How To Land Internships in Venture Capital for Canadian University Students (Step-By-Step Guide)

Venture capital is one of the most competitive industries in finance and technology. It is also one of the least accessible industries for students, from an information and opportunity perspective. I landed a summer analyst at Global Founders Capital, a $3B AUM multi-stage fund during the Summer of 2022 after my internship in middle-market private equity. I have gone through the process and wanted to share a few thoughts.

Venture capital may sound like a black box to many students. I’m writing this guide to help contextualize and prepare you to recruit for venture capital internships. This is a step-by-step methodological guide for students keen to explore a role in venture capital.

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Step 1: Understand The Venture Capital Industry

Your day-to-day responsibilities vary according to the firm and more specifically the type of investments they make, there are four types of VCs you need to understand before you start applying to these roles:

1. Seed-stage VCs specialize in offering initial funding to startups in their conceptual or prototype stage, aiming to assist entrepreneurs in initiating their ventures and establishing a solid groundwork for future development
2. Early-stage VCs invest in startups that have a viable product and demonstrated market traction, focusing on companies with the potential for scalability and market leadership
3. Growth-stage VCs target more mature startups with substantial revenue and user growth, aiming to support their expansion and positioning as industry leaders, often leading to exit events like initial public offerings (IPOs) or acquisitions
4. Corporate Venture Capital (CVC) involves large corporations investing in startups and innovative companies, to gain strategic value by accessing new technologies, markets, or products that complement the corporation’s existing business.

Step 2: Develop Awareness of the Venture Capital Firms around you

The first step to landing an internship in VC is knowing what firms to apply to.

Unlike investment banks or CPG conglomerates, VCs are not active on campus with information sessions and sponsored events with student clubs. You have to do some research yourself to understand what firms are out there, and what are you looking for.

During my time when I was searching for a role in VC, I put together a spreadsheet of 120+ Canadian companies with venture capital involvement in Canada (and US firms with a record of hiring Canadian students)

There are a few tricks that I found to be helpful to identify these companies rather than merely searching them on Google / Linkedin.

#1. Look for any new VC fundraising announcements, and look at the engagement from their LinkedIn post and comments.

VCs are a small knitted community, especially the case in Canada, so when new funds are getting announced on Linkedin, their company and their general partners will repost/share them on their feed, chances are people who react to the post are usually also venture capital investors from other funds that you may or may not have heard from.

#2. Write down 15–20 companies that you believe into their team, products and mission, and find out which VC funds are backing them

Doing this exercise on Crunchbase allowed me to find out the investing firms that share similar beliefs and values to you. You are going to thrive in environments where your vision is aligned with the investment criterias and culture of the fund.

#3. Look for fund of funds for venture capital firms

Some examples would be iNovia’s Emerging Managers Fund and Intact Ventures Fund Investments, you can find an extensive list of venture capital investors you can reach out to.

#4. Participate in student-run venture funds/venture fellowships

Participating in your school’s entrepreneurship/startup clubs helps develop your interest in startups, but it does not prepare you for a role in venture capital. To get that exposure, I’d recommend participating in student-run venture organizations like FrontRow Ventures, and Contrary Capital, and fellowships like RippleX, Bessemer Fellowship, etc. For Western University, definitely Ivey Venture Capital Club.

Step 3: Cold Email Your Way To Land Introductory Calls

Chances are, your favourite venture capital firms are not going to post a job on their career page, and if they do, you are competing with hundreds of students for that summer internship position.

Therefore, you want to be top of mind for these people when they recruit.

To do that, you need to get in front of them, wherever platforms they are on.

Whether it is Twitter, Linkedin or Email, you need to reach out to them and follow up a few times. You can find these people by searching the company name on Linkedin and filtering for “people”, ideally you want to prioritize people who have graduated from your school, or share some kind of common experiences whether it is affinity for sports, a company they used to work for, international experiences, etc.

In the cold reach-out message, you want to be punchy and include these three things.

1. Introduce yourself — “Hi, my name is Alex, I’m a 3rd-year business student at Ivey”
2. Why you reach out — “I’m interested in learning more about your experiences at X/Y”
3. What are you hoping to achieve — “I would love to connect via a 20-minute call sometime next week”

On top of that, you want to mention something personal with them, it could be complimenting articles that they put out on the internet, it could be congratulating them on a new job/promotion, it could be mentioning you are leading the school they once used to be part of, try to spend an extra few minutes personalizing your emails, it goes a long way.

Step 4: Preparing and Having the Introductory Chats

Two things that you have to know about these chats. (1) These chats are short. (2) They have a lot of those

Therefore, before you hop on a call with VCs, you want to be prepared with a good fundamental understanding of the fund, their investment portfolios, and any news relating to startups/ventures that would affect their work.

And you want to achieve two goals: (1) Ask insightful questions, (2) Communicate your interest in working in VC.

Let me unpack that further

1. Ask Insightful Questions

Asking insightful questions is one way to make a great impression, but more importantly, you need to understand what you can expect from working at that fund. It is an informational interview for both sides, you should take the opportunity to assess the fund and whether it is the right fit for you.

