A lot of people have been telling me they really want to get a job in VC. But like most jobs, unless you actually do it, it’s hard to actually get a handle of what do you do all day and therefore really whether you should. By popular demand from a number of people wanting this, I thought I would try and provide a flavour of a typical day. Note this is an actual day last week versus an amalgamation of 5 hypothetical days, however I did pick a more newsworthy day in the spirit of writing something interesting.

your job overall

As a whole, this day probably reflects an “average” workday Monday-Thursday at a VC firm. Some people work more, some people work less based on what they have on (I was recently in Silicon Valley where some firms have a no more, no less than 60 hour work week i.e less than 60 hours means you aren’t getting enough done and more is a law of diminishing returns). In the end, a lot of tech industry people are very outcome driven, so people work alot, but 12 hours seems fairly common if you have no prior commitments.

I’ve not actually seen someone in my team miss something really important (birthday /anniversary /performance etc) as generally the industry applies both flexible working hours and locations so if you want to start at 2pm and work till 3am, you normally can – as long as you can manage expectations from people that want things from you. I note that while it sounds long, at least some of that time is things you might be doing anyway for fun like attending talks, or catching up with people in industry for a drink etc.

So of a potential 12 hour day a breakdown could be:

• 2 hours of research / industry knowledge / networking
• 3 hours on helping grow existing investments
• 3 hours on diligence for new investments
• 2 hours interacting with the team / sharing views or formal feedback both ways on matters which you are not the lead on
• 1 hour of admin / other
• 1 hour of lunch/coffee/break/gym etc.

Things you may not expect about breaking into VC as a junior

• You work alone most of the time within your team. If you look at the average day below around 60% of the time you are in a one on one meeting / call or you are doing research by yourself
• Conversely, you are always meeting inspiring people every day from all parts of the tech spectrum and you spend at least half your day not at your desk
• Unless you are very junior you generally aren’t told what to do every day. Every day is different and while you might get asked to lead or support particular projects or investments you get a lot of time and leeway to network, pursue your own deals and bottom out your own research even in the first 12 months
• You won’t be on Excel most of the day (especially since your current job you may be on excel most of the day). Models are part of IC papers, but you won’t spent 6 weeks on the model. In fact you may be on excel <25% of your day unless you are a very junior analyst with no tech background. You’ll probably have to forget all the finance metrics you learned if you come from a banking or consulting background and relearn SaaS metrics like CAC or LTV
• Because the investments you make in venture can be quite small e.g hundreds of thousands you will very early on in your career be meeting founders directly. In fact you may be person that takes the first 3 meetings solo and advocates on their behalf to the rest of the team
• You spend a disproportionate amount of time researching and reading material. If you hate reading or listening to things this may not be the industry for you
• You get to have a disproportionate amount of fun. If you don’t genuinely get a kick out of trying out new tech, building things or listening to tech stuff in your spare time, you probably won’t have a lot of fun though
• There aren’t any slides or drone deliveries. There are free t-shirts and ping-pong
• There’s only free beer on Fridays and pizza is sporadic

An Actual Day Last week – what you might be doing

830am: Mornings are generally about news and checking latest developments. This involves checking the major Australian newspapers (or at least the AFR), TechCrunch, TechMeme, Hackernoon, various email newsletters and Twitter. I don’t really Tweet a lot but a lot of my best material / links to medium / blogs come from Twitter and I encourage everyone to get an account and start following people they like – there is some great free content out there. During this I also generally listen to a few podcasts – again a great way to jam information into a short amount of time. My life hack is to listen to all podcasts on 1.5x or 2x speed – it makes you have to really concentrate on the podcast. If we find anything relevant we will shoot them over to portfolio companies for them to reflect on / and or ask if they have a view as to how it might affect a particular industry.

