Hi! I’m glad you’re here. You’ve made it to issue #106 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 had a 1:1 call last week with an MBA student from Japan attending a top U.S. business school. He'd done his homework, read the playbooks, understood the standard advice. About 10 minutes in he stopped me and said something I've heard in different versions from a lot of international candidates over the past year:

So I was. Here's where I started.

Venture capital shares a lot of DNA with early-stage startups. Small teams, lean operations, not a lot of HR infrastructure. And just like an early-stage startup often can't support the legal and financial overhead of sponsoring an international visa, many VC firms can't either. This isn't about willingness. It's about structural readiness.

Emerging managers, which I'd define as funds on their third fund or earlier, are especially unlikely to have this capability in place. They're still building out back-office operations, their LP relationships are newer, and the legal infrastructure to navigate sponsorship may not exist yet. A lot of aspiring VCs spend months doing outreach at exactly these firms and wonder why nothing converts. For international candidates, this is a structural issue, not a networking one.

What this means: you need to build your target list differently. And once you know what to look for, that list isn't small. It's just more intentional.

The type of investor behind a fund predicts how equipped that firm is to hire you. Funds backed by institutional LPs (university endowments, pension funds, sovereign wealth funds) have had to build real operational infrastructure to manage those relationships. Legal teams, HR processes, compliance functions. That's the infrastructure that makes visa sponsorship possible.

Fund size is a useful signal. Funds managing $100M or more are more likely to have institutional LPs and the infrastructure that comes with them. But fund size alone isn't the filter. A large fund can still be backed primarily by family offices and high net worth individuals, which means less structure than the number suggests. The LP type matters more than the headline fund size.

You can find LP information for funds through PitchBook, public press releases, GP interviews, etc.. It takes some digging but it's the right starting point before you invest time building relationships at firms that structurally can't hire you.

That's filter one. There are three more filters I walked him through, and one of them is the one most international candidates completely overlook. It's also the one that, when you find the right match, makes you a stronger candidate than anyone domestic they could hire.

Let’s get into it!