Tech Capital Partners Blog

People often ask me about how to become a venture capitalist and how I *decided* I wanted to be a VC. I must admit, a career in venture capital was not at the top of my list as I tried to figure out what I wanted to do right out of school. Venture capital wasn’t one of the careers that was showcased on “career day” and I don’t remember my high school guidance counsellor recommending venture capital as a career choice.

Not sure this is the ideal time to be writing this post as markets are crashing all around me but nevertheless, here I am, several years out of school and seven years into my career as a VC reflecting on how I got here…

Looking around at my peers, there seem to be a couple of traditional paths people follow to become a VC. Some people get an undergraduate degree in engineering/finance and then an MBA, join an investment bank or venture capital firm at the Analyst/Associate level and then work their way up through the organization over time. Others are successful entrepreneurs who have built a number of companies before joining a venture capital firm at the Partner level. A while back, Seth Levine wrote a couple of blog posts: How to become a Venture Capitalist and How to get a job in venture capital (and the comments are just as informative as the original posts).

My journey started with passion for marketing and technology. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been interested in bringing technology products to market and building technology companies. I remember thinking in university as my peers were clamouring for marketing jobs in the consumer products industry “who would want to sell butter?” Luckily, one of my first jobs out of school was working for a technology focused marketing consulting firm and following that, working at PixStream, a technology company focused on distributing and managing digital video across broadband networks. My first exposure to venture capital was at PixStream in 1999/2000 and the experience (through the bubble) was a wild ride. Following PixStream’s acquisition by Cisco in 2000, Tim and Andrew at Tech Capital invited me to join the firm as a marketing operations resource for the firm’s portfolio companies which I did for a few years before focusing more on the transactional side of the business.

Learning about what it means to be a VC is certainly easier today than it was a few years back. Information that used to be shared through apprentice-based learning is now more accessible as VCs all over the world are sharing best practices and adding transparency to the industry. There are also courses you can take through the Venture Capital Institute (high level overview of a number of aspects of venture capital) and Harvard offers an Executive Education program Private Equity and Venture Capital (focused more on private equity but some venture capital content). I’ve heard good things about the Kauffman Fellows Program although I haven’t experienced it myself.

Venture capital is a difficult industry to break into, and from time to time the job is not very fun but working everyday with brilliant and creative people who are building exciting technology companies somehow makes it all worthwhile.

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