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. 011Size the market for electric two-wheelers in India.Market sizing and estimationIntermediatetechnicalIndian venture capitalGrowth equity

   Say this

   Start from the total two-wheeler market, take the realistic electric penetration curve, then convert to revenue at the electric price point. India sells roughly 17 to 18 million two-wheelers a year, electric is in the high single digits of that today, and the plausible path is 25 to 30 percent within five to seven years.

   Then walk it

   1. Base: about 17 million two-wheelers a year, in a country with roughly 300 million households, so penetration is already high and the market is mostly replacement plus first-time urban buyers.
   2. Penetration: electric is around 6 to 10 percent of new sales now, concentrated in scooters rather than motorcycles, because urban short-trip use suits the range and the drivetrain.
   3. So at 25 percent penetration that is roughly 4.5 million units a year. At an average selling price of ₹1.1 lakh, that is about ₹500bn, call it $6bn of annual vehicle revenue.
   4. Then the segments that matter more for a venture return, because the vehicle itself is a low-margin manufacturing business: batteries and swapping, charging infrastructure, and financing. Financing is the interesting one — at 80 percent loan-to-value on $6bn of sales that is roughly $5bn of annual originations.
   5. Then the constraints I would name unprompted: subsidy dependence, since FAME-type incentives have repeatedly moved the price point and demand with it; battery cell import reliance; and the fleet segment, where delivery and ride-hailing operators buy on total cost per kilometre and adopt years ahead of retail.
   6. Cross-check: electric two-wheeler penetration in China ran far higher far earlier, which says the ceiling is not technological. And petrol at ₹105 a litre against electricity means a running cost gap of roughly 80 percent per kilometre, which is why the fleet segment converts first.

   Where candidates lose it

   Producing one unit number and stopping. The investable question is which layer of the stack has venture-scale margin, and for EVs that is usually batteries, swapping or financing rather than assembling vehicles. Also: ignoring subsidy dependence, which has already reset this market twice.

   Expect next

   • Which layer of that value chain would you actually invest in?
   • What happens to the unit economics if the subsidy goes away?
   • How would you diligence a battery-swapping company?
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?
3. 013What is 301 times 447?Market sizing and estimationCorephone / first roundGeneral AtlanticGeneralist · New York · 2026Vista Equity PartnersPrivate Equity · Austin · 2021

   Say this

   134,547. Break the awkward number into a round one plus a remainder: 300 times 447 is 134,100, and one more 447 gives 134,547. Say the method out loud as you go, because they are listening to the decomposition more than the answer.

   Then walk it

   1. Split 301 into 300 plus 1. Three times 447 is 1,341, so 300 times 447 is 134,100.
   2. Add the last 447: 134,547. Two steps, about five seconds.
   3. The alternative decomposition works too: 447 is 450 minus 3, so 301 times 450 is 135,450, minus 903 gives 134,547. Same answer, and it is worth knowing both because sometimes one side is the rounder number.
   4. Then sanity-check the magnitude before you speak: 300 times 450 is about 135,000, so anything not starting with 13 is wrong. That check costs nothing and saves you from a transposition error.
   5. Say the working as you do it. In a growth or VC seat mental arithmetic shows up constantly — a revenue multiple in a meeting, an ownership percentage, a dilution check — and the interviewer wants to hear whether you decompose or freeze.
   6. If you genuinely lose the thread, restate the approach and start again rather than guessing. A wrong number said confidently is much worse than ten extra seconds.

   Where candidates lose it

   Trying to do long multiplication in your head, digit by digit, in silence. You will drop a carry and you will look uncomfortable. Round, multiply, adjust, and narrate. Also practise the standard set beforehand: percentages of round numbers, revenue multiples, and 'what IRR is 5x in 5 years'.

   Expect next

   • What is 17 percent of 1,400?
   • A company grows from $4m to $32m of revenue in four years. What is the CAGR?
   • If I invest at a $20m post-money and exit at $340m, what is my multiple on a 10 percent stake?

