Everyone wants to break into venture capital. Few know how. Here are the eleven real routes in – and the two types you never want to be; inspired by the latest discussions at IMD’s Venture Asset Management Program this weekend.
What tips would you give me?
“Chris, I want to find a job in venture capital after my MBA is done. Can you give me any tips?”. The e-mail I got Monday morning perked my interest. It was not the first, nor likely to be the last.
Across programs and classrooms, we have already worked with well over 2.200 people, teaching venture capital, running venture capital masterclasses and GP accelerators. But flying back from Geneva, having just wrapped up another Venture Asset Management Program at IMD, consisting of senior executives, long-time investors, a broad range of investment professionals and a strong line up of MBA students, I caught myself reflecting. “How would I best help?”, “Which tips would I give to the 27-year old successfully exited founder with an impressive resume to date, now aiming to break into venture capital?”.
Well, here’s my thinking.
In my view, there are eleven primary routes, or entry points candidates can take to break into venture capital. I am sure there are many more, that I have not caught yet. But based on my experience, here are the top tips, here are the best ways.
Eleven ways to break into venture capital
“I’ve successfully built to exit – now I want to do it again, with a whole portfolio”
1. The operator
Congrats. You have built and scaled a startup. You’ve lived the founder’s journey. You have closed an exit and hopefully delivered great returns to your own, previous investors. Now, you can find your path into the world of venture capital by claiming hard-won experience, experience that can help the next generation of founders and their investors to win. You can come in as a mid-level or senior person with the fund. Part-time? You are a perfect venture partner. For many, this is the perfect path into VC.
“I’ll bring my unique deals – memos in hand, ready to close”
2. The deal-maker
Anyone can “make an introduction”. But to break into venture through the deal-maker path, you need to go above and beyond. At a minimum, research the VC fund, their thesis, stage, ticket size. Ideally, you build relationships with the founders, develop a full VC investment memo, complete the DD process and bring a deal that is actually, truly, ready to close.
“I’ll bring the money”
3. The capital attractor
Every fund, everywhere, is raising. Or about to raise. Or quietly worried about its next raise. Capital is the oxygen of the business, and most GPs spend more time worrying about LPs than they’ll ever admit. So, if you can bring capital – real capital, committed LP capital – you become very interesting, very fast. Family offices, institutional LPs, sovereign funds, fund-of-funds, high-net-worth networks. If you have those relationships and you can convert them into commitments, you don’t apply for a job. You negotiate one. Just be honest with yourself: a warm contact is not a commitment. “I know some LPs” is not the same as “I can close €10M.” Bring the latter, and watch the doors open.
“Check out my incredible angel portfolio”
4. The angel investor
You’ve been investing your own money. Ten, twenty, fifty checks. You’ve felt the thrill of the markup and the quiet sting of the write-off. That matters. It means you’ve actually done the job, with your own money on the line.
A strong, well-documented angel portfolio is one of the most credible CVs in venture. It shows judgment, access and conviction. But “incredible” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Show the data. Entry points, ownership, follow-ons, markups, realized exits, DPI.
A handful of logos on a slide is not a track record. A clean portfolio with real returns is. Get that right, and you walk in not as a hopeful, but as a proven investor ready to step into VC role.
“I can bring 100 angels to the deal”
5. The angel network manager
One angel is nice. A hundred angels, organized, is leverage. If you run an angel network, a syndicate, or a community of investors who’ll follow your lead into a deal, you control something every fund quietly craves: co-investment capital and deal velocity.
You can fill an allocation in a weekend. You can de-risk a round. You can turn a “maybe” into a “closed.” For a fund, that’s a strategic asset, not a nice-to-have. Bring an organized network that actually deploys – not just a mailing list that opens your emails – and you’re bringing distribution. And distribution is power.
“Founders love me, trust me, can’t scale without me”
6. The accelerator manager, the coach
You sit at the top of the funnel. You see hundreds of founders before anyone else does, and the good ones trust you. That’s genuine deal flow, and it’s early.
Run a strong accelerator or coaching practice and you have two things a fund wants: proprietary access to the best founders before they’re “hot,” and a real read on who actually executes versus who just pitches well. That second one is gold. Funds pay dearly for pattern recognition on founder quality, and you’ve built it the hard way, in the room, over time. The trap? Confusing access with investing. Knowing great founders is the start. Turning that into sourced, structured, ready-to-close deals is the job. Do the second part, and your accelerator network becomes the best top-of-funnel a fund could ask for.
“I’ll get you the DPI you need”
7. Head of exits
Here’s a secret hiding in plain sight: most funds are great at buying and terrible at selling. They’ll spend months on a deal memo and then hold a position for eight years with no real exit plan. DPI – cash actually returned to LPs – is the only number that ultimately matters. Paper markups feel wonderful, right up until the fund needs to return capital and can’t. If you understand secondaries, M&A processes, strategic buyers, continuation vehicles, IPO windows and how to engineer liquidity, you are solving the hardest problem in the business.
