Yet Another (ex-)VC Blog

(Thanks to Mark Davis who forwarded this one to the Blue Venture Community List)

Venture Capital Analyst at Bessemer Venture Partners

Location: Greater New York City Area10010 (Greater New York City Area)

URL: http://www.bvp.com

LinkedIn Exclusive — this job is available only on LinkedIn

Job Description

BVP is seeking an investment analyst to join the firm for a two year analyst program. The analyst role is ideal for someone who is self-motivated, competitive, passionate about technology, and excited about the opportunity to speak with hundreds of entrepreneurs. The position is located in the firm’s Larchmont, New York office, which is 35 minutes by train from Manhattan.

Analysts gain first-hand experience with the full breadth of venture capital activities and work on the cutting edge of business, technology, and innovation. BVP takes a “roadmap-driven” approach to investing by developing investment theses in sectors that are ripe for innovation and proactively reaching out to companies within these areas. Analysts serve a critical role in working closely with Partners and Associates to map out investment roadmaps, predict emerging trends, and identify exciting investment opportunities.

Analysts’ primary responsibility is to interact with hundreds of entrepreneurs each year in an effort to originate new investments for the firm. Analysts are given the opportunity to work in a wide variety of sectors— including consumer Internet, online retail, mobile, enterprise software, financial services, healthcare IT/services, cleantech, and emerging areas of technology. Analysts also work closely with the firm’s senior professionals to develop investment roadmaps and conduct due diligence processes associated with these opportunities.

The Analyst position provides a unique opportunity to experience the role of a venture capital professional, speak with hundreds of executives at high-growth technology businesses, and gain exposure to all aspects of the venture capital investment process.

Skills

Job Requirements

- BA/BS from Ivy League or equivalent institution.

- Outstanding academic record with significant campus leadership experience/extracurricular achievements.

- Intellectual curiosity and passion for technology/entrepreneurship.

- Basic understanding of business and accounting, but extensive study in these areas is not required.

- Comfort proactively contacting and speaking directly with CEOs of companies.

- One to two years of prior work experience at a leading investment bank, consulting firm or technology business is preferred. Outstanding graduating Seniors from the class of 2010 will also be considered.

- Two year commitment in the New York office. Select analysts who demonstrate exceptional performance will have an opportunity to stay for a third year.

Company Description

Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP) is the oldest venture capital firm in the United States, carrying on a tradition of active venture investing that has continued since 1911. With offices in Silicon Valley, Boston, New York, Israel, and India, the firm manages one of the largest venture funds in the industry. Over the past 30 years, BVP has taken more than 100 companies public and generated top-decile venture returns.

BVP was an early investor in dozens of companies that have fundamentally changed industries, including Skype, Postini, LinkedIn, Yelp, Diapers.com, VeriSign, BladeLogic, HotJobs, Gerson Lehrman Group, LifeLock, Gartner, International Paper, Maxim, Parametric, Staples, Veritas, Parallels, Sports Authority, and W.R. Grace. BVP invests across investment stages and across all areas of high technology—including Internet, software, digital media, cleantech, biopharma, healthcare IT, and financial services.

Job ID: 844169

It has been a little over 6 months since I took the plunge and left L Capital Partners to join VMTurbo.  It has been a great move so far and a huge learning experience.  Unfortunately, this move hasn’t been helpful in maintaining a regular blogging schedule (See “Prioritize relentlessly” section below) so this post has been a long time coming.

I hope some of these personal experiences and observations are helpful to some of my VC friends who have always toyed with taking the plunge, as well as people who may be thinking about careers in VC or in VC backed startups.

And if you’ve played on both sides of the ball, or have thought it about it, chime in with your thoughts.

1) Prioritize relelentlessly. If I was 23, unmarried, with no kids, I could devote 80 hours a week to work.  In fact, that sounds like many weeks at my first startup.  However, I’m now 32, married, and have two kids. :)  Therefore I need to make every working hour as productive as possible-it is just not an option to work on the wrong things.   Fortunately, startups are about results and not “ass time,” so I can be creative with how and where I achieve them.  Another good reason to set 3 goals per day and per week, and devote yourself to crushing them, instead of having 10 TODOs and doing a mediocre job on all of them.  (Better get this blog post done and get back to work…)

2) Beware of spinning your wheels on way-too-early business development. So far I have not heard (or witnessed) any good reasons to put much effort into seeking partnerships right off the bat.  In the software biz, business development is all about taking your product and combining it with the products of other companies to develop a Whole Product.  When you are still doing Customer Discovery and Customer Validation (see Blank and 4 Steps to the Epiphany), you’re still trying to figure that stuff out and aren’t going to have much of an idea of where you can plugin with other companies to make that Whole Product.  An exception to this caveat would be opportunities to use APIs as business development, which in an ever more cloudy world would allow you to create a Whole Product without having to cut any deals.    However, for most behind-the-firewall enterprise software stuff, an APIs as BD strategy isn’t going to make much sense.  (BTW I have heard from friends doing mobile startups that BD is critical in the early stages…so your mileage may vary with this particular tip.)

