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. 077What return does a fund need to be considered top quartile, and what does that require of the portfolio?Fund economicsHardtechnicalSeed fundsVC fund operations

   Say this

   Roughly 2.5 to 3x net TVPI for an early-stage fund, which means about 3.5x gross before fees and carry. On a $100m fund that is $350m of gross proceeds, and given the power law it has to come from one or two companies, which sets a specific requirement on ownership and exit scale.

   Then walk it

   1. Work the gross-to-net gap first, because most candidates skip it. To return 3x net you need roughly 3.5 to 3.8x gross: fees consume 15 to 18 percent of the fund and carry takes 20 percent of the profit above capital.
   2. So $100m committed needs about $350m back gross. Apply the power law: expect half the portfolio to return under 1x, so the top two or three names have to produce $280m to $300m of it.
   3. Which fixes the requirement. One company producing $200m means either a $2bn exit with 10 percent retained, or a $1bn exit with 20 percent retained. Both are demanding, and the second is usually harder to hold through three rounds of dilution than the first is to achieve.
   4. That is why fund size is the binding constraint on strategy. A $100m fund can get there on a single $2bn outcome. A $1bn fund needs the equivalent of five of them, and there are not many $2bn-plus outcomes in a decade, which is the structural reason large venture funds underperform small ones on multiple.
   5. The other lever is DPI timing, because top quartile is measured by vintage against peers and an LP is looking at IRR too. The same 3x delivered by year eight rather than year thirteen is a completely different ranking.
   6. And the caveat about the benchmark itself: quartile data is self-reported, survivorship-biased, and the dispersion in venture is extreme — the gap between top and median in venture is far wider than in buyout. Which is why LP capital concentrates so heavily in the same handful of firms, and why a new manager's pitch is so hard.

   Where candidates lose it

   Quoting a net multiple and never bridging to gross. Fees and carry are a 20 to 25 percent haul and ignoring them makes your portfolio arithmetic wrong. And failing to connect the fund-return requirement to fund size — that connection is the whole reason the question gets asked.

   Expect next

   • So what exit do you need from your single best company?
   • Why do larger venture funds tend to return lower multiples?
   • How much should the gross-to-net gap be?

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.