On being a great VC intern

By popular demand, we’ve put together a quick guide on how to ace your summer venture capital internship.

For those of you fortunate enough to be progressed in your career - feel free to share this with your own interns, your younger siblings, and your mentees.

While this guide is focused on early career professionals in venture capital, we hope that that many of these tips are universal and will be useful in other roles as well.

You can be 7 minutes late to your university class - after all, with a thousand people in the lecture hall, chances are, the professor won’t even notice.

However, a good VC can’t be 7 minutes late to a founder pitch. Being late to work creates an impression that you’re not reliable and risks cutting you out of meetings (like LP calls!) that do start on time.

Arriving early each day will also make sure you start the day off right, and make you look prepared and well put together. Nothing worse than showing up sweaty and swearing as your Zoom decides that _now_ is the time to run an update!

Always keep a notebook and pen on you - on top of your desk as you’re working, next to your laptop as you’re on a call, in your bag as you’re at lunch.

It’s much faster to jot down a note on paper - a to-do item, a question you want to ask later, notes from a call - than it is to find the right document on your computer and wait for it to load.

Having a notebook (and using it!) removes the “oops I forgot about that!” error that is sure to annoy your manager.

It’s normal and expected that you won’t know where everything is, and how to do all the tasks you’re assigned.

However, when you come with questions, be prepared. Use full sentences and proper nouns. Be specific.

“I can’t find it” is not a helpful thing to say.

“I am having issues locating Carrot Co in our Investment Pipeline database. I’ve tried searching by both the founder name and the company name already” makes it easy to help you and shows you’ve already tried to solve the issue on your own.

If you’ve finished a task - tell your manager!

Chances are, there are other tasks to do (including possibly, more fun stretch assignments) and taking more work of your boss’s plate always makes you look good!

Keep a list of what you’re working on, and every time you get assigned a new task, remind your team of your existing tasks and ask where this one ranks in priority.

Chances are, your lead won’t have YOUR to-do list on top of THEIR mind.

Making sure you’re aligned on priorities with your team lead also makes sure you’re not set up with impossible deadlines.

Also consider asking how long each task is expected to take as you get given it, and then tracking how long it takes you. If you’re 2 hours into a task that was supposed to take 20 minutes, it’s highly likely something has gone wrong, and it’s time to raise that with your team!

I’ll let you in on a secret - your boss doesn’t like these either!

However, doing a regular check-in on your progress makes the final internship review less awkward (and eliminates any surprises about your likelihood of getting a return offer!).

Doing a quick weekly check in on expectations and performance means you can improve as the internship progresses, and also gives you an opportunity to give low-stress feedback to your manager on how they can support you better, too.

Often termed as “attention to detail”.

Being wrong on one entry in a 100 line database doesn’t make you 1% wrong - it means that your boss now can’t trust all 100 rows. Focus on what you’re doing, and make sure it’s done properly.

Work while you work

Play while you play.

All that you do, do with your might

Things done by halves, are never done right

If you’re fortunate enough to be invited to sit in on pitches or LP meetings - take notes! Earn your keep by taking good, detailed, factual notes. When, post the call, you can offer to add these notes to the funds’ CRM, you make yourself more likely to be invited to the next founder or LP call.

Venture capitalists can skew a little jaded or introverted. Please bring the mirth back to our offices! We bring interns onto our teams because we want to be surrounded by energy and vitality - please do not average down to our basement gremlin default.

What else would you add? We’d love to keep this list dynamic!