Venture Capital interview preparation

Questions

100

Traced to a firm

31

Firms

12

Updated

September 2026

Asked at

All firmsGeneral Atlantic9Insight Partners7Silver Lake6Vista Equity Partners4Bessemer Venture Partners3ACAccel2Advent International2Battery Ventures2Andreessen Horowitz1Coatue Management1Sequoia Capital1WPWarburg 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

1. 063You are on the board and the CEO wants to fire their co-founder. What do you do?Board and governanceHardsuperdayEarly-stage VCGrowth equity

   Say this

   Slow it down by two weeks, get the facts independently, then support a clean decision either way. My job is not to adjudicate the relationship — it is to make sure whichever way it goes, the company keeps functioning and the equity consequences are handled properly before anyone is told.

   Then walk it

   1. First, separate the question of whether the person should go from the question of how. The first is a performance judgement I should test; the second is where boards do the real damage by rushing.
   2. Get independent information. Talk to the co-founder directly, talk to two or three people who work with both of them, and understand whether this is a capability gap, a role that has outgrown the person, or a personal breakdown. Those three have different answers — the second is often solved by changing the role rather than removing the person.
   3. Then the equity question, before any conversation happens. What is vested, what accelerates, what does the shareholders' agreement say about a departing founder's shares, and is there a repurchase right. A founder leaving with 18 percent fully vested and no involvement is a problem every future investor will raise, and the time to negotiate it is before the termination, not after.
   4. Then the operational question: what does this person actually hold? Key customer relationships, the entire backend, the regulatory licence in their name. I have seen a co-founder removal take out a third of engineering because nobody mapped the dependency first.
   5. Then support the CEO if the case holds. A board that blocks a CEO's decision about their own leadership team, without a serious reason, has just told the CEO they are not in charge. But I would also say clearly that this is a signal about the CEO — how they handle it, whether they are generous, and whether they have been avoiding the conversation for a year.
   6. And be honest about the pattern: the modal error here is not firing too fast, it is a board that let a broken co-founder relationship run for eighteen months because nobody wanted the conversation. Speed in the decision, care in the execution.

   Where candidates lose it

   Taking sides immediately, in either direction. Backing the CEO reflexively ignores your duty to all shareholders and to the facts; blocking them undermines their authority. The structure is: pause, verify independently, sort the equity and dependency consequences first, then support a clean decision.

   Expect next

   • What if the departing founder has 20 percent fully vested?
   • What if you think the CEO is the problem, not the co-founder?
   • How do you handle the announcement to the team and to customers?
2. 065In diligence you find that a founder overstated revenue. What do you do?Board and governanceHardsuperdayGrowth equity

   Say this

   Establish whether it was a definitional error or a deliberate misstatement, in that order, because they lead to completely different outcomes. A founder counting signed letters of intent as ARR is a founder who needs better accounting. A founder who knowingly gave me a number they knew was false is a pass, regardless of how good the company is.

   Then walk it

   1. First, go back to the primary data. Pull the bank statements, the invoices, the contracts and the accounting system, and rebuild the revenue figure myself. Do not go to the founder with an accusation built on a spreadsheet inconsistency.
   2. Then classify it. Definitional: counting bookings as revenue, annualising a one-month pilot, including a non-binding LOI, or recognising a multi-year contract upfront. All of these are common, mostly honest, and mostly fixable with a CFO.
   3. Deliberate: a number the founder knew was wrong, presented to raise money. That is a character finding and it is disqualifying. The reason is not moralism — it is that I am buying an illiquid position for eight years in a company where the only source of information is this person's word.
   4. Ask the question directly and watch the response. The good outcome sounds like 'you're right, we've been counting it as bookings and I should have flagged it'. The bad outcome is a moving explanation, or blaming the analyst, or a number that changes again when pressed.
   5. Then check whether it is systemic. If revenue was overstated, look at retention, pipeline and headcount too. One inflated metric is rarely alone, and a pattern converts a definitional problem into a deliberate one.
   6. And the obligation to others: if I pass on a character finding, I would tell my own partnership plainly why. Whether to tell other investors is genuinely harder — there is defamation risk and I would take legal advice — but I would not give a positive reference, and I would say nothing rather than something misleading.

   Where candidates lose it

   Jumping straight to 'I'd walk away'. It sounds principled and it shows no judgement, because most revenue discrepancies at seed and Series A are definitional. The structure is: verify from primary documents, classify honest versus deliberate, test with a direct question, then act. Only the deliberate case is an automatic pass.

   Expect next

   • Where is the line between aggressive and dishonest?
   • Would you tell other investors?
   • What if you had already signed the term sheet?

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.