While an Ivy League MBA will open doors in private equity and investment banking, in venture capital, experience in a particular industry that relates to the venture capital firm’s area of focus may be even more valuable.
Your venture capital job resume should emphasize your relevant experience and successful track record, if possible, with early stage businesses. Business failures can be included as well, if you point out the valuable learning experiences gleaned from them.
For financial experience, you might emphasize any experience in creating financial models for transactions such as LBOs, mergers and acquisitions, IPOs and venture investments.
For specific venture experience, you might talk about whether you have experience with due diligence and deal structuring for investments or acquisitions within the venture capital space or corporate M&A.
Perhaps you can demonstrate your entrepreneurial experience by describing business plans you’ve developed for start-up companies, or proposals for early stage financing of a small business. You may not have started a business yourself but you should at least show a passion or deep interest in the entrepreneurial world or perhaps the tech community. Having started any successful organization, even a club at your school or volunteer organization, adds strength to your commitment to the venture space.
In other areas of your resume, you might want to emphasize operational experience, whether you’ve run a small business, worked in operations, supervised a team of employees or been a manager. As you may know, very often the associate level and VP level executives within a venture capital firm take a major role in the operations of portfolio companies, sometimes serving on their board of directors or overseeing operations.
You’ll need to show great communications skills. Mention presentations you’ve done and to whom. You might even be a little offbeat in this area, describing acting training or performances.
Finally, if you have sales experience of any kind, it might be worth elaborating on this. As famed venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki once noted, a strong sales background can be even more valuable than an MBA. That’s because aside from funding, start-ups need sales to bring revenue in the door and get to the next stage of development.
Remember, your goal with your resume is to grab their attention in the first 10 to 20 seconds, get them to read further and perhaps put you on that coveted list of candidates who snag an interview.
References:
Ross School of Business, University of Michigan
http://www.zli.bus.umich.edu/
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