   Reported by candidates at General Atlantic (Generalist, New York, 2026); Vista Equity Partners (Private Equity, Austin, 2021). Source: Wall Street Oasis.

4. 014What do you look for in a founding team?Founders and teamsCorephone / first roundEarly-stage VCSeed funds

   Say this

   Four things, in this order: earned insight into the specific problem, the ability to recruit people better than themselves, unusual speed of learning, and enough resilience to survive three years of it not working. At seed, the team is most of what you are underwriting.

   Then walk it

   1. Earned insight. Not domain experience as a line on a CV, but a specific, slightly contrarian belief about the market that came from doing the work. The test is whether they tell me something about the industry I did not know and could not have read.
   2. Recruiting ability. The first ten hires determine the company, and the only evidence that matters is who has already said yes to them. If a genuinely impressive engineer left a good job to join, that is a stronger signal than any reference.
   3. Rate of learning. I compare what they said three months ago to what they say now. Founders who update fast on evidence compound; founders who defend the original plan do not.
   4. Resilience, which is the one nobody can fake for long. Most companies spend a long stretch looking dead. I look for prior evidence of finishing something hard with no external pressure to do so.
   5. On co-founder dynamics: clear decision rights, complementary skills rather than duplicated ones, and a track record of disagreeing productively. I would rather see two people argue in front of me than perform agreement.
   6. The honest limitation: founder assessment is where investors are most overconfident. My pattern-matching is largely a bias toward people who remind me of people who already worked, which is how whole categories of founders get missed. So I weight evidence from the business over my read of the person wherever I can.

   Where candidates lose it

   Giving the generic list — passionate, smart, hard-working. Everyone the fund meets is those things. The differentiators are recruiting evidence, rate of learning, and earned insight, all of which are observable. And you must name the bias problem, because the honest answer to 'how do you judge founders' includes 'imperfectly'.

   Expect next

   • How do you tell conviction from delusion?
   • Would you back a solo founder?
   • What is the strongest founder signal you have ever seen?
5. 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?
6. 016A brilliant solo founder, no technical co-founder, strong early traction. Invest or pass?Founders and teamsIntermediatetechnicalEarly-stage VCSeed funds

   Say this

   It depends on whether the missing capability is on the critical path and whether they can hire it. Solo founders are not disqualifying — the data is roughly neutral — but a non-technical solo founder in a deep-technology business is a real problem, and the same person in a distribution-led business often is not.

   Then walk it

   1. First: is the hard part of this company technical or commercial? A compliance-workflow product where the moat is regulatory relationships and sales can survive an outsourced build. A new database cannot.
   2. Second: what has the traction actually proven? If they got to $500k of revenue with contractors and no CTO, they have proven demand and they have taken on technical debt. Both are true and both get priced.
   3. Third, and decisive: can they recruit? Ask who they have already tried to hire as CTO, what happened, and who is in the pipeline. A founder with two credible engineering leaders in late-stage conversation is a different risk from one who has not started.
   4. The structural risk is single point of failure. No one to argue with, no one to cover when they burn out, and a key-person dependency that shows up in every later diligence. That does get priced, usually in ownership or in a vesting and governance structure.
   5. How I would actually do it: invest with the round sized and milestoned to a senior technical hire, help run that search as the main value-add, and reserve for a bridge if it takes longer. Possibly a slightly larger option pool to fund the hire.
   6. And the honest data point: solo-founder companies are well represented among large outcomes, so a blanket rule against them is a filter that costs you more than it saves. The real question is capability gap, not headcount.

   Where candidates lose it

   Giving a policy answer either way. 'We never back solo founders' is a lazy heuristic the interviewer will push back on, and 'traction solves everything' ignores the execution risk. The answer is conditional on where the hard part of the business sits, and it ends with a structure, not a verdict.

