> But for some reason this money cant be directed into infrastructure we need to deal with climate change?
I work in this area (climate repair) and eventually came to the realization that the work must proceed despite the opposition of the US. I just tune out when colleagues and peers talk about discussions and coordination with various US government agencies and programs. I’ve seen enough Lucy-and-the-football episodes. The most that will ever happen on that front is lip service.
The most valuable strategies may or may not be the most profitable. VC is about return on investment. This feels like square peg and round hole.
It is going to take a lot of failure. Government turns failure into finger-pointing. VC is comfortable with failure but only understands profit. We have a structural gap.
5 emails a week is only 260 a year. That's fewer companies than a single YC intake. I don't think it'd be hard to write a LinkedIn profile that matches positions at most startups (a few popular languages, interests in trendy tech, open to remote or in a popular location, senior skillset with lower years experience maybe indicating good-but-cheap). That would get you lots of recruitment attention. It doesn't mean anything is odd in the startup market (but obviously it doesn't mean everything is fine either, it just isn't a strong signal either way).
260 a year is a lot since a single there is a huge pool of candidates, and you really just need 1 of them to fill a position. in my experience, the pendulum has swung towards the candidates having leverage and ghosting. 2008 and even 2013 did not seem so.
It seems to be ruled by the mighty dollar, yet is like a force of crazy strength in its ability to naturally select out the strongest.
Sometimes that strength is existing connections and money, though there are those rare times where a truly novel idea breaks free, a truly beautiful design, or something truly good is made.
Is that worth the evil it does?
I don’t know, let the capitalists and socialists fight it out.
An important question to everyone, I'm a developer with no experience in finance. I've written something which now exists as a prototype or POC so it's further along than just an idea. Recently I got an offer from someone to fund it to market by about $500,000. I think this amount of $$ makes them really an angel not a VC but I don't know.
They want to know what percentage of ownership I would give up for this level of funding. I have no idea what is fair. Could the people here tell me what they think a reasonable percentage trade of the company would be typical. Also any other advice. I will give some ground on this because if I don't get this funding it will make it very hard to get it to market. And they say 100% of nothing is nothing.
(I don't want to talk the specifics of what it does but there is nothing like it on the market and I have done the market research. The only competition around does it badly.)
I can't say anything about what is usual (or "fair", for whatever definition of that). But if you want to be in a good position for negitiations, it's better to make them say what percentage _they_ expect in return, and start from there. Asking you first is just a common negotiation tactic to get more than would be usual (especially if you're inexperienced with these things).
You kind of have to plan things differently: assume that there will be 3 or 4 rounds of investment before the company grows to an appreciable firm - Seed, A, and B, there is some equity, say 10-15% for early employees, etc.
Then you will conclude that giving away more than 20% at each stage will dilute you into nothingness
Ofcourse the nature of the project, etc. matter a lot
I think the standard is to evaluate in terms of valuation? So if you give up 10% for $500,000 you are setting a valuation of $5M, so 1% for $500,000 -> $50M valuation, etc.
Is any decent VC going to even consider a candidate that doesn't fall into:
1. Somebody they already know or is vetted by a trusted source
2. Somebody with a pretty specific background for entry level jobs (ivy league/mckinsey/banking) or an incredibly specific background for higher up jobs (successful founder or investor)?
Can't speak for every VC fund but one of the best ones in Australia, Blackbird, does all their initial screening anonymously with no CV. So yes, it's possible at least at some funds!
As someone offered VC money by a discrete but high profile US investor who flew to the UK to meet their potential protege's, there is a lot of behind the scenes background checking and vetting going on.
You wont know you are being checked out either, lots of stock market listed companies do this to potential customers as a matter of course.
When you get wise to it, you can actually be unsettled by the techniques used because private investigators would use similar techniques, but when you are investing alot of money, these people like to know where their money is going, this isnt a confetti throwing party!
There is so much PR management in place to keep things discrete and quiet.
I would be BEYOND shocked if any decent VC is hiring off cold applications even for basic entry-level positions. In fact, it's almost definitely a bad sign because it means that despite the VC's job being connected to capital, connected to startup people, entrepreneurs, etc -- in other words, their job is to have a huge and valuable network -- and despite these being high paying, prestigious jobs with wealth-creation potential - they have to put up a post soliciting random people to work for them?
Heck even in hedge fund circles there seems to be a meme around how cushy VC jobs are, but how it's very hard to transition into them. (Correct me if I'm wrong, this is my impression from IG hedge fund meme pages).
The role of VC job postings are (1) give a superficial appearance that it's an open process, which is importantly especially for diversity virtue signalling and (2) serve as a public notification to warm connections that there is a job opening up. But trying to get a job at a VC by blind applying will have a low % success rate.
>A job at a start up funded by venture capitalists
No, that's not what this thread's "Show HN" is about.
It is showing job openings at the VC firms themselves. E.g. a16z, Sequoia, etc. The typical job candidates would be interested in a career in finance with tasks that include investments due diligence, corporate research, market analysis, etc.
