Hi! I’m glad you’re here. You’ve made it to issue #98 of VC Demystified🪄.

My name’s Nicole - I’m a Principal at an early stage venture fund, and I know firsthand that VC can often be a black box. Breaking into the industry may feel daunting and resources can seem scarce and inaccessible. I wanted to put together a newsletter to give others the playbook I wish I had when I first started.

^{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.}

Over the past several months, I've been doing 1x1 calls with aspiring VCs all different stages: PhDs pivoting out of academia, operators fresh off their first startup, ex-bankers, Big Tech folks, MBA grads who just finished summer internships at funds. Dozens of conversations.

And after a while, you start noticing the same patterns. Not because these people are doing anything wrong exactly, all of them are smart, motivated, and have done their homework. But there are a few blind spots that show up again and again, and they're the kind of thing nobody tells you because they're uncomfortable to say out loud.

So I'm going to say them.

Almost everyone I talk to leads with their background - where they went to school, where they've worked, what they've done. And that stuff matters. But the question that actually determines whether you're hireable isn't what have you done, it's what can you bring to a firm that they can't easily get somewhere else?

The VCs I know aren't hiring for credentials. They're hiring for access and judgment. Specifically: What network do you have that they don't? What founders will take your call? What industries do you understand from the inside in a way that takes years to develop?

If you can't answer that in one or two sentences, you haven't done the work yet. That answer is your pitch. Everything else is context.

This one is surprisingly common, even among people who have done a lot of research. The assumption is: VC is VC. But the day-to-day reality of a junior role at an early-stage, emerging manager looks almost nothing like a junior role at a Series B institutional fund. An associate at one firm could have an entirely different set of daily responsibilities than an associate at another, even if the titles are identical.

Stage alone changes everything. At early stage, the job is closer to sales and relationship management than finance. You're on the phone constantly. The feedback loops are long. You might not know if you made a good call for 7-10 years. At later stage, it flips: more technical rigor, more modeling, more structured diligence.

But stage is just the start. Whether a firm leads rounds or participates changes how much much exposure you get to the startups you invest in. Team size determines how specialized or generalist your work will be. A small team means you're touching everything from sourcing to platform support; a large firm means you might own one narrow slice. Some firms are thesis-driven and research-heavy; others are relationship-driven and opportunistic. Some source almost entirely through inbound; others run aggressive outbound programs. Some invest in deep tech; others in consumer or fintech or SaaS.

Understanding these dimensions isn't just useful for targeting your search, it's the foundation of a credible pitch. When you walk into a conversation knowing exactly how a firm operates and where you'd plug in, it shows. When you don't, that shows too.

I understand why people do this. You need a job. You're working toward a goal. But the mindset of "I need to get in front of as many VCs as possible" is the exact wrong approach, and experienced investors can feel it immediately.

The people who get hired, especially into roles that were never publicly posted, are almost always people who have already been useful to the firm. They shared a deal that was actually interesting. They offered a perspective on a market the firm was watching. They introduced a founder.

The best networking move you can make isn't reaching out to the partner. It's reaching out to the most junior person at a fund and asking them questions. Then ask for one specific intro, not "can you introduce me to someone," but "is there anyone you think I should be talking to given that I'm focused on B2B AI at the seed stage?"

This one is for the founders and operators in the room. You have real advantages. You've been in the weeds, you've felt the friction of building, you know how to evaluate whether a founding team actually knows what they're doing. That is genuinely valuable.

But in most of the calls I do with operators, they describe their experience in operational terms rather than investment terms. They tell me what they built. They tell me what went wrong. What they rarely do is connect that to investment judgment: because I've been through this, here's what I look for in a founder. Here's the pattern I've seen that makes me skeptical.

If you can make that translation compellingly, the operator path into VC becomes one of the strongest pitches there is.

I get asked a lot: "I want to be in a VC role in 3 months. Is that realistic?" And honestly, it depends, but usually the timeline is doing you more harm than good.

Three months of focused networking isn't enough time to actually add value to anyone. The people who get hired 6 months or a year into a search are the ones who slowed down enough to be useful - to share deal flow over time, to be a reliable source of insight, to be someone a VC has thought about hiring before there was even a role open.

If you're trying to force it, you'll end up applying to public job postings in competition with hundreds of other people at a disadvantage to the person who's been quietly building a relationship with that firm for 8 months.

The common thread across all of these is self-awareness. The aspiring VCs who stand out in my calls aren't necessarily the most pedigreed or the most prepared. They're the ones who have done genuine, uncomfortable work to understand what they actually bring to the table and who are building toward that specifically, rather than performing a version of what they think a VC is supposed to look like.

That work is harder than updating a resume. But it's the work that matters.

See you next week 🪄
Nicole