GoingVC Career Fair 2021 Recap

GoingVC recently hosted our first ever Venture Capital Career Fair in the midst of our 9th cohort as part of the GoingVC Program. With 50+ representatives from firms like Plug and Play, Okta Ventures, Touchdown Ventures, Sozo Ventures, Mighty Capital, and more, it was an event unlike anything we had ever put on before, and unlike anything else we have ever seen in the industry!

As a quick aside, a major word of thanks goes out once again to all the recruiters, investors, and GoingVC members themselves for attending this momentous event! We truly appreciate your participation in helping shape the future of the VC industry and ecosystem.

What Happened At The Fair 

During the event, we facilitated over 250 1:1 meetings between GoingVC members and VC firms, which collectively came out of over 100 RSVPS to the Career Fair itself. 

It shouldn’t come as a surprise, as most members of GoingVC are passionate about investing and have the goal of finding work in the field, but we’ve been very encouraged to receive positive feedback on both the preparedness and enthusiasm GoingVC members demonstrated during the Career Fair, which we’re proud to say has already led to dozens of more formal interviews being requested with our members from the VCs that were in attendance. 

To guide our members in this preparation, we advised them to research the firm, the firm’s investment themes, sector and geography focus, portfolio companies, and the actual role the fund was hiring for in an effort to help them best position themselves for these follow-up conversations. Much of this preparation came as part of our larger “Career Week,” which culminated in the Career Fair, and so regardless of whether the members were successful in securing more formal VC interviews, we think the event served well as a training run for the kind of preparation they will need to do in future VC interviews they’ll be faced with down the road. 

Furthermore, these 1:1 conversations we were able to facilitate allowed candidates to learn more about the partners, firms, and positions which they are interested in joining and provided them a great opportunity to introduce their stories to these funds - a relationship they will hopefully continue to build on as they continue along their path into the industry. 

Check out our post about interview tips and tricks here  

All in all, we couldn’t be more pleased with the outcome of the fair and are looking forward to hosting more soon. 

How It All Came Together 

We had the idea for the Career Fair after we realized we had never seen an event of this nature in the VC industry ever before, and with visibility into VC job openings often hard to come by, felt there was a gap that needed to be filled. 

During the planning of the event, our community team invited recruiters and VC firms to reserve a virtual booth for the fair, utilizing a platform called Eventus which during the pandemic has hosted a number of similar events on behalf of universities and other organizations. 

During this process too, we were able to learn more about what roles are in the highest demand in the industry right now. Below is a breakdown of this data, which will hopefully give you an idea of what types of roles funds are mostly hiring for. As you can see, the majority of the VCs we engaged with were immediately hiring for VC associate roles at seed stage and series A firms. 

Level of seniority hiring for:

When the company is hiring:

Stage of investment:

Member’s Experience

GoingVC members expressed their thoughts about their experience of the 1:1 meetings they had during the fair, which lasted roughly 10 minutes each. Unsurprisingly, this led one member to describe the experience as “speed dating,” an analogy we quite enjoyed! 

Below are some kudos shared around afterward through our community Slack channel. Again, none of this would have been possible without the heavy involvement of the GoingVC community itself, so we are incredibly thankful to them, as well as our Community, Events, and Career Services teams in general for putting together such a successful event! 

At the end of the day, GoingVC’s aim remains to help our members gain more access to the venture capital industry. In fact, it’s one of our five core program pillars to support our emerging VC members and community by providing them access to a network of VCs, as so much success in the industry comes from having a strong network. 

This certainly won’t be the last event we’ll put on to create opportunities for VCs and GoingVC members to connect. Should you want to learn more about those in the future, you can stay up-to-date by subscribing to our newsletter or following us on Linkedin and Twitter! 

Last but not least, if you’re a VC that would like to learn more about our members, please review our talent platform here.  

And if you are a recruiter from a VC firm who would potentially like to participate in the next Career Fair, please fill out this interest form and we will be in touch once we start planning for our next event in 2022. 

Thank you again for participating at GoingVC's Career Fair!!!

9Yard Ventures, 2048 Ventures, Earthshot Ventures, Learn Capital, Mercy Corps Ventures, Nina Capital, Okta Ventures, Savano Capital Partners, Soma Capital, Stealth VC Firm, Valia Ventures, GC1 Ventures, 137 Ventures, Alumni Ventures, ARCH Venture Partners, Array Ventures, Aumni Fund, Autotech Ventures, Avanta Ventures, AXA Venture Partners, Camber Partners, CincyTech, CSC Upshot Ventures, Edison Partners, Fintech Collective, Harpoon Ventures, Inflexor Ventures, JLL Spark Global Ventures, Mach49, Mirae Asset Global Investments, Mouro Capital, Newchip Accelerator, OnePrime Capital, Tola Capital, Touchdown Ventures, True Wealth Ventures, 27V, Alter Global, Avesta Fund, B Capital Group, Bloomberg Beta, Female Founders Alliance, Konvoy Ventures, Kyra Barker, Plug and Play, Sozo Ventures, and Swift Ventures