How to get a job in venture capital

• Venture Capital (VC) firms invest in new and fast-growing start-ups.
• The culture in VC firms is more relaxed and less corporate than traditional private equity jobs. Compensation is also lower compared to private equity.
• VC firms can pay carried interest, but it's not common. Exit opportunities take a long time to achieve, and most start-ups fail.

Technically speaking, venture capital is a subset of private equity: like big private equity (PE) firms, venture capital firms invest in companies that aren't publicly traded on a stock exchange. But working for a VC firm is a wildly different experience to a career in the likes of Blackstone or Carlyle. 

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What is venture capital?

Venture capital firms traditionally invest in early-stage companies, taking a minor ownership stake alongside various other investors. Traditional PE firms, by contrast, tend to invest in more mature companies, and take majority stakes in their portfolio companies. PE firms tend to have more specialisation, at least on a fund-by-fund basis, while VCs are more generalist.

The biggest difference between VCs and PE firms, though, is the level of support they claim to provide for founders. Luke Pappas, partner at New Enterprise Associates, said at the 2026 LSE Alternative Investments Conference (AIC) in February that VC is all about "look[ing] for the secret sauce in the founding team" and having "conviction that this team is going to be the one to change things." That conviction is necessary because "all the companies we're interested in are inherently unprofitable for the first few years." The involvement of VCs isn't always a good thing in the eyes of the founders; Joel Perlman, co-founder of fintech OakNorth Bank, said at a conference in 2024 that founders often "drink the kool aid" and "mess up their company" by following too many demands from their VCs.

Some VCs are much more involved than others. The likes of Y Combinator are classed as start-up incubators; they have a more direct role in the running of start-ups, to the point where they may even match potential founders together.

VCs have a reputation for inflating the valuations of their portfolio companies. Pappas said "many of my hedge fund friends and private equity friends will ping me and tell me that we're not very rational in our pricing." He said that many of the best investments in VC are blink-and-you'll-miss-it, however, and that accepting an inflated valuation is necessary; "if this company ultimately becomes a $10bn company in the long run, it won't matter much."

Fundraising in VC isn't what it used to be, however. A report from accounting infrastructure firm Carta estimated that there was a total of $110bn in start-up investments through its platform last year, down from a high of $220.3bn in 2021. The Wall Street Journal reported in January that fundraising for US VC firms in 2025 was the lowest it had been for six years. Funds have a lot less margin for error, which is putting increased pressure on VC professionals.

What do you do in venture capital?

"VCs are not glamorous," said Antler partner Hannah Leach at the AIC. "It's honestly a lot of admin." You'll be sitting in numerous meetings for your portfolio companies and researching new ones. Leach said "you need to be adept at sending a cold email" if you want to win new business.

Your job is to see through the noise in the start-up world. Pappas said that "every day, I open up my news app and see 15 different products that people say are changing the world." Leach said that VC is all about doing your homework and "go[ing] into conversations well-informed regardless of asset class."  

Cherry Ventures principal Nadja Reischel said that you have to look for "founders who are super obsessed with the product," as that obsession will carry them through the next ten years of working in their start-up. You'll also need to gauge their learning speed and commercial instinct; "you want people who are talking to not 20 but 2,000 potential customers," Reischel said.

All of this typically translates to long hours. Leach said that "work-life balance doesn't quite exist in VC... you need to want to get up at 7am and work through to midnight." Reischel said that "venture is pretty much 24/7" and suggested that she hasn't taken a Sunday off since she joined her firm.

There are many more stories of failure in VC than success. Using the UK fintech scene as an example, market intelligence platform Tracxn said there have been 18,000 fintech start-ups created in the UK to date, of which just 30 have become unicorns (start-ups valued at $1bn+) and almost 6,000 have become defunct. The goal of VC is to cast a wide net and invest across a range of start-ups expecting those few unicorns to make up for the losses made on the failures.

What skills and experience are VC firms looking for?

To succeed in VC, you need to be a people person, but there's more to it than that.

Pappas said that you're a good fit for VC if your "brain likes to context switch a lot of times," as you'll be working across a wide range of products and teams. Leach said you also "need to be good at psychology." 

Shayan Roy Chowdhury, MD of VC education platform, the Newton Venture Program, told members of our community, The Bubble, that the most important skills are "critical thinking, ability to think big, relationship building, time management, and clarity of communication." An investor at one UK-focused VC firm said in The Bubble that there is much less reliance on "'traditional’ valuation methodologies" in VC compared to private equity but you'll need to be a good judge of character as you're "taking a position on the people involved to be able to deliver."

