I was reading over Venture Capitalist (VC) Fred Wilson‘s post on Venture Partners and thought it would be great to expand on this blog for our business, economics and finance majors (and would-be entrepreneur) readers. Everyone else, you are free to skip this post.
I read Wilson’s post voraciously, non-stop and I consume it as a part of my personal and professional development. As many of you know when we were RED Consulting Group LLP focused on bilingual recruitment searches, consulting and some public relations our attention was no where near the world of VC, Y-incubators, etc. Today, we are. Why? Because we’re online trying to improve a service of connecting organizations with diverse and bilingual talent. Does that already exist elsewhere? Of course. But we believe there’s plenty room for improvement. As such we’ve moved our operation online full-time and fine-tuning how we make the connection, how we inspire diverse and bilingual talent to go for it, how we announce vacancies, how organizations attract talent, where the avenues of opportunity are and which VC (or angel investor) is best suited to help us get there. That said, careers as a venture partner.
Wilson notes that A Venture Partner is
“a person who a VC firm brings on board to help them do investments and manage them, but is not a full and permanent member of the partnership. The “full and permanent” members of the partnership are often called General Partners, Managing Members, or Partners.“
How do you get into this career? Wilson expanded, “many Venture Partners are very experienced, either as VCs or successful entrepreneurs. They are not likely to be ‘wet behind the ears newly minted MBAs.’ So you when you are dealing with a Venture Partner, you are probably dealing with a secure and successful and experienced individual who can help you out.“ So Venture Partners have been doing business deals for a while and/or very successful entrepreneurs. They understand what it takes to build a business from the ground up. They are experts in specific fields, whether its mobile technologies, web apps, etc. At the national level both the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) and the National Association of Seed and Venture Funds (NASVF) exists to nurture and support these individuals who invest in America’s entrepreneurs.
There are also Angels and Superangels. Angels are individuals who invest their own money into a startup; superangels are individuals with an institutional fund. Elad Gil, an entrepreneur who now works at Twitter wrote a pretty good post defining these two (Angels vs Superangels: What is the Difference?).
For more information on this career field start reading Venture Hacks (good advice for startups). Start there. Secondly, build a successful business that attracts the attention of a VC. If you have an MBA great otherwise join or launch a startup and get to it. PS: Dave McClure, an entrepreneur and VC writes a great blog in this area–Master of 500 Hats–also start there.
David Molina is the Founder and CEO of BilingualHire. Follow him over on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook.