Yet Another (ex-)VC Blog

Interesting VC associate role in NYC for someone with ‘big data’ experience and an MBA.  Brief snippet below and more details here.

I am currently spending a lot of time evaluating companies targeting “big-data,” predictive analytics, anomaly detection, machine learning, high-performance computing, data visualization and related fields, and am seeking an Associate to be involved in all stages of the early-stage venture investment process.The successful candidate will be a key member of a small team of highly successful investors and entrepreneurs. This individual will be a highly analytical, innovative and driven self-starter with deep technical experience combined with business judgment.

So true…the original post by @cdixon is also great…

msuster wrote:

Chris, I’m so glad you wrote this. Everybody asks the question and now I’ll just send them the link ;-)

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.

My point is … the numbers are so daunting that anything “standard” won’t work unless you already walk on water. The people who “sneaked into” the process were a) great networkers b) great networkers and c) had other people contact me on their behalf (great networkers). But if you don’t have GREAT street cred already don’t hassle the VCs. Just accept that it isn’t likely you’ll get in without doing great things at a start-up first.

Link to comment: http://www.cdixon.org/?p=732#comment-16630352

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I wish LinkedIn would allow me to forward an email to an alias (like Salesforce, Basecamp, Tripit, and various other services that allow records to be added via email) and then automatically send a connection request to the person who was in the From: line from the original email.  Seems like it would be a good thing for LinkedIn as well, because it would remove the friction of users having to think to visit the LinkedIn website to manually request that someone connect with them.