A rule of thumb for me is that if the answer to your question is publicly available on the internet, it is probably not the right question to ask. Prioritize questions that are related to investment strategy, specific deals, cultures, and their personal opinions. Ask about their thoughts on recent deals they completed, ask about their deal lifecycles, and ask about their thoughts on verticals that you know they are close to. Make them as conversational as possible.

Also, there are some questions about the background information about the fund strategy including:

• What verticals do they invest in? (that speaks to the type of companies you would be looking at)
• What stage do they invest in? (that speaks to the level of due diligence you would be doing)
• Do they usually lead their investments or do they only participate? (that speaks to the volume you can expect relative to other VCs, i.e. leading investors invest in fewer deals with larger cheque sizes)
• When was their last raise? (that speaks to their capital deployment cycle, if their last raise was 4–5 years ago with no signs of a future raise, that is a negative signal of the fund’s future)
• Do they have a reputation for being operationally involved with their portfolio companies? (that speaks to the scope of your role, and whether you would have any portfolio exposure)

Try to find the answers to these questions before hopping on a chat with VCs.

1. Communicate your interest in working in VC.

Towards the latter half of the chat, you want to communicate your interest with the firm by asking whether they are open to recruiting undergraduate to work at their funds.

To gauge the sentiment, you can look at whether the funds have a track record of hiring students for internships, and if they do, ask for their recruiting timeline and advice. If they don’t, ask if they would be open to recruiting students for a part-time or full-time internship.

Step 5: Preparing for the Interview

Let’s say you have proceeded to an interview stage with the funds. The interview style could vary from a case study to a behavioural interview to an investment memo to a deal pitch. It varies a lot.

Unlike investment banking or consulting, there is no consensus around interview styles for VC. However, it doesn’t mean you can’t prepare or study for them.

The key is differentiation.

Regardless of formats, VCs look for a few characteristics: (1) self-starter mentality, (2) strongly opinionated, and (3) coachability. Therefore you need to make sure these points are coming across the interview process.

Ideally, you want to have extensive rehearsed examples around your extra-curriculars and how they reflected these attributes, it could be initiatives you led at school clubs or any investing-related experiences or projects you have built in the past.

Then, you also want to have a pocket of startups that fit the fund’s investment criteria (stage / vertical-wise) that you can discuss at the interview, and the most important part is, to develop an opinion on whether they are good investments or not. In the buy-side world, being able to articulate whether an investment is good or bad with logical reasoning and evidence is the key to succeeding. Demonstrate that through the interview.

Lastly, VC is a highly people-oriented job, especially in early-stage investing, lots of your work involves working directly with partners and meeting founders. Being coachable is one of the most important attributes of any internship, as being curious and an active listener.

Bonus Point: There are two weapons you can leverage to expedite the process: (1) Warm Intros and (2) Online Presence

1. Warm introductions with credible individuals are insanely powerful.

A great amount of venture capital deals are done through warm introductions. Early-stage investors introduce their portfolios to late-stage investors, founders leverage warm intros to find investors, investors leverage intros to secure allocations, etc.

Warm intros are not just about meeting people, they are about meeting people’s needs.

It works best when you are looking for an internship and when they are looking for interns, it works best when your mutual contact has previously worked with you and can affirm your interest in VCs.

An example that often happened to me was that I had a great chat with an investor from a VC fund but they told me they weren’t planning to hire undergrads. I asked the person to suggest another VC that would be open to hiring an undergrad intern, and he ended up making a warm introduction which saved me tons of effort from cold emailing and provided me with some credibility because of the association between the other VC investor and my mutual.

Another example would be asking former interns to connect you with the VC funds that you are interested in applying to, the peer-to-peer relationship makes it easier to form deeper connections and they are tight with the people at the fund, leverage these peer connections to get in front of the investors you are interested in connecting with.

Remember this, great warm introductions add value to everyone, your conversations with the contact will impact how impact the reputation of the mutual, so please be the person whom your mutual would be proud of making the connections, instead of vice versa.

2. An online presence can be helpful to differentiate

For companies, a large part of recruiting is about understanding who the person is behind the resume, and how compatible/capable is that person with the team.

There are two pieces to this: (1) Content and (2) Mutual Connections

On content, it is always helpful to have pieces of content, in the forms of thought pieces, blogs or even tweets, that can showcase your interest in venture capital and startups. If they reflect thoughtfulness around startups, your strongly held beliefs in certain ideas, or your ability to come up with ideas with independent thinking, it would increase their confidence about your candidacy, a huge net positive to your possibility of landing a role in VC.

On mutuals, if your social profiles (Twitter / Linkedin) are connected with prominent investors in the VC, it sends a positive signal to the venture capital firms you are recruiting at. It works similarly to having references, but instead of having them validate your job experiences after you have been hired for the role, VCs could look at their mutuals with you and validate your abilities by speaking to their connections who know you. However, the advice is not to cast nets as wide as possible and start sending invitations to investors you haven’t met, the advice is about investing in building your network and a reputation for solving problems that are close to the industry you want to apply to.

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🙏 I hope you enjoyed reading this article. Reach out to me at alex.ha4121@gmail.com or Twitter if you have any questions! Follow Ivey Venture Capital Club on Instagram for more resources like this.