Hi! I’m glad you’re here. You’ve made it to issue #100 of VC Demystified🪄.

^{My personal mission is to open as many doors as possible for other people and this newsletter is just one avenue to do that. As always, I will continue to post VC insights daily for free across my socials. This newsletter may contain paid partnerships or affiliate links.}

I landed my first full-time VC role before the job was ever posted. Here's exactly how.

The job boards, the LinkedIn applications, the cold outreach to recruiters, that's not where VC roles are won. By the time a role is public, it's already half-filled (sadly).

The best time to get in front of a VC firm isn't when they're hiring. It's 3-6 months before they announce it.

The insight is simple, but easy to miss if you’re not aware of how hiring works in venture.

VC firms don't hire on a whim. Their headcount decisions are almost entirely driven by one thing: management fees. More management fees come when additional capital is raised.

Learn more about how VCs make money to run their ops and hire here.

There are 2 moments in a fund's life that almost always trigger new hires:

Year 3 of a current fund. Most VC funds have an investment horizon of 3 to 4 years (the time it takes to deploy the initial capital into startups, excluding follow-ons). By year 3 of that funds lifecycle, they likely will have started raising their next fund already and will have a new line of site to additional management fees. That’s when they’ll think about team expansion.

When a firm is actively raising. Some funds don’t start raising until they finished their exisiting fund deployment so these firms would think about hiring when they are actively raising their new fund.

The playbook: find firms in either of those two windows and reach out before the role is ever written.

PitchBook surfaces fund-level data including vintage year (the year the first investment check was written from that fund) and fund size.

In PitchBook, search by investor type (VC) and filter by Fund Vintage Year. Target funds with a vintage 2 to 3 years ago. Those firms are in or entering the hiring window.

When a VC firm raises a new fund, they're required to file a Form D with the SEC. It's public. It's searchable. And it tells you the fund name, amount being raised, and the exact date the offering began, often weeks before any press release or LinkedIn announcement.

How to use it: Go to SEC EDGAR's full-text search. Click “+ more search options.” Enter "venture capital" in the Document word or phrase field, type "FORM D" under Filing types, and hit search. You'll get thousands of results showing every VC fund that has filed to raise money.

How to read the results:

You've reached the end of the free portion of this issue.
How to intepret the search results, the VC fund tracker template, no-code scraper walkthrough, and other signals worth watching are for paid subscribers only.