3) Learn to love “The Ask“. In a startup, you’re constantly asking prospects to take the next step, asking for introductions, asking for feedback, asking for money, asking for references.  You’re constantly asking, when often it is not immediately clear to the receiver of “The Ask” what the benefit will be.  Nothing at a startup happens unless you make it happen-and making stuff happen usually requires an “ask”.  So get comfortable with it!

4) Business development skills and personal network are highly transferable between VC and startup...  Warm intros and getting people to take my calls/emails was a big part of my job as a VC, and its a big part of my job at VMTurbo.  If you’re looking for an escape hatch, moving from VC to business development at a startup is a pretty logical move, and one where your industry network will have the most impact.

5) …and those due diligence tools come in handy, too. Startups play in a world of imperfect information and compressed timeframes, as do their investors.  Being able to get a quick handle on markets, competition, and processes is very important when you’re trying to quickly determine the best route to market, or to pivot and investigate new processes or markets when the first set doesn’t pan out.

6)  Fail.  It’s OK-really. Given the uncertainty within and around early stage startups, there is a better than 50% likelihood that any decision you make on any given day will be wrong.  I’ve never been wrong so many times in such a short period of time :) Just means you need to fail faster.  Get your minimally viable product to the market as fast as possible, hear the feedback, iterate, lather, rinse, repeat.  This really hits home once you actually try it, because you find that erring on the side of releasing something what seems like “too early” is actually the best way to get feedback.  Customers engage most deeply when they can see and touch.  Slide decks and landing pages are nice and can certainly help gauge demand for a solution to a problem, but there ain’t nothin like the real thing.

If you fold at the first un-returned email what hope do you have as an entrepreneur? As an entrepreneur, people aren’t going to respond to you and it’s your responsibility to politely and assertively stay on people’s radar screen. You no longer work for Google, Oracle, Salesforce.com or McKinsey where everybody calls you back. You had no idea how important that brand name was until you left it behind. Your customers don’t care that you went to Standford, Harvard or MIT. It’s just you now. And frankly if you went to a state college in Florida you’re at no disadvantage in the tenacity column. Persistence will pay off.

via 10 skills I look for before writing a check – Venture Hacks.

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.

SEOmoz was also helped in this deal by an important factor I think every startup should consider – WE DIDN’T NEED THE MONEY. We were already profitable and growing, already had a brand name in the industry and had attracted interest from multiple investors. I think that every entrepreneur who’s considering startup-dom should think about establishing those goals before they go for institutional capital – a profitable, growing company with a product that’s on the market and a brand name that’s well known makes you:

* A) Lower risk to investors

* B) Interesting to multiple parties and multiple kinds of investors (angels, VCs, private equity, etc.)

* C) More confident in every step of the process

* D) Able to walk away from a deal you don’t like

This psychology is so powerful that I can’t imagine doing it any other way. If I wanted to build a travel portal to take on Kayak.com, I’d start a great travel site (maybe even just a really interesting blog), build up some brand recognition, use advertising or low-cost premium features to drive revenue and only after those numbers made for a compelling story, approach investors. I’d use that same formula even for a capital intensive business – start with cool ideas, great writing and valuable resources, become a hub for your industry, show web traffic and positive interest, then go fundraise.

via SEOmoz | My Startup Experience: VC, Entrepreneurship, Self-Analysis & The Road Ahead.

Having seen this come up a couple of times over the last couple of weeks, I felt it was worth blogging it.

Don’t give the product sales pitch when you’re pitching an early stage investor.

An investor presentation, although technically a sales presentation (you want the investor to buy equity in your company), should not be a product sales presentation.

Yes, we want to understand the product you have built or are building, but if it’s 100% about the product (or even 70% about the product), it’s hard to tell the story that will convince the VC that this is an exciting team and market opportunity, with the right product at the right time.  Getting bogged down in features and functions is going to take the investor’s eye off the vision and into the weeds.

There’s plenty of time to get into the weeds once you have the investor’s interest, but not in a first meeting.

Related articles by Zemanta

• How to Pitch a VC (aka Startup Viagra: How to Give a VC a Hard-On) (rafer.tumblr.com)
• The Two Keys to a successful Venture Capital pitch (startups.typepad.com)

Here’s the first stab at the forward for the VC careers eBook.  I’m going to build the content around this, so please let me know if there are topics that you think I missed or that you want to make sure are included in the chapters I’ve outlined here.  Comments are very welcomed and appreciated.

