Don't Start as an Analyst. What 12,000 Careers of Junior VCs Tell About Making it in VC

Do's and don't's

What does it take to become a partner in VC?

There are over ten thousand mid-to-senior level investment professionals in the U.S., spread across more than 3,000 VC firms. Every year hundreds join them as junior VCs.Year after year, my MBA students ask me: what characteristics make a junior VC more likely to become a partner? Finally, I have some answers.

Blake Jackson and I have assembled the largest and most comprehensive dataset of all the VC investment professionals in the US covering the last 30 years. A critical advantage of our data is that we can observe junior level employees as they enter VC firms. Most previous studies focused, for data availability reasons, only on the most senior people. Our sample includes 12,627 people who joined an institutional VC firm in the US between 1996 and 2025 at the junior or middle-level. (We exclude corporate venture capital firms from this exercise because, even though career progression there is interesting as well, it too often follows a different trajectory.) For all these professionals we painstakingly get demographic, educational, and experience data. This allows us to ask a simple question: can a VC’s background predict their career progression? Are investors with particular backgrounds consistently and differentially likely to become more successful VCs?

Some clarifications first

First, let me define what I mean by “junior,” “middle-level,” and “investment professional. For the latter, we count only full-time employees of VC firms who make investments or participate in the investment decision-making process. We exclude venture partners, because they are not full-time. We exclude non-investment staff, such as CFOs and General Counsels. (There are interesting findings here, but they must await a future article!)

Once they enter our data, we observe most VCs at least once every year until today or until the time they exit the industry. For each year we observe a VC, we classify them by the seniority into three buckets. These buckets reflect the standard three-layer hierarchy: Junior, Middle, and Senior. Typical Junior titles include Analyst, Associate, and Senior Associate. For the middle level these are vice presidents and principals. For senior level these are partners. Most of the time classification works pretty well. Often we need to adjust this classification to take into account firm-specific rules and idiosyncrasies. For example, a16z these days counts almost all of its full-time investment professionals as partners. This does not mean, though, that all the VCs working for a16z are senior partners, because a16z reserves the title “General Partner” for more senior investment professionals. Overall, I think we are doing a pretty good job of classifying seniority.

There are many potential measures of career progression, such as promotion to senior level, attribution for one deal, or attribution for five deals. For this article, I will concentrate on a very specific question: if somebody started at a junior or middle level position, what can predict their ability (or inability) to get into a senior level position. An important caveat: if somebody starts at a junior position in Sequoia and then becomes a partner at Accel, I will count this as a promotion. Lateral moves count. If somebody starts as a middle-level investor in NEA and then leaves and founded their own VC firm (and become thus a partner), I would also count this as a promotion. If somebody starts at a junior level at Benchmark and then leaves and joins as a senior partner at a UK VC firm, I will not count this as a promotion, though it clearly is, because our data currently covers only U.S. VC firms.

For my econometrically inclined readers another important note: I include fixed effects for the year an investment professional first entered the VC industry. This accounts for the time required for promotion and absorbs cohort effects. For example, people observed in the past (including my colleague at the GSB Paul Oyer) that the macroeconomic conditions at the start of the career have non-trivial influence on outcomes.

At what level you enter the VC industry matters a great deal

One of the most powerful predictors of career progression is the seniority at which you enter the industry. Junior entrants are 70 to 80 percentage points less likely to become senior VCs than those who enter at the middle level.Their odds of being credited with at least one investment are 26 percentage points lower as well. These results are not surprising because middle-level VCs can be senior enough to sit on portfolio company boards or source and lead investments themselves. This result is very generic and holds outside the VC industry. Turnover and mobility are higher earlier in careers and those who join an industry later are more likely to be a better match for their industry.

Does it mean you should try not to enter the VC industry as an analyst? That depends on the goal. If your goal is to make it to a senior partner, then my recommendation is to sweat it out in a startup (see below), and then join at a more senior level. But if you are an undergrad and are looking for your first exposure to the world of startups and investments, being an analyst in an actively investing VC fund could be a cool start.

The chart shows the estimated impact of various factors. For each factor the circle is the estimated coefficient and the line shows the 95% confidence intervals. Circles to the right of zero show factors that increase the chance of promotion. If a line crosses the vertical zero axi, the effect is not statistically significant, once you control for all the other factors. I will mention those non statistically significant results as well, but of course this is an important caveat.

Race and gender matter

Demographic factors are the first set of career predictors I will show and discuss. We classify all VCs by their race and gender based on names and biographical text. For race, we use the U.S. Census Bureau classification. Although this variable is not self-reported, evidence suggests the classification quality is high.White VCs are more likely to be promoted compared to other races (Asian, Black). Female VCs are significantly less likely to be promoted. They are also significantly less likely to be identified as active deal-makers. In fact, gender is the only economically significant negative factor among all individual characteristics. While this factor was stronger earlier, it is still significant in recent years.

When I present these gender results, the reaction is often one of understandable frustration. While it is natural to question the data, the gap is consistent enough that we need to focus on the root causes. The most productive path forward, in my opinion, is to try to get into the “why” question: why do women, conditional on becoming junior or middle level VCs, are less likely to become partners? There is no one simple answer. Women may be less likely to get attribution for the deals they have sourced, or they may encounter barriers to securing board seats and accessing ‘hot’ deals in a founder ecosystem that remains heavily male-dominated (less than 10% of unicorn founders are women). Please share your thoughts and suggestions in the comments!

Work/startup experience matters

The second set of variables covers pre-VC work experience. Experience matters a great deal. VCs who previously worked at a VC-backed startup are much more likely to become partners. VCs who worked at failed startups, successful startups, or as rank and file employees or instead as founders/C-suite professionals are all more likely to become a partner. Of course, this is all conditional on breaking into VC in the first place. The results are strong for successful startups as well, since founders or C-suite executives of unicorns often enter as senior partners immediately.

In my experience, startup experience really matters because VCs often back first-time founders or technical founders who may have less business acumen. Experience with failed startups is valuable because you learn what to avoid and how to recognize red flags early. Operational experience at successful startups is helpful, because you learn valuable skills of how to scale quickly and effectively. When MBA students ask whether they should enter VC directly or take an operational role first, I show them this data and recommend seeking a C-suite position at an early-stage VC-backed company.

VCs with work experience at a technology company or management consultancy are also more likely to become a partner. Pharma and investment banking experience may also be valuable, but in our data the results are not significant or only marginally significant.

Education matters

The third set covers education. Let’s start with a surprising result: variation in undergraduate majors plays a relatively small role. For founders, the undergraduate major is a predictor of success (measured by the likelihood of founding a unicorn). For VCs, majors are not significant in a partner promotion, once you control for other factors. However, one major is significant in explaining whether a VC backs at least five successful deals: Business.And it comes with a negative sign. Those with an undergraduate Business major are less likely to be successful investors — but no less likely to become partners.

An undergraduate degree from an Ivy-league school does not increase the chance of becoming a partner (sorry, Harvard), but a similar degree from an Ivy+ school does (yes, Stanford). Those with an MBA or an advanced degree are also much more likely to become partners. However, holding an MBA (much like an undergraduate Business major) lowers your chances of making successful investments, all else being equal. “Other things equal” includes getting Stanford or HBS MBAs that negate the negative effect. This really means that while MBA comes in as a negative factor, top MBAs contribute positively. But overall, we see a clear contradiction (or a puzzle, if you prefer) of MBA being more helpful in career push and less helpful in backing successful deals.

Getting an advanced non-MBA degree (master’s or doctoral degree) helps both in becoming a partner and in making better deals.

So, what do I tell my MBA students now? I tell them to stop obsessing over VC associate roles. The data shows that the “direct path” is actually the hard way. If you really want to be a Partner, go join a rocket ship — or even a sinking ship. In Venture Capital, it turns out that the fastest way to move up is to first move out.