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. 029How do the unit economics of a marketplace differ from a SaaS business?Unit economics and cohortsIntermediatetechnicalConsumer VCIndian venture capital

   Say this

   A marketplace has two customers and revenue is take rate on gross merchandise value, so the numbers to watch are contribution margin per transaction, liquidity, and repeat rate on both sides. SaaS has one customer and recurring contracted revenue, so retention and payback do most of the work.

   Then walk it

   1. Start with the revenue definition, because this is where founders obscure things: GMV is not revenue. Net revenue is take rate times GMV, and a company quoting a $500m GMV run rate on a 4 percent take rate is a $20m revenue business.
   2. Contribution margin per order is the core metric, and it has to be after all variable cost: payment processing, delivery, support, refunds, and any incentive or discount funded by the company. Indian food delivery and quick commerce both spent years with negative contribution margin per order while reporting GMV growth.
   3. Liquidity is the marketplace-specific concept with no SaaS equivalent: what share of listings transact, and how fast. It is the real measure of product-market fit, and it can look fine nationally while being broken in every individual city.
   4. So you analyse marketplaces city by city or category by category, never in aggregate. The question is whether the oldest, most mature city is profitable at the unit level, because that city is the only evidence of what the others become.
   5. Retention works differently on both sides. Supply-side churn is often the harder problem and is under-reported — a marketplace losing 60 percent of its sellers a year is permanently re-acquiring supply. And disintermediation matters: once buyer and seller know each other, do they transact off-platform?
   6. The genuine advantage over SaaS is capital intensity and network effects: no cost of goods in the classic model, and each side makes the other more valuable. The genuine disadvantage is that revenue is transactional, not contracted, so it can fall 40 percent in a quarter in a way software revenue cannot.

   Where candidates lose it

   Accepting GMV as the growth metric. Every marketplace deck leads with it because it is the biggest number available. Ask for net revenue and contribution margin per order in the oldest city, and know the word liquidity — that is the vocabulary check.

   Expect next

   • How would you calculate CAC for a two-sided marketplace?
   • What is disintermediation risk and how do you test for it?
   • Which side would you subsidise and for how long?

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.