📶 10 Things We've Learned About VC Talent

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Over the past three years, we’ve thought a lot about talent.

We’ve built a community of talented individuals (1,780 and counting), we run a job board, and we’ve started a recruiting service built to help venture capital funds build better investment teams.

We think that access to talent is a true competitive advantage, and we haven’t met many folks that think about venture capital talent more than us.

Throughout this process, we’ve learned some things.

1. VC hiring sucks.

2. Investing in talent is underutilized.

3. The funds that do invest in talent, win.

Here’s what else we’ve seen.

Talent is a zero-sum game.

Most of (early-stage) venture is a positive-sum game. Talent is not.

If Candidate A goes to work for Company B then they can't go work for Company C.

Pattern recognition ≠ talent evaluation.

VCs have convinced themselves that their ability to identify good companies has given them a sense of what "good" looks like in other areas. Most investors we know have fundamental flaws when it comes to identifying and retaining high quality talent.

The talent pool for most VC recruiters are ex-investment bankers / consulting people.

Don’t get me wrong. These people are talented in their own right, but the work done in these roles does not translate over to VC.

If you’re working with a recruiter, the first question you should ask is what their talent collection looks like.

(If you work in VC, you can join our talent collective, and we’ll start referring you over to firms that are hiring.)

Nearly every venture fund lists “talent” as one of their value-add pillars, but talent is an afterthought for the majority of these funds.

Almost every VC we know over-indexes on the value of their personal rolodex. When it comes to hire internally or help portfolio companies hire, the vast majority cannot deliver.

Checklists work as a way to connect all the main models for decision-making, but few use checklists to evaluate candidates.

Public investors love frameworks, mental models, checklists, and processes for evaluating different stocks.

Venture investors feel almost allergic to them when it comes time to hire.

The reason there are very few venture capital recruiters is because it is illogical to recruit for most venture capital funds.

VCs are notoriously cheap, they hate placement fees, they are overconfident in their ability to attract talent, and the work required to match firms with candidates often does not justify the pay.

If you’re looking for a list of recruiters, we’ve got you covered.

Venture and growth investing are totally different skill sets.

Your evaluation process should differ based on the stages you invest.

More emphasis on analytical skills, financial modeling, and telling the story with data at the growth stage; more emphasis on founder psychology, market sizing, and narrative evaluation in venture.

Venture is labeled as an apprenticeship business, but it’s not that.

Investing in patterns is easier than investing in scattered data points.

VCs like when somebody else does the filtering for them.

If you come from a prestigious school (namely two that have more representation than others in this industry), FAANG work experience, or prior venture experience, your path to investing is 100x easier than somebody with none of those credentials.

Platform teams outperform primarily because talent has become a massive component of the VC platform function.

As venture capital funds evolve, the role of platform plays a bigger piece. Many of the top-performing funds are hiring 1 investor for every 2 platform people because the majority of the work-to-be-done requires a platform person.

Speaking of VC talent …

If you’ve been a reader of this newsletter, you’ve seen this ad before. Hopefully it all makes more sense now.

Hiring VCs is no fun. Actually, it’s a nightmare.

We run the investor hiring process from start-to-finish, and we help funds find, vet, and hire from the top community of venture talent.

Get in touch with us if you’re ready to take your fund hiring seriously.