Stefano Bernardi

How hard is it to get into Venture Capital?

I am simply amazed at how hard it is to get into the american venture capital industry if you’re a young graduate.

Reading this passage written by Mark Suster (you may know him from his awesome blog) really stunned me. I’m posting it just to give you an idea.

We recently hired an associated. I got > 700 resumes and I didn’t even post that widely. 65 of them were of unreal quality in terms of education and job experience. Undergrad: Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, Princeton, Yale & MBA: Harvard, Stanford, Wharton. Many had near perfect SATs and GMATs. Many worked for Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, McKinsey or had worked in P/E or VC before. It was UNREAL. Not that you need these qualifications to be successful. But when you’re staring at 700 resumes (and we VCs don’t have an HR department!) you need some way of filtering quickly. In my process I also gave high street cred to CS undergrads - particularly from MIT or equivalent and for premier tech experience: Google, well-known startups or even one great candidate from Microsoft’s Xbox group. From the 65 we did 16 1-hour in-person interviews. We short-listed 6 and did full day interviews including a presentation from the candidate analyzing a market. They were given less than 1 week to prepare. We finalized 3 that we took to dinner to check social fit. We chose 1.

Here is the original post by Chris Dixon.