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. 025A company shows net revenue retention of 140 percent and logo churn of 30 percent. What is going on?Unit economics and cohortsHardtechnicalGrowth equitySaaS-focused funds

   Say this

   A small number of large accounts are expanding hard while a long tail of small accounts is falling out the bottom. The 140 is real but it is concentration, not health, and the business has two entirely different customer bases being reported as one.

   Then walk it

   1. Mechanically: if your top 10 percent of accounts double and your bottom 30 percent disappear, dollars grow while customer count shrinks. Both numbers are honest and together they describe a business that only works upmarket.
   2. The first thing I would ask for is the retention table split by initial contract size. I would expect something like 130 percent net retention above $100k ACV and 60 percent below $20k. That split is the actual finding.
   3. Why it matters: the company is spending sales and marketing to acquire small customers who leave, which drags the blended payback out. If they stopped selling to the bottom segment, revenue growth would slow and efficiency would jump sharply.
   4. The risk in the 140 is concentration. Ask what share of revenue the top ten accounts represent. If it is over 40 percent and the expansion is usage-based, one customer's budget cycle can flip the whole retention number negative.
   5. Also test whether the expansion is real adoption or a pricing artefact. A seat-based product growing with customer headcount compounds. Expansion driven by a one-time land-and-expand from a pilot to an enterprise licence does not repeat.
   6. The conclusion I would take to the partnership: this is probably a good enterprise business wearing a bad SMB business as a costume. The diligence question becomes whether they can kill the low end without breaking the growth story they have sold to previous investors.

   Where candidates lose it

   Reading the 140 as unambiguously good and stopping. Paired with 30 percent logo churn it is a signal about segment mix, not quality. The candidates who do well here immediately ask for the metrics split by cohort and contract size rather than commenting on the blended figures.

   Expect next

   • What would you tell them to do about the low end?
   • How much customer concentration would make you pass?
   • How do you tell adoption-driven expansion from a pricing artefact?

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.