Forward

It’s no surprise that it’s not easy to get a venture capital job when you consider some of the factors at play:

• There are very few VC jobs to begin with
• People tend to stay in a VC job for a long time
• Venture capital is not a growth industry; The number of people employed in the field does not typically increase annually (in fact, it may start decreasing going forward)
• VCs only hire through trusted referrals
• VCs are generally well compensated
• VCs work with entrepreneurs who are trying to change the world, or at least the industries in which they operate (which is no small feat, either!)
• Bottom line: VC is a great industry and the jobs are great, too

The combination of scarcity and quality of the jobs makes for a big labor supply/demand imbalance that works mightily against the venture capital job seeker.

• Acknowledgements and thank you’s (A shoutout to everyone that I can remember who helped me or met with me during my search)
• What’s the job of a junior VC? (A discussion of the day-to-day work of an analyst or associate)
• Onramps to venture capital (Discussion of the feeder jobs and industries to the venture capital industry)
• Do you need an MBA?
• What makes a good VC? (Discussion of skils that can help you be successful in this industry)
• Where are the jobs? (Finding/creating venture capital job opportunities)
• Where are the internships? (Finding/creating internship opportunities as an undergrad or grad student)
• Introductions and followups (The lifeblood of a VC job hunt)
• The Informational Interview (Once you get it, how to get the most out of it)
• Offer negotiations (If you’re fortunate enough to have offers to join multiple firms)
• Exit options (If you’re not a VC lifer, some thoughts on careers that might make sense post-VC)
• Final advice
• Online information sources (Sites and blogs that I found useful during my job hunt)

Related articles by Zemanta

• Venture Capital Careers Panel at Columbia Business School (johngannonblog.com)

If you visit the blog fairly regularly, you may notice that I removed the M&A Funding Pipe feed in the right column and replaced it with the @vcdeals twitter feed.

@vcdeals tweets any financing or M&A announcements that get posted to a variety of blogs and then provides a bit.ly link where you can get the full article.

If you are a twitter user and follow the venture-backed startup market, follow @vcdeals and let me know what you think.

Special thanks to the Twitterfeed folks who made it really easy for me to get this going.

Better late than never, but L Capital is looking for a summer intern to assist us over the next couple of months with some portfolio corporate development projects.

This would be a great fit for a 1st year MBA who is still looking for a summer internship, or an i-banker who has some time on their hands before starting b-school in the fall.

Click this link, and if you meet the desired qualifications,  follow the directions if you’d like to apply.

Thanks, and I hope to hear from you soon!

(This post is one in a series of posts and third-party resources related to careers in venture capital.)

As a junior staffer at a VC firm, I think its important to understand where and how you can be helpful to portfolio companies.  The advice I received from my venture capital teachers Stuart Ellman and Will Porteous of RRE Ventures (blog) has stuck with me, and I’ve tried to operate using that advice since starting my VC career.

I’m paraphrasing here (it’s been about a year since the class where we discussed it) but in essence, the advice was to simply be helpful and humble.

Here are some examples of ways that a junior VC can add value:

• Business development: Introducing the company to potential customers and partners in their network.
• Fundraising: Introducing the company to other VCs during the fundraising process and helping the company develop their investor pitch materials.
• Recruiting:  Portfolio company is looking for a couple of engineers?  Get the job description, post it on some boards that might be relevant and forward it out to your LinkedIn network.  Maybe make some phone calls to folks in your personal network to see if anyone would be interested in the roles.
• Strategy: If you have an interest in corporate strategy and/or a background in strategy consulting, and the company is looking to explore new markets or the competitive landscape, see if you can lend some of your experience by helping crunch numbers, helping to put together the board presentation, etc.
• Listening and learning: Learn as much as you can about the company and the industry in which it operates.  Attend board meetings and listen!  VC is an apprenticeship business, so in many cases, the best approach is to sit down, shut up, and open your ears!

Company management, the VC partners who have invested in the company, and the founders will be adding the most value and steering the ship.  As a junior staffer at a VC firm, your job is to be ready to help out wherever they identify a need they’d like you to address OR to identify a need and then socialize it with your boss(es) at the firm to see if its something they’d like you to pursue.

You definitely don’t want to go off half-cocked, ginning up initiatives and projects without making sure that they are viewed as value-add by the partners and company management.

If there are any other junior VCs out there (I know some of you are lurking!), it would be great to hear some of your thoughts on what works and what doesn’t related to working with portfolio companies.