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. 015How do you tell conviction from delusion in a founder?Founders and teamsHardsuperdayEarly-stage VC

    Say this

    By how they handle disconfirming evidence, not by how strongly they believe. Both look identical from the front. The difference is that the convicted founder can state exactly what would change their mind and can recite the counterargument better than you can.

    Then walk it

    1. Test one: ask for the strongest case against the company. A convicted founder gives you a sharper bear case than your own and then tells you why they are taking the risk anyway. A deluded one tells you there isn't one.
    2. Test two: ask what data would make them stop. 'We'd know by Q3 whether the enterprise motion works, and if payback is still over 30 months we pivot to self-serve' is conviction. 'It will work' is not.
    3. Test three: look at what they have already changed. Every founder who has been at it eighteen months has been wrong about something. Ask what, and what they did. Someone who has never revised anything either has not shipped or is not listening.
    4. Test four: separate the belief about the destination from the belief about the route. Stubborn on the mission, flexible on the path, is the combination that works. Stubborn on both is the failure mode.
    5. Watch how they talk about customers who said no. Delusion sounds like 'they didn't understand it'. Conviction sounds like 'they didn't have the budget line, so we changed who we sell to'.
    6. And the limitation I would admit: this call is genuinely hard and the same trait produces both outcomes. Several of the best companies of the last twenty years looked delusional at seed and their investors have said so. So I would rather be wrong by backing a few founders who turned out deluded than build a filter so tight it screens out the outliers.

    Where candidates lose it

    Framing it as a personality read — 'you can just tell'. Interviewers hear that as pattern-matching with no method. Give behavioural tests that produce observable answers, and admit that the best outcomes often looked like the failure mode early.

    Expect next

    • Give me a company that looked delusional and worked.
    • What would make you pass on a founder you liked?
    • How do you avoid being sold to in a founder meeting?

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.