The investor said that there are three broad types of profile VCs hire for 'operating principal' roles, the people that get involved in the day to day running of portfolio companies. They hire subject-matter experts for specific sectors who have their "finger on the pulse and are often at the forefront of emerging trends." They also hire "proven operators," who have worked in start-ups and have experience scaling them. These are often ex-founders, chief operating officers (COOs) or chief revenue officers (CROs). The other profile of operating principal is a "functional specialist" in an area like hiring, go-to-market (GTM) or AI who can assist that function across multiple portfolio companies at once. Hires can be one, or multiple, of these archetypes.

As with their founders, VC firms also want their employees to be passionate. Pappas said that, if you're not, "there's going to be 1,000 people who are genuinely interested and they will outperform you." Leach said that demonstrating your passion is particularly hard as a graduate, but suggested building a "shadow portfolio of companies you think will do very well" to stand out.

Having a financial background isn't always necessary. Speaking at the AIC in 2024, LocalGlobe partner Mish Mashkautsan said "template paths" like banking or consulting are "uninspiring" as routes into VC. Instead, he said "the best thing you can do is take a bet on yourself." Chowdhury said in The Bubble that many people join VCs after working in a start-up in a role like a founder's associate or chief of staff, while the UK investor said that VC is "somewhat more accepting of non-traditional profiles, especially at earlier stages." One ex-banker in VC previously told us that big name brands are much more important for getting a VC job in Europe than they are in America. 

What jobs are available in VC?

Unlike PE, most venture capital firms do not have robust intern or graduate recruitment programs. There are exceptions, like Bessemer Ventures' analyst program, but you'll likely have to monitor the recruiting pages of the firms you're interested in. 

There aren't that many VC jobs available, even at the top firms. Andreessen Horowitz, for example, is one of the largest firms but only has 16 current openings. Y Combinator, another major VC, has just six openings. Sequoia Capital has no current openings. Roles in VC are extremely oversubscribed, so you'll need to rely on connections where possible. If you're a right fit for the people-centric world of VC, that shouldn't be hard.

How is AI changing venture capital?

AI is having a profound impact on VC firms by virtue of the fact that almost every start-up today is now an AI firm in some way shape or form. The technology has provided some huge opportunities, like the chance to invest in burgeoning AI labs, but this often comes with chaos.

The biggest AI firms have grown at an unprecedented rate; Anthropic, for example, was valued at $4.1bn in 2023, but has since grown its valuation to almost one trillion dollars. The growth of AI technologies has also made it easier than ever to build a start-up, meaning that there are many more companies for VCs to invest in, and a lot more work to decide which are worth the money.

One of the biggest spanners in the works for VCs today is the growth of 'reverse acqui-hires,' in which companies pay huge amounts of money to sign the most important people from a growing start-up without buying the company itself. Roxanne Varza, director of start-up campus Station F, said at the Sifted Summit last year that many founders "aren't even thinking of an exit strategy," and are treating their start-up as an audition so that they'll be picked up by one of the AI giants. If they get hired, the VCs that invested in them could be left with a worthless company if they don't manage the crisis effectively.

While some of the biggest companies are planning IPOs to give their investors liquidity, it's much more common to operate in the secondaries market, in which stakes in companies are sold from one private investor to another. Delta-v Capital partner Garrett Marsilio told the Journal there are "trillions of dollars trapped inside private technology companies,” and that there will be an "explosion" of activity in the secondaries market as people try to cash out (or in). 

All of this means that the pressure on VC investors to see through the noise and invest in viable, healthy companies is more important than ever. They're increasingly using AI on a daily basis to do that. A survey from private capital CRM firm Affinity found that 85% of dealmakers use AI to automate daily tasks in 2026, up from 76% last year. It's primarily used to assist in research tasks for companies given the ability of large language models (LLMs) to process complex documents quickly. 28% of respondents said they also used AI to make investment decisions, up from 13% in 2025.

How much do VC jobs pay?

A 2026 salary survey from Venture5 found that analysts in VC earn $80k on average. You'll earn $130k-150k as an associate, ~$200k as a mid-level professional, then over $300k on average if you can make partner.

A key appeal of working in PE (and thus VC) is the opportunity to earn carried interest, which is a percentage of the profits should a portfolio company have a large enough exit. Only 24% of VC analysts reported that they earned carry, however.

As a partner, pay depends on how large your fund is. The survey found that partners at VC funds with more than $500m in assets under management (AUM) earned $585k in total compensation. When AUM was $250-500m, average compensation was $402k.

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