Hi! I’m glad you’re here. You’ve made it to issue #101 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.}

When I broke into VC, nobody asked me to build anything.

The interviews were memos, case studies, mock investment pitches. Technical candidates might get a modeling test. But the bar was largely the same across the board: could you think like an investor?

That bar has shifted.

Every aspiring VC I've spoken to who has gone through the process in the last 3 months has had to build something from scratch as part of their interview.

This is happening because of tools like Claude Code, Codex and AI-powered website and app builders that let anyone create functional products just by prompting.

These tools have gotten good enough, fast enough, that firms now expect every candidate, regardless of technical background, to be able to use them. The bar has shifted from "do you understand how technology works" to "can you actually produce something with it."

Here's what that looks like in practice.

One aspiring VC I spoke with was interviewing for a platform role. They were asked to build a dashboard that could aggregate and display portfolio company information in a useful way. No spec. No tool recommendations. Just: build something that would help a platform team do their job better.

Another aspiring VC was interviewing for a senior associate role and was asked to build a custom AI agent, either a GPT or a Claude Project, that could automate industry research. That means writing the instructions, training the model on relevant materials, and iterating until it actually works consistently. Again, no guidance on where to start.

In both cases, the assignment came with a tight window: 2 to 5 days to deliver.

You are not told which tools to use or how to go about it. You are just expected to figure it out. And increasingly, what you can actually show in an interview matters more than what's on your resume.