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?
2. 026If revenues get hit in a quarter, what would you do as CFO to preserve cash flow?Unit economics and cohortsIntermediatetechnicalSilver LakeTechnology, Media and Telecom · San Francisco · 2022

   Say this

   Work in order of reversibility and speed: first the levers that cost nothing to pull and can be undone, then working capital, then discretionary spend, then headcount last. And before any of it, establish whether the quarter is a timing issue or a demand issue, because the answer is completely different.

   Then walk it

   1. Diagnose first. A slipped enterprise deal that closes in six weeks is a timing problem and you do not restructure the company around it. A cohort that stopped converting is a demand problem and you act hard.
   2. Fastest reversible levers: freeze discretionary spend — travel, events, consultants, new tooling — and pause the hiring pipeline without touching existing staff. That typically finds 10 to 15 percent of operating expense within a quarter and can be switched back on.
   3. Working capital next, because it is cash without cutting the business. Tighten collections and chase the ageing receivables, move new contracts to annual upfront with a discount rather than monthly, and stretch payables where the supplier relationship tolerates it. Annual prepay is the single biggest lever in a software business.
   4. Then capital expenditure and committed spend: defer the office build-out, renegotiate the cloud commitment, and look hard at the software stack, where most companies are paying for 30 percent more seats than they use.
   5. Headcount last, and if you do it, do it once and deeply enough that you do not have to come back. Repeated small cuts destroy more value through uncertainty than the cash they save. And protect the revenue-generating and product functions, because you still have to grow out of this.
   6. Then the financing side, which is the real CFO job: extend runway to at least eighteen months, open a venture debt or revolver conversation while the numbers still look fine rather than after they do not, and tell the board in the quarter it happens, not the quarter after.

   Where candidates lose it

   Going straight to layoffs. It signals no sense of sequencing and it is the slowest source of cash once you account for severance. The structure they want is reversible-before-irreversible, and the diagnosis — timing versus demand — before any of it. Mentioning annual prepay and receivables is what marks out someone who has actually looked at a cash flow.

   Expect next

   • How much runway would you insist on holding?
   • When would you take venture debt instead of cutting?
   • How do you decide whether it is a timing problem or a demand problem?

   Reported by candidates at Silver Lake (Technology, Media and Telecom, San Francisco, 2022). Source: Wall Street Oasis.

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.