Walk in as the person who knows how to get money out, not just in, and you’re not asking for a job. You’re offering the one skill the whole industry is short on.
“Let me take care of the boring stuff”
8. Fund Manager (back office)
Not everyone wants to be the rainmaker on stage. Good. Because behind every fund that runs well is someone making the unglamorous machinery actually work. Fund administration, LP reporting, compliance, capital calls, valuations, audit, fund structuring, regulatory filings. It sounds boring. It is boring. It is also absolutely essential, and surprisingly hard to do well. A fund with weak operations leaks trust with every late report and every messy capital call. If you’re the person who can run a tight back office – clean books, on-time reporting, LPs who never have to chase you – you free the investment team to invest. That makes you valuable, hirable, and far more central than the word “back office” suggests.
“I am one of the top ten experts in this field, globally”
9.Domain expert
Deep tech, life sciences, climate, defense, semiconductors, space, AI infrastructure. As funds chase harder, more technical bets, generalist instincts run out fast. Someone has to actually understand whether the science works. If you’re one of the genuine experts in a field – the kind of person founders in that space already know and respect – you bring something money can’t easily buy: the ability to tell a real breakthrough from a beautifully packaged dead end. That’s diligence the fund cannot fake, and credibility that helps win the best deals in your domain. The catch: domain mastery is the ticket in, not the whole job. Pair your expertise with a willingness to learn the investing craft – structuring, ownership, portfolio construction, exits – and you become the rare specialist who can also actually pick and build winners.
“I prefer working in corporate environments”
10. The corporate venture investor
Maybe the lean, scrappy, raise-your-own-fund life isn’t for you. Maybe you like the resources, the platform and the strategic muscle of a large company. There’s a serious, well-paid path here: corporate venture capital. CVC has exploded. Half the large companies on earth now run a venture arm, hunting for strategic bets, new growth engines and a window into the future. As a corporate venture investor you invest the balance sheet, not blind-pool LP capital, and you sit at the intersection of two worlds – the startup and the mothership. It’s a different game. Your “returns” are part financial, part strategic, and your hardest job is often translating between fast-moving founders and a slow-moving parent. But if you can do that – bring real investing discipline into a corporate environment – you become genuinely rare, and genuinely in demand.
“screw it, just do it”
11. Set up your own fund
Why break into someone else’s fund when you can build your own? It’s the boldest route, and increasingly, the most common. Don’t wait for a partner title someone else controls. Raise a small first fund, a rolling fund, a syndicate, a €5–20M micro-fund, and start building a track record that is unambiguously yours. The barriers have never been lower; the bar for actually succeeding has never been higher. Be clear-eyed about what you’re signing up for. You are now founder and CEO of a financial company. You’ll raise capital (brutally hard for fund one), build a thesis, source and pick deals, manage a portfolio, report to LPs and somehow return cash – all at once, often before you’ve paid yourself a salary. But pull it off, even at small scale, and no one can ever ask you again how to break into venture. You’re in. You built the door.
Two types to avoid
“I’m just trying to learn”
Don’t be the eternal student.
It’s great people are learning, studying, building skills in venture capital; but if you do a full year’s study without making any investments yourself (angel, or VC), you are simply not learning what you could and should. Get out there. Make deals. Invest your own money to feel what it is really like. Learning is good. Eternal studies? Maybe not.
“I like working with founders”
The lifestyle wanna-be VC. Dang!
I meet this one way too often. “I like speaking with founders” or “I enjoy coaching founders”, or any variant of that. That’s great, wonderful, but that should not be a primer for you becoming a VC. Being a VC is far, far more than ‘supporting founders’, you are custodian of LP capital, you need to successfully raise capital (it is hard), you need to say no to 100’s and 100’s of deals, you need to develop outcome analysis, exit strategies, maybe fire founders and navigate rough term sheets days before running out of cash. Ultimately, you have one job, to sell the company, sell your equity and return buckets of cash to your LPs. “Like working with founders?”, that’s great, just don’t think for a second that’s the job.
Boil it down
If you boil it down, the vast majority of VCs need three things.
1. Capital VCs need LPs.
Simple. How many can you bring? Bring enough, you’ll be hired in no time.
2. Deals – but only the top 5%, primed, memoed and ready to close
Few VCs have a deal flow challenge. They mostly have a bandwidth challenge. Don’t “send intros to founders”. Do send fully written deal memos, preferably of better quality than the VCs would do themselves (see above, bandwidth challenge). These memos, should be ready to close, thanks to your work and structuring. Bring 3-5 great deals, watch them close and expect to land a job pretty quickly too.
3. Exit, liquidity, cash
What every VC will love you for? Deliver successful exits in their portfolio. If you got what it takes, find pathways to liquidity and help generate DPI. Do this once, you’ll get a coffee.
Do it repeatedly, you can name your own terms and timeline to full partner.
These three things will determine how quickly and effortlessly you can land a job in venture capital.
Good luck!