   Expect next

   • How would you structure the round to manage that risk?
   • What if they refuse to give up the CTO title?
   • Name a solo-founder company that worked and say why.
7. 017How do you reference-check a founder?Founders and teamsIntermediatetechnicalGrowth equityEarly-stage VC

   Say this

   Off-list references are the only ones that matter, and the useful calls are with people who worked for the founder rather than above them. On-list references tell you the founder can pick three friends.

   Then walk it

   1. Get the list, call it quickly, and treat it as a formality. Then build your own list: former direct reports, a co-founder they parted from, customers who churned, and an investor from a previous company.
   2. Direct reports are the highest-signal call. Ask whether they would join this founder again, and listen to the pause before the answer. Ask who else on the team should I talk to, which quietly widens the list.
   3. Ask behavioural, not evaluative, questions. Not 'is she a good leader' but 'tell me about a time she changed her mind' and 'what happened the last time the company missed a quarter'. Stories are checkable; adjectives are not.
   4. Always ask the negative directly: 'what is the thing that will frustrate their next investor?' Referees will tell you, but only if you ask in a way that gives them permission.
   5. Then triangulate with customer calls, which for growth-stage deals are worth more than the founder references. Ask what would make them switch away and what the renewal conversation actually looked like.
   6. The limitation: references are systematically positive because the network is small and nobody wants to torch a relationship. So I read them for the shape of the concerns rather than a verdict, and I weight one specific negative story over five glowing generalities.

   Where candidates lose it

   Only calling the list you were given, and asking questions that can be answered with 'yes, she's great'. Also forgetting that founders find out you called. Off-list references need handling with judgement, especially with a live process and a signed term sheet in the market.

   Expect next

   • What would you do if one off-list reference was strongly negative?
   • How do you reference-check without damaging the relationship?
   • What do you ask a customer that you cannot ask the founder?
8. 018Two co-founders, a fifty-fifty split, no vesting. What do you say to them?Founders and teamsIntermediatetechnicalEarly-stage VCSeed funds

   Say this

   The split I can live with; the absence of vesting I cannot. Any round I lead will put both founders on four-year vesting with a one-year cliff, with credit for time already served, and that is a condition rather than a negotiation.

   Then walk it

   1. Why vesting is non-negotiable: if a founder leaves in month eight with 50 percent of the company unvested-but-owned, the remaining founder is running a business where half the equity belongs to someone who has gone. No later investor will fund that, and no new hire can be paid properly out of what is left.
   2. Mechanics: four years, one-year cliff, monthly thereafter, with acceleration only on a change of control and usually double-trigger. Credit for time already worked is the fair concession — if they have been at it 18 months, they start 18 months vested.
   3. On the fifty-fifty split itself: it is fine and often healthy, but it is worth asking how they break a tie. Companies with no decision-maker stall at exactly the moment speed matters. I would want to hear a real answer, even an informal one.
   4. The deeper thing the question is really testing: how the founders react to being told. A pair who immediately understand why an investor needs it are much easier to work with than a pair who treat it as distrust. This is genuinely diagnostic.
   5. And frame it for them in their own interest, because that is the truthful framing: vesting protects the founder who stays, not the investor. Ask them which of them would want to be the one left holding 50 percent of a company they cannot fund.
   6. One nuance: acceleration on termination without cause is a reasonable founder ask and I would give some of it. Full single-trigger acceleration on any acquisition is not, because it strips the acquirer of retention.

   Where candidates lose it

   Focusing the answer on the fifty-fifty split. The split is a talking point; the missing vesting is the actual deal issue and it will be the first thing your investment committee asks about. Lead there, then say how you would give credit for time served so it does not read as a power grab.

   Expect next

   • What is single versus double-trigger acceleration?
   • What if one founder has already checked out?
   • Would you invest in a company where one founder has left and kept their shares?
9. 019Walk me through CAC, lifetime value and payback, and tell me how each one gets manipulated.Unit economics and cohortsCoretechnicalGrowth equity

   Say this

   CAC is all the money you spent to acquire a paying customer, divided by the customers you actually acquired. LTV is the gross profit that customer produces over their life, discounted. Payback is how many months of contribution margin it takes to earn the CAC back. Payback is the one I trust.

