Venturing in Public 3/26/25 — VC is a sales job
Venture capital sounds like a glamorous gig. Being a VC is:
💡 Intellectually stimulating – You get to spend your days with interesting people talking about cool technologies.
😎 Personally gratifying – Lots of people want to meet you.
🆓 Highly empowering – There’s a high degree of freedom and you get to choose who you want to fund.
But you only get to do those things if you don’t mind selling.
A lot.
👋 You sell LPs: VCs get their money from LPs – endowments, fund of funds, high net worth individuals. Just like startup founders, venture capitalists need to go out fundraising every 2-3 years.
📣 You sell founders: There are thousands of venture capital firms. You need to find a way into their minds. This is why so many people whose job seems to be capital allocation also have a sideline in podcasting or newsletter writing. And once you’ve got their attention, you need to win them over with terms and high-touch sales work.
🫰 You sell other VCs: VCs need to pitch their startups to peers and later stage investors.
To be clear, this isn’t as hard as building a startup, but the hustle never stops. You need to manage a CRM. A high degree of extroversion is required to meet up with dozens of people over the course of a week. Deals need to be negotiated at all hours. It’s a fun life, but it’s not nearly as glamorous as it seems.
All that said, if this sounds good to you, we do have an open investor role in our Harvard Square office!
