Venture Capital interview preparation

Sourcing, unit economics, term sheets, cap tables, fund economics and the India venture market. Every question is either traced to a named firm from a public candidate report, or tagged at desk level when we could not trace it — answers lead with the point, then the mechanism, then the limitation.

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Question bank

100 questions, mapped to the firms that asked them

Questions
100
Traced to a firm
31
Firms
12
Updated
September 2026
Asked at
All firmsGeneral Atlantic9Insight Partners7Silver Lake6Vista Equity Partners4Bessemer Venture Partners3Accel2Advent International2Battery Ventures2Andreessen Horowitz1Coatue Management1Sequoia Capital1Warburg Pincus1
Topic
All topicsSourcing and deal flow5Market sizing and estimation8Founders and teams5Unit economics and cohorts11Term sheets12Cap table and dilution7Early-stage valuation7Portfolio construction6Board and governance4Down rounds and secondaries4Exits and liquidity4Fund economics5Sector theses and markets6India venture market6Fit and motivation10
Level
AnyCoreIntermediateHard
Type
AnyTechnicalFitCaseMarket viewBrainteaser
Showing 1–1 of 1 · filtered from 100Clear filters
  1. 014What do you look for in a founding team?Founders and teamsCorephone / first roundEarly-stage VCSeed funds

    Say this

    Four things, in this order: earned insight into the specific problem, the ability to recruit people better than themselves, unusual speed of learning, and enough resilience to survive three years of it not working. At seed, the team is most of what you are underwriting.

    Then walk it

    1. Earned insight. Not domain experience as a line on a CV, but a specific, slightly contrarian belief about the market that came from doing the work. The test is whether they tell me something about the industry I did not know and could not have read.
    2. Recruiting ability. The first ten hires determine the company, and the only evidence that matters is who has already said yes to them. If a genuinely impressive engineer left a good job to join, that is a stronger signal than any reference.
    3. Rate of learning. I compare what they said three months ago to what they say now. Founders who update fast on evidence compound; founders who defend the original plan do not.
    4. Resilience, which is the one nobody can fake for long. Most companies spend a long stretch looking dead. I look for prior evidence of finishing something hard with no external pressure to do so.
    5. On co-founder dynamics: clear decision rights, complementary skills rather than duplicated ones, and a track record of disagreeing productively. I would rather see two people argue in front of me than perform agreement.
    6. The honest limitation: founder assessment is where investors are most overconfident. My pattern-matching is largely a bias toward people who remind me of people who already worked, which is how whole categories of founders get missed. So I weight evidence from the business over my read of the person wherever I can.

    Where candidates lose it

    Giving the generic list — passionate, smart, hard-working. Everyone the fund meets is those things. The differentiators are recruiting evidence, rate of learning, and earned insight, all of which are observable. And you must name the bias problem, because the honest answer to 'how do you judge founders' includes 'imperfectly'.

    Expect next

    • How do you tell conviction from delusion?
    • Would you back a solo founder?
    • What is the strongest founder signal you have ever seen?

Firm tags come from public, anonymous candidate reports on Wall Street Oasis: strong signal, not sworn testimony. Firms are named as the places a question was reported, not as partners of Fin Maverick. Answers are written for this page to show how to think out loud; they are not scripts to recite.