   Then walk it

   1. CAC properly done is fully loaded: paid media, sales and marketing salaries and commissions, tools, and any onboarding cost, divided by new paying customers in that period. Not just ad spend.
   2. LTV is gross-margin based, not revenue based: ARPU times gross margin, divided by monthly churn, discounted if the life is long. Using revenue instead of gross profit inflates it by whatever your cost of service is.
   3. Payback in months is CAC divided by monthly gross profit per customer. Best-in-class B2B SaaS is under 12 months, acceptable is 12 to 18, and above 24 months you are running a financing business rather than a software business.
   4. The three manipulations to look for. One, blended CAC that folds organic and word-of-mouth customers into the denominator while only counting paid spend in the numerator — always ask for paid CAC on paid customers. Two, LTV built on an early cohort's churn, which is always the best cohort. Three, a churn assumption of 1 percent monthly applied to a company that is eighteen months old and has never observed a five-year life.
   5. The practical rule I would state: LTV/CAC above 3 is the convention, but it is nearly meaningless without payback, because a 5x LTV/CAC with a 36-month payback will kill the company on cash before the ratio ever pays out.
   6. One real number to anchor it: at $12,000 CAC, $1,000 monthly revenue and 80 percent gross margin, payback is 15 months. If monthly churn is 2 percent, implied life is 50 months and LTV is $40,000, so LTV/CAC is 3.3x. Both numbers are fine; the fragile input is that 2 percent.

   Where candidates lose it

   Quoting LTV/CAC above 3 as if it settles the question, and using revenue instead of gross profit in LTV. Also: not asking over what period CAC was measured. Founders present a good quarter. Ask for twelve months and for paid-only CAC, and the ratio usually halves.

   Expect next

   • Why do you prefer payback to LTV/CAC?
   • What is a good payback period for consumer versus enterprise?
   • How would you calculate CAC for a marketplace?
10. 020What is the burn multiple and why do investors like it?Unit economics and cohortsIntermediatetechnicalGrowth equityLate-stage VC

    Say this

    Net burn divided by net new annual recurring revenue over the same period. It answers one question: how many dollars did you set on fire to buy a dollar of new recurring revenue. Under 1.5 is excellent, 1.5 to 2 is fine, above 3 means the growth is bought rather than earned.

    Then walk it

    1. The calculation: if you burned $12m in a year and added $6m of net new ARR, the burn multiple is 2.0. Net new ARR is net of churn and downgrades, which is the whole point — it punishes growth that is leaking out the back.
    2. Why it beats the alternatives: growth rate alone rewards companies that buy revenue, and efficiency ratios based on a single quarter can be gamed by pausing spend. The burn multiple is one number that captures both sides at once.
    3. Rough bands, and these hardened after 2022: under 1 is exceptional, 1 to 1.5 is very good, 1.5 to 2 is acceptable at scale, 2 to 3 needs a specific explanation, above 3 is usually a broken go-to-market rather than an investment phase.
    4. It is stage-sensitive and you should say so. A company going from $1m to $3m of ARR will have an ugly multiple because the fixed cost base dominates. From $20m to $40m it is a genuine judgement on efficiency.
    5. What it hides: a company can produce a lovely burn multiple by starving R&D and harvesting an existing base. So I read it next to net revenue retention and the R&D share of spend — good multiple plus deteriorating NRR is a company eating its seed corn.
    6. In practice this is now the first number a growth investor asks for, because it is the cleanest available proxy for whether more capital produces more company.

    Where candidates lose it

    Using gross burn or using total ARR instead of net new ARR. Both make the number look better and both are wrong. And quoting benchmark bands without adjusting for stage — a seed company's burn multiple is nearly uninformative, and saying so is part of a correct answer.

    Expect next

    • What is the magic number and how does it differ from this?
    • How would you fix a burn multiple of 4?
    • What is a good burn multiple for a Series A company?

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.