1/ Someone emailed me asking how to break into VC, so I wanted to answer on Twitter where others could see and contribute to the conversation.

2/ “Being a VC” can mean a lot of different things, so it’s worth asking:

What actual activities do you want to do?

- Deep market analysis?
- Be in the flow of information and people?
- Make deals?
- Work closely w/ founders over time (e.g take board seats?)
- Manage capital?
3/ It’s worth specifying what type of VC you might like to become — as there are different archetypes. E.g.

- Benchmark (Lead series A/B - couple investments a year)
- First Round (Lead seed rounds, partner w/ a few companies a year)
- SV Angel (Make lots of seed investments)
4/ Continued:

Expa - Incubate companies

YC / Village Global - Build a platform to help entrepreneurs at scale

Do you want to join a firm or start one? There’s a lot to consider.

Different paths will require different skillsets & sets of experiences.
5/ Since the person who wrote the email is a young person trying to break into VC by joining a firm (and who doesn’t want to start a company), I’ll tailor this tweet storm to that goal. There’s some overlap.
6/ If you are looking to join a VC firm, the question the firm needs to be able to answer is:

“Is this person going to help me to invest in companies that I otherwise would not have invested in without him/her?”

How do you do this?
7/ Basically you want to see yourself as having an asset or “portfolio” of assets that make you uniquely valuable—not only next to thousands of other smart, connected, well-branded ppl trying to break into VC—but also to other *existing* angels/VCs.

Why will you see great deals?
8/ Maybe because you own a key network. Examples:

- You worked at Stripe or Palantir and run their alumni group (Company)

- You went to MIT and ran their on campus fund (College)

- You ran Waterloo’s startup community and you know all the great projects (Location)
9/ More examples of key networks:

- You host the signature AR/VR conference (Vertical network)

- You run a community like "Interact"—top technologists under 25 (Horizontal network)

- You’re the best writer in, say, crypto—or more specifically, privacy coins (Legible expertise)
10/ Or you have some unfair advantage:

- You worked at Product Hunt or in journalism (can help startups with distribution/PR)

- You host "The 20 min VC" (can help startups raise money)

- You run a podcast called "The 20 min Blockchain Engineer" (can help startups recruit)
11/ The important thing is to do the work upfront.

Here are other things you can do to add value to VC firms:

1. Send them good deals
2. Send their companies customers or talent
3. Invite partners on your podcast or to your event (or any of the assets mentioned above)
12/ These things, of course, are hard.

How do you get access to customers in the first place? Host a VP of Sales Event once a quarter, or an event for another core buying audience.

Talent? Start a job board site for engineers, or a regular happy hour for top designers.
13/ Deal flow? Have some asset that makes founders come to you — an event series, a valuable network, or a domain expertise — and then send deals to others. The more you send good deals the more you’ll receive.
14/ Quoth Rob Go: “ it’s much less about “how” to find a VC job but more about “being” the kind of person who can get a VC job.”
15/ Getting a job in venture capital is partly less about “who you know” and more about “who you’ve helped.”

Start creating a personal portfolio of projects that allow you to help others, especially around getting into deals, and you may break into VC.

Add any other thoughts.

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There are a *lot* of software shops in the world that would far rather have one more technical dependency than they'd like to pay for one of their 20 engineers to become the company's SPOF expert on the joys of e.g. HTTP file uploads, CSV parsing bugs, PDF generation, etc.


Every year at MicroConf I get surprised-not-surprised by the number of people I meet who are running "Does one thing reasonably well, ranks well for it, pulls down a full-time dev salary" out of a fun side project which obviates a frequent 1~5 engineer-day sprint horizontally.

"Who is the prototypical client here?"

A consulting shop delivering a $X00k engagement for an internal system, a SaaS company doing something custom for a large client or internally facing or deeply non-core to their business, etc.

(I feel like many of these businesses are good answers to the "how would you monetize OSS to make it sustainable?" fashion, since they often wrap a core OSS offering in the assorted infrastructure which makes it easily consumable.)

"But don't the customers get subscription fatigue?"

I think subscription fatigue is far more reported by people who are embarrassed to charge money for software than it is experienced by for-profit businesses, who don't seem to have gotten pay-biweekly-for-services fatigue.

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A brief analysis and comparison of the CSS for Twitter's PWA vs Twitter's legacy desktop website. The difference is dramatic and I'll touch on some reasons why.

Legacy site *downloads* ~630 KB CSS per theme and writing direction.

6,769 rules
9,252 selectors
16.7k declarations
3,370 unique declarations
44 media queries
36 unique colors
50 unique background colors
46 unique font sizes
39 unique z-indices

https://t.co/qyl4Bt1i5x


PWA *incrementally generates* ~30 KB CSS that handles all themes and writing directions.

735 rules
740 selectors
757 declarations
730 unique declarations
0 media queries
11 unique colors
32 unique background colors
15 unique font sizes
7 unique z-indices

https://t.co/w7oNG5KUkJ


The legacy site's CSS is what happens when hundreds of people directly write CSS over many years. Specificity wars, redundancy, a house of cards that can't be fixed. The result is extremely inefficient and error-prone styling that punishes users and developers.

The PWA's CSS is generated on-demand by a JS framework that manages styles and outputs "atomic CSS". The framework can enforce strict constraints and perform optimisations, which is why the CSS is so much smaller and safer. Style conflicts and unbounded CSS growth are avoided.