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💡 This is a guide to help you preparing your interviews in Venture Capital in France. If you have ideas or resources to be added, feel free to drop me a message on Linkedin. Cheers! Alex
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General Advices
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👉 You can also read this post I wrote in April 2020 on Breaking into Venture Capital
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- Getting an internship into a French VC Fund has become super hard in the past few years
- I would say that it's almost impossible to get an internship without a prior six month professional experience
- All the VC funds don't have the same criteria to recruit their interns. To give you an idea, at Eurazeo we are looking for someone who is able to demonstrate thanks to its past experiences strong analytical skills (basically finance or consulting) and a genuine interest in the tech ecosystem (could be an internship in a startup but also any association related to the tech industry)
- If you are serious about entering the industry, you have to be prepared as if you were planning to do an internship in investment banking or in consulting
- VC internships differ widely from one fund to another regarding the task that you will be dealing with. It's crucial to ask questions about the job description during your interviews in order to avoid disappointment
- Without being exhaustive, here is a list of actions I would do to prepare my interviews:
- Contact VC interns to have their feedback on their fund and on the industry in general
- Find 2-3 startups to pitch during your interview (the best way to do this is to pitch either a startup funded by a tier-one seed fund like Kerala, Frst, LocalGlobe, Point Nine or one funded by UK VCs like Accel, Index, Balderton)
- For each fund you interview with, be ready to pitch one startup you like in their portfolio and one you dislike
- Go to events in Paris to get familiar with the atmosphere of the ecosystem and to have stories to tell during your interview (The Family and Station F are great places to find events)
- Know how a VC fund works in terms of economics and operating model
Venture Capital in General
VC Series A Investors in Europe
- Dealroom disclosed the series A most active investors in Europe between 2014 and 2018 - of course, being the most active doesn't mean that you are the best investor...
- Crunchbase did the same for both seed and series A investors all over Europe in 2019 - Kima should be first in the seed section but all their investments are not disclosed
The VC Ecosystem in the UK
Tier one UK funds: