As Saison Capital is growing our team, recruiting for Associates and interns, there was a single question that we kept returning to:
What is the standard we should expect from each other, and how could we measure our growth over time?
All the answers online seemed vague, and had all the same buzzwords around thinking clearly, having a great network and reputation, etc, which seemed to be fairly high-level. The most important ability to advance in/get a job is to understand what the job entails officially and unofficially, especially given how opaque the Venture Capital industry is.
We thought we could bring some clarity to this question. This document is a generalization of the skills that we at Saison Capital believe VCs should have, and how they benchmark as they advance in their careers. We think this could be used to interview candidates, benchmark OKRs, and understand the standards needed to rise within a VC career.
We hope this is useful for people navigating the venture capital scene. If you have any feedback for improvement, comment below and I would love to incorporate it into this document.
To note: As a generalization, there will be partners who would not fit neatly into the partner benchmarking, or interns who would not fit neatly into the intern benchmarking. That is normal, but the idea is that there should not be a large deviation: I.e. Intern skillset benchmark should be roughly around the same. We do not expect everyone to fully agree with these benchmarks, and there are important deviation of these benchmarks across fund size, fund stage, fund strategy, geographies, etc.
This will be a fairly long article so I advise pressing ctrl+f for the specific skill you are looking to further understand.
A link to download this document as a PPT is at the bottom of this article.
Deal Sourcing
Deal Analysis (Informational Skills)
Deal Process
Deal Analysis (Technical Skills)
Recruitment
Internal Operations
Pre-Sourcing Analysis (Thesis Building)
LP Engagement
Ecosystem Management
Portfolio Support
We hire Interns on a rolling basis and are currently looking for one more amazing full-time Associate to join us. Feel free to drop me an email if you think you would be a fit with us.
Dropbox link to download the PPT here: http://bit.ly/vcbenchmarks
Thanks to Jamie Elliott, Stefan Mader, and Saison Capital interns, Vincent/Hua Bing for thoughts/comments.