11/17/2019 Why venture capital should be your next career move

Why venture capital should be your

next career move
Sibel Buyukbaykal
Jan 10, 2018 · 7 min read

Pitching Reinventure at the FinTech Australia Festival (Nov 2017)

As I wrap up my final month as an investment associate at Reinventure, I’ve enjoyed

reflecting on all the cool things I’ve learnt over the last 18 months. However, it’s
surprising to me how few of my university peers have considered joining the venture
capital (VC) world given the accelerated learning and opportunities you have access to
in less than 2 years as a junior. In fact, as we are now in the processes of hiring an
investment analyst to join the team, it’s remarkable how much interest we have
received from candidates from the US and UK, where roles in VC are highly
competitive, yet it still seems to be a relatively unknown (or not well understood)
sector in Australia. Admittedly, the VC space Australia is still young but growing very
quickly — VC fundraising has almost quadrupled from FY13 to FY16 with AU$568m
raised in FY16. While it is still quite a way off from our friends in the US, UK, or China,
it’s an exciting time to be building a sustainable local VC ecosystem.

Thus, I write this blog post for you — my friends working in management consulting,
investment banking, private equity, technology and startups — to give you 6 reasons

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why you should seriously consider working in venture capital:

1. Understanding the fundamentals for building successful businesses

Ever since I was a kid, I have been coming up with business ideas and always liked the
idea of running my own venture someday. So after I graduated university, I joined a
management consulting (MC) firm because I wanted to get a cross-industry view of
how different businesses operate. MC gave me a good foundation on how to analyse
businesses, build financial models, prepare presentations and think strategically,
however the nature of MC means you end up working for big behemoth corporates that
have been operating for decades. You don’t get insight into how businesses are formed,
build processes and grow.

Working in venture capital, you get to speak to founders/CEOs daily and witness how
startups are born from ideation to raising capital to becoming profitable (on that note,
you also get to see why startups fail). When deciding whether or not to invest in a
company, you go deep into understanding the mechanics of the business. Our due
diligence includes analysing the business model, founders, traction (revenue,
customers, growth), competitors, product stickiness, valuation, and interviewing
customers and suppliers. By performing this analysis, you come to understand the
benchmarks and heuristics of successful businesses. What should their growth look
like? How many customers should they have to be ideal for VC funding? How do you
create a network effect? While there is no exact formula, you know what to look for and
avoid to ensure you go into every personal and professional venture with eyes wide
open.

2. Building a professional network of inspirational founders

As a venture capitalist, you are always surrounded by the best and brightest startup
founders who have put their comfy corporate salaries on the line in order to improve
the world around them. As an aspiring founder, what better way to understand the
skillsets, drive, and motivations of being a founder than to be at the centre of the
ecosystem- investing in startups. We meet with founders every day, and also have
around 30 inspirational founders in our current portfolio that we get to see at strategy
sessions, board meetings and afternoon drinks. At Reinventure, we physically sit within
Stone & Chalk — a dedicated Fintech coworking space — now located within the
Sydney Startup Hub alongside Tank Stream Labs and Fishburners, so there is no
shortage of inspirational founder and stories.

3. Sharing your thoughts and experiences on professional platforms

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I didn’t know this when I first joined, but there are lots of people and companies out
there that are really interested in a venture capitalist’s perspective on tech, startups,
entrepreneurship, innovation, diversity and a whole range of other topics.
Consequently, I have been pleasantly surprised by how many opportunities I have had
to present my views and represent Reinventure’s perspective at conferences, meetups
and panels, despite being a relatively junior member of the team. Prior to working at
Reinventure, I had never been invited to talk publicly as an authority on any topic, NOT
because I didn’t have the ability but because there were no available opportunities
(particularly as a junior). But as a VC investment associate, I have been asked to speak
on topics like: “How to raise seed money”, “How corporates can innovate with
startups”, “What do VCs look for in investments”, “Should startups be thinking global”,
amongst many others. Public speaking was not a skill I had practiced properly since
high school nor did I think I would get a chance to practice it again until much later in
my career, so it has been exciting to build that confidence again.

Bonus for the ladies:

As I mentioned earlier, venture capital in Australia is still has a relatively small

headcount, and unfortunately it is also an industry that lacks gender diversity, so there
are few women in the industry (but on that note, Reinventure has 50/50 gender
balance across the company). Because of this, and because of the gender
discrimination that has been exposed in the industry (particularly in the US), I have
found a more deliberate effort to provide women with a platform and opportunity to
shine a light on their skills, talent and perspectives. It is with this platform that I hope
we can encourage and normalise more women in the venture capital industry.

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October and November 2017 Conferences

4. Building a professional network of other VCs

Venture capital in Australia is still a small and tight-knit community, with most VCs co-
investing in the same ventures. While there is some aspect of VCs competing against
each other to invest in the best deals, there is far more utility, as an industry, in
collaborating to achieve the best outcome for the entire startup ecosystem. As juniors
in the VC community, we often work together when co-investing by sharing our due
diligence findings or sitting together on board meetings. We also refer deals to one
another when there is a good company that might not fit within our specific investment
mandate. Thus, whilst our individual VC firms are small (usually between 5–10ppl), we
still have a community of peers we can work with and can talk to. We organize events
and drinks across the country and our VC Juniors Christmas party has become the hot
ticket end-of-year event.

5. Developing skills as a futurist

One of the most exciting and important parts of being a venture capitalist is the ability
to see trends and consumer behaviours evolve before they become mainstream. This is
important because we don’t want to invest in ideas/businesses that are incremental
improvements to what already exists today; while these types of businesses might be
successful, they are not going to achieve the outsized returns required by VCs. Rather,
we want to invest in game-changing ideas that have the ability to return >10x our
initial investment. This requires us to look around the corner for not necessarily what is
popular today but what will be popular in 3–5 years.

Working at Reinventure, I have been lucky enough to learn from the brightest minds in
FinTech, data and disruption. Learning to decipher between a tech fad, sustaining
innovation and disruptive innovation has informed so much of how I look at
investments, both professionally and also personally. When I buy shares in listed
companies, I ask myself, is this a business or industry that is at risk of being disrupted?
Is the business overvalued/undervalued based on performance? Is the business using
technology at its core or as an enabler? Even learning about blockchain and its
applications early on has informed my small (but growing) crypto portfolio (although
at this stage it’s feeling more and more like a gamble). In VC, you are literally paid to

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learn about the latest trends and technology which certainly helps you develop and
define your own personal investment philosophies.

6. Accessing the best startup job opportunities

If the time comes when you decide to move on from venture capital, you can use your
experience evaluating businesses to choose a high promise/successful startup to jump
on board with. The benefit of working in VC is that you will have already performed
some level of due diligence on the promising startups in your industry of focus, and
have a behind the scenes view of companies that have all the makings of a unicorn.

It is with this knowledge that I have decided to join the BRICKX team this February.
BRICKX joined the Reinventure portfolio family last year, and having worked closely
with the CEO during our due diligence and looking ‘under the hood’ of the business, I
knew it was somewhere I wanted to work. I will be able to bring my experience in VC to
any future BRICKX capital raisings and work with the BRICKX team to leverage the
most value from investors.

But while that is my preferred path, joining a startup is by no means the only career
pathway following an entry into the VC world, with many of my peers either
progressing within their companies to take on more responsibility, going on to manage
a seed-stage fund or launching their own venture. Personally, I’m glad that I won’t be
going too far and will be watching Reinventure and its portfolio of companies kicking
more goals in 2018.

Venture Capital Jobs Careers Business Analyst Startup

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