930am: We have nearly 30 companies in the portfolio and a lot of the interactions are cross-border. The first one to two hours of the day are generally based reflecting on, providing feedback and strategy to portfolio companies or colleagues based offshore. This is typically providing feedback on a specific issues (tech plan, hiring, business plan, financial model etc) or reviewing any emails from offshore e.g setting up calls / liaising with the appropriate person in the organisation. Morning is a good time to talk to anyone based in LA, NY or SF which you may do at least once a week.

11am: Morning meeting with a company pitching a Seed round. This is a new investment that just came in and I’m attend this meeting one on one with the CEO. I’ve not had to prepare industry research because we already have companies in this space and I’ve heard of this particular one. I note that generally we will have prior to the meeting, read every news article about the company, their company website, their blog website and looked at all the Linkedin employees who list the company so a part to note for potential startups is what is the online presence of you / your company. Equally if you google your own name what comes up (does any VC or tech related content come up if you want to break in to investing?) Initial meetings one on one are just about getting to know the founder and their product, so it is largely a casual meeting where the outcome is that the founder will send a full deck and we will arrange a meeting with the broader team.

12pm: Lunchtime. Sushi train. A catch up with a friend works in the industry and he shoots through a couple of companies I may want to look at and vice versa (which is somewhat where at least 50% of deals originate, someone that you know has a connection to a company who is in growth mode). I come up with an app to change the speed and direction of the sushi train on demand by paying a onetime cost. I feel like that would have strong demand, at least from me.

1pm: There’s a lot of “in between” time in VC. So instead of having 3 hours to do one long task you may have 3 x 1 hour slots in between meetings where you have to try and do 3 tasks. I know I have a meeting at 2pm so I spend the next hour trying to review the subscription documents for a potential investment and get it out so that the team can keep working. I send out my issues list to the company and pass some more notes to the team looking at the investment.

2pm: meeting with portfolio company about to start a capital raise. We go through the investor deck page by page and the investor list and we suggest and debate the relative merits of potential parties. I’ve recommended to the company that their timeline needs to increase by at least a month. We also go through their metrics table and give them views as to what other metrics need to be reporting and any concerns we would have as an investor.

330pm: Phone call to follow up on a potential investment. We’ve had a few meetings with them, so this is ticking off items on our diligence list. We look at the product demo with a representative of one of our portfolio companies who works in the space and get them to offer some thoughts. Startups should assume that if the VC has an investment in the space and they like your company they will ask (subject to confidentiality and how closely overlapping it is) for a trusted person in that company to take a look whether just the materials or actually turning up to the meeting or call. We have a debrief and send notes around to the deal team.

5pm: Emails, emails, emails. It’s not uncommon for you to be out of the office most of the day, so people are emailing through the entire day trying to get you. I try to look at decks quickly and first and get feedback to founders as soon as possible if it’s totally not in our sweetspot, or suggest anyone that I know that they should contact. There are a number of ASX announcements that concern our later stage investments today and we circulate them noting the impact on the company and potential valuation.

6pm: Friend’s birthday, so a great chance to eat tacos and catch up with old friends I haven’t seen in a while. A lot of tech investing is networking and meeting new people so if typically one person from our team is at one event every night. There is no hard and fast rule, and you definitely don’t have to go to any every week, but most people I know go to 1-2 per week even if it’s purely out of interest (this is probably part of your 12 hours but i don’t classify this as work because generally everyone in VC loves going to hear about new things or meeting other like minded people)

9pm: Back at home, finish emails, finalise and send out final paper for approval for investment committee for one of the deals we have in train. Read a pretty long analyst report on AI and Automation, and forward some specific queries to a portfolio company about what are they doing on specific issues raised in the report. Write out list of things to do for tomorrow and check that I’m prepared for my morning call and finalise my list of questions

12am: Done for the day. I’ve been watching the Discovery Channel in the background and the Alaskan Bush People have completed their windmill so that’s a good time to head off to bed. A fairly long day but i have managed to squeeze in quite alot of things i wanted to do, so that’s a plus.