matters:

Firm size and structure

People talk about venture irrespective of firm size, which is insane. You would never say, "I'm thinking about joining either Google or a five-person startup. I'm kind of indifferent between them." But people do this with venture all the time.

Andreessen Horowitz has 500 people. FIVE HUNDRED. It is a company. You could be on the American Dynamism team or the crypto team, and you really work for a single GP. Is that a structure you want? Do you work well in big companies and playing politics, or do you work better in smaller teams?

I work much better in smaller teams. A lot of the really big firms have massive hierarchies. If you're not at the very top, your ability to get anything done — getting deals, getting meetings, getting resources, getting heard — is going to be extremely limited.

On the flip side, working at a small fund isn't all roses. You don't have the brand, the resources, or the people. There's more existential uncertainty. Your role will be less structured (which many people don't like). Choose wisely!

Mentorship and investment in your success

One of the most important things to look for is a manager and a firm structure that is really invested in your long-term career success. This might sound like table stakes, but it's surprisingly not.

There are venture firms that just hire gobs of associates every year, and it's 100% sink or swim. They don't care if people succeed or fail. They're trying to thin out the herd and find the “keepers” while getting some useful work out of the rest. 

You need to understand who else has had success with the hiring manager you're talking to. What's their philosophy? Who works for them right now? Find them on LinkedIn. What did they start as? How long did it take to get to the next level?

There are basically two types of associates that partners hire. There's the chief of staff type. This is where the partner has tons of deal flow and just wants you to help prosecute it. Basically they want an LLM to look at their inbox of pitches. That's not necessarily a job that goes anywhere, but it can if the Partner grows to like and trust you. 

The other type is the sourcing associate. You go out and find the best people. That's a straight-up sales job. That's what we do at Amplify (and I certainly am biased, being a partner there), and I think that's what everybody should do.

The content someone creates is pretty consistent with the type of people they're trying to attract. You should be able to figure that out.

Promotion history and criteria

If you've found a firm that seems like a good fit, promotion history will tell you more about how that firm actually works than anything they'll say in an interview. Most venture firms are really squishy on how they evaluate people.

But you can see their hand when you ask how people got promoted. Very quickly you'll pick up on whether this firm promotes based on deals done, deals marked on paper, or actual dollar returns. It's typically one of those three, and it usually goes in rising order of seniority.

Some firms have numerical thresholds. At a firm I used to know well, you couldn't become a certain level of partner unless you'd returned hundreds of millions to the fund (I’m sure that number has gone up a lot over the past decade). But even returning $100 million (realized, net of carry) isn't trivial.

The more junior you are, the less likely they have any real interest in investing in you versus just getting you to do work. You need to know what success looks like in their eyes, because that will tell you what the engine of the firm actually is.

Fund health and momentum

You want to pick a fund that has momentum, that's doing well, that has returns or is positioned to have returns. If a fund's not raising every two to three years consistently, that's a pretty big warning sign.

If you know LPs, ask what's the word on the street. You can also ask other VCs, because VCs love to trash other VCs off the record. (I'm unique in that I trash them on the record.)

Here's a simple test: can you name a company they've invested in during the last five to seven years that seems like a big business? If you go to their website and the companies they're highlighting are all companies you've never heard of, that's a bad sign. Don't mistake website polish for substance, but if they have no companies of note, run.

Choose wisely

Choosing the right venture firm matters enormously. The people who succeed in venture found firms that matched their skills, their working style, and their career goals. They didn't just chase brand names.

There are VCs who started at firms no one's ever heard of and went on to do incredibly well. Every day there are new funds. You can find your way in.

But you have to be intentional about it. You have to do the work. You have to ask the hard questions and be honest with yourself about the answers.

Because venture is the big leagues. And in the big leagues, you're either on the field or you're not.