It is _not_ showing jobs at VC-funded startups. E.g. Snowflake cloud startup backed by VC Sequoia. Those typical job candidates would include software programmers, engineers, etc.
LOL. Just ten years ago you had to have founded a billion dollar company or be a particularly well connected Harvard or Stanford MBA to even have a chance of working in VC. The sector has grown too big.
Decades of low interest rates resulting in wealthy people looking at new places to put their money to make more money, coupled with the phenomenal results that early stage tech investing has seen in the past 20 years, with a bit of "new money" from people who have lucked out in tech and crypto.
I do not want to cynical or questioning anyone's ability, but how on earth does anyone with a degree in `earth and oceanographic science` land a high level position at a VC company that funds tech ventures with magnitudes of million of dollars. Crazy.
In a perfect world where jobs were assigned based on performance they could have gotten the job by being a very good associate, who did good research and showed a track record of good judgment in picking companies or founders that later went on to some level of success. The entire VC model relies on generalists in any case. Earth and oceanographic sciences should cover the basics or physics, biology and chemistry and plenty of VCs don't even know that. It would hardly be relevant to e.g. Stripe.
I suggest you restrict the use of quotation marks to actual quotations. It is less likely to deceive.
If your mental models (not excel models) are better than other people's you have an advantage in making money because you undersatnd the world better. Not everything is all sales. sales is really important but it's not everything.
Perfect background to fund startups like liquid robotics - much of startup investment is art, groupthink, luck and casino. Traditional financial background is of limited use in early stage startups
I would find it extremely odd if every tech VCs did't hire at least one extremely seasoned engineer with experience building soup-to-nuts infrastructures and products, particularly for successful startups that scaled successfully. It's not that I think VCs should be building shit like that, but before each round of funding they should be able to figure out if the startup is doing things in a scalable way. And part of being a VC is helping their investments grow.
As an engineer, I used to think the same. From vicarious experience, I’ve learned that software execution is far down the list of reasons startups don’t work. The wrong market, the wrong approach to the market, or the wrong team approaching the market are all far more likely and harder to change. By comparison, a tech stack that won’t scale is much easier to fix on the fly.
Source: I lead engineering at a VC firm. We’re hiring data scientists and software engineers! https://drivecapital.com/join for more, email in profile.
There is a plethora of valuable companies that did not do things in scalable way and only later sorted that out. Even a popular essay around here called "Do things that don't scale"
If you an engineer at a VC, their jobs would be due dilligence to check how much of a startup is smoke and mirrors. Much of it is, so you want to know if it's 50% or 90%
Checking that their product is being built with Kafka or whatever is worthless - you cam throw money at that problem later and fix it.
I lead engineering at a VC firm, and while we do sometimes help in diligence, it’s a tiny portion of our time, <1%.
Your second paragraph is spot on, and I hinted at a similar idea in a sibling to your comment. Especially at series A and later, customers are an existence proof for the product not being vaporware.
So when we are involved in diligence, it’s usually near the end, and we’re getting to know the engineering leaders to see if we can help them speedrun a few iterations by sharing best practices or introducing them to other leaders in the portfolio who have been there and done that recently.
What if they're series F and are burning €1m per month on infrastructure because it's badly designed, and haven't yet turned a profit? Maybe VCs really do have billions to slosh around... Didn't a start-up go under recently for that very reason?
We typically invest at earlier stages, so I can't say firsthand what diligence looks like at series F. If you mean Fast, Gergely Orosz had a good writeup at https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-scoop-fast. Sounds like that was more attributable to hiring ahead of revenue than infrastructure spend.
London is a bit of a disgrace with only 3 jobs, is this website complete, although looking at European cities, Europe looks a bit of a disgrace seeing that Australia is not far behind with opportunities and there is a lot of money in the US.
Thank you for showing this! My employer is actively hiring investors, and I’ll share this with the person heading that search.
Relevant to the HN crowd, we’re also hiring data scientists and software engineers. It’s rare for a VC firm to have its own engineering team building a product, which is part of what makes it so fun. Do you think these technical jobs would be relevant to your board’s audience?
We've built a platform that helps us run the firm and includes tools for our investors and portfolio companies. At a high level, there are proactive features we want to improve or build and plenty of analysis to help inform our decisions. There's a bit more detail at https://drivecapital.notion.site/Data-Scientist-e05614596225....
Cool. I might be using this. I think I would like to be an analyst. I looked into a corporate strategy role at my current company on a team that looks at M&A. Unfortunately only 25% was actual analyst work and the rest was project/stakeholder management. Apparently they use those roles to groom executives...
Is there any kind of part time work at VC firms? Something where one could meet a few people and contribute by maybe technical due diligence, or technical hiring advice, or something where having had some experience running small firms matters?
I’ve done some hourly consulting for VCs as a subject matter expert in an industry they are interested in. “Tech” won’t really cut it though - they already know very well how SaaS works.
Thanks! Which ones? The remote ones should either be office + remote or remote only (typically in a geography). If you can point out the ones you think are wrong, I can go ahead and update them if needed :)
Anecdatum: These days I’m getting 5+ emails a week asking if I’m interested in joining XYZ early stage startup.