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. 006How do you size a market for a company that is creating a category that does not exist yet?Market sizing and estimationHardtechnicalEarly-stage VC

   Say this

   You cannot size the category, so you size the behaviour it replaces and then size the behaviour it unlocks. Two numbers: the budget or time being spent on the old way today, and the population that could not participate before because the old way was too expensive.

   Then walk it

   1. Start with substitution. Find the spend that already exists in an adjacent, ugly form — the agency fee, the manual process, the spreadsheet plus two analysts. That is a floor you can defend with real data.
   2. Then expansion, which is where the real answer lives. New categories are usually big because they drop the price by an order of magnitude and bring in users who were priced out. Ride hailing was not sized correctly off the taxi market; it was several times bigger because at half the price people stopped taking the bus.
   3. So build it as price times units at the new price point, not at the old one. That single step is what separates a serious estimate from a top-down slide.
   4. Sanity-check with a revenue-per-user bound. If you claim a billion users at $50 a year in a country where average annual discretionary spend on that category is $8, the number is wrong and you should say so.
   5. Then reverse the question, which is the answer interviewers actually want: forget TAM, what does this company have to be true to return my fund? If I need a $3bn exit, that is roughly $300m of revenue at a 10x multiple, which is 3 million users at $100. Is 3 million users plausible in ten years? That question is answerable; 'what is the TAM' is not.
   6. And say the limitation out loud: for genuinely new categories the TAM number is theatre. It is a test of whether your reasoning holds, not a forecast anyone believes.

   Where candidates lose it

   Pulling a Gartner number off a slide. The interviewer wants to watch you build it. And sizing the incumbent market only — that is the error that made every early taxi-market analysis of ride hailing too small by a factor of five.

   Expect next

   • So what does this company need to look like for us to make 10x?
   • When is a small market actually fine?
   • How would you size the market for an AI coding agent?
2. 012You have ten minutes with a founder and no deck. What do you ask?Market sizing and estimationHardsuperdayEarly-stage VCSeed funds

   Say this

   Five questions, each designed to be hard to rehearse. Why you, why now, what did you learn last month that you did not know before, what does your best cohort do, and what would have to be true for this to be worth ten billion dollars.

   Then walk it

   1. 'Why are you the person to build this?' Founder-market fit in their own words. I am listening for specific earned insight, not a career summary.
   2. 'Why is this possible now and not in 2019?' If there is no real answer, the company is probably a feature or a timing bet with no tailwind. This question kills more pitches than any other.
   3. 'What did you learn in the last month that changed your plan?' This is the highest-signal question I know, because it cannot be prepped and it reveals whether they are actually running experiments or just executing a deck.
   4. 'Show me your best cohort.' Not aggregate growth — one cohort, month by month. Retention curves do not lie and founders who know theirs by heart are usually the ones running the business off the data.
   5. 'What has to be true for this to be a ten-billion-dollar company?' I want to hear them reason about their own ceiling. Founders who have never thought about it are usually optimising for the next round, not the outcome.
   6. And I would spend at least two of the ten minutes shutting up. The questions matter less than whether they ask me anything sharp back, and whether they say 'I don't know' when they don't know.

   Where candidates lose it

   Reeling off fifteen diligence questions. Ten minutes means five questions and real listening. Also asking anything that a deck already answers — you learn nothing from 'what does the product do'. Pick questions that only the founder can answer.

   Expect next

   • Which of those five is most predictive, in your view?
   • What answer would make you pass immediately?
   • How do you avoid falling for a charismatic founder?

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.