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. 003You get two hundred inbound decks a month. How do you triage them?Sourcing and deal flowIntermediatetechnicalEarly-stage VCSeed funds

   Say this

   Two filters in sequence. First a hard screen on fund fit that takes thirty seconds, then a judgement screen on the three things that actually predict an outcome. Most of the two hundred die on the first one, and that is fine.

   Then walk it

   1. Hard screen, mechanical: stage, cheque size, geography, sector mandate, and whether the round is already led. If the fund writes $2m seed cheques in India and this is a $40m Series C in Brazil, it is a polite no in one line. That is maybe 70 percent of the pile.
   2. Second screen, three questions only: is the market big enough to return the fund on its own, is there something about this team that makes them the right people for it, and is there evidence anybody actually wants this.
   3. Evidence beats narrative at this stage. Twenty paying customers with a two-week sales cycle tells me more than a beautiful market slide. For consumer, a retention curve that flattens.
   4. Then a deliberate 'weird pile'. Companies that fail the screen but where something is genuinely strange in an interesting way. In a power-law business the outliers rarely look sensible on a first pass, so a purely mechanical filter is a good way to miss the one that matters.
   5. Reply to everyone within a few days, including the noes, with one line of real reason. The cost is low and the reputational return is high, because founders route deals to VCs who answer.
   6. And I would track my own passes. Writing down why I said no, then reviewing those names a year later, is the only way to find out whether my filter is any good.

   Where candidates lose it

   Describing only the mechanical filter. Any associate can build a screen. The interesting half of the answer is how you keep the screen from killing the outlier, and that you close the loop by tracking your own passes.

   Expect next

   • What would make you take a meeting with a company that fails your screen?
   • How would you review your own passes a year later?
   • Which single signal would you keep if you could only keep one?

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.