From Junior to Standout: The Skills That Fast-Track Your Growth in Venture Capital
Juniors who rise fast in venture capital don’t just execute tasks; they master the fund’s two wings. First comes the Founders wing, where building real track records earns you credibility. Then comes the Limited Partner (LP) side, where proven results translate into influence.
Understanding How VC Funds Actually Work
Before optimizing your career, you need to understand how VC funds are structured. A VC fund is essentially a bridge between two groups: LPs who supply capital, and founders who use that capital to build companies. The fund’s job is to allocate that capital to the right founders and then return more money back to LPs over time.
Because of this, everything you do should ladder up to one of two goals:
Helping the fund find, pick, and support great founders.
Helping the fund raise and maintain capital from LPs.
You start your career with the first goal. You earn your way to the second.
Why Juniors Start on the Founders Wing
The LP wing is not the place where careers begin; it is where strong track records get monetized. LPs care about evidence: deals you sourced, pushed through the investment committee, and that later outperformed. Without that, you are just another person with opinions.
In contrast, the Founders wing is where you can build that evidence:
You see many deals and sharpen your judgment.
You build relationships that generate proprietary deal flow.
You show partners that you can find and champion winners.
Focus on founders first because that is how you accumulate the track record and reputation that LPs will eventually care about.
What the Founders Wing Is Really About
The Founders wing is not just “networking with startups”. It is about becoming meaningfully valuable to founders, so that they want to work with you and, through you, with your fund.
Your job on this wing is to:
Build genuine connections with founders.
Create value for them consistently enough that they remember you and talk about you.
Translate those relationships into high‑quality deal flow for your fund.
When you do this well, your reputation starts to compound. Founders introduce you to other founders. You see rounds early, sometimes before they are broadly shopped.
Two Engines of Deal Flow: Founders and VCs
There are two main ways you will source deals:
Founders
This is the most powerful engine. When founders trust you, they:Share what they are building before it is widely known.
Introduce you to other founders in their network.
Come to you first when they think about raising.
Other VCs and investors
The second engine is your relationships with other investors. With them, your relationship is often based on:Sharing interesting opportunities that might be a better fit for their fund.
Collaborating on rounds where both funds can complement each other.
If you become known as someone who sends high‑quality, relevant deals, your peers will return the favor. Over time, this creates a powerful deal‑sharing network around you.
Where to Find the Right Connections
You cannot build these two engines from behind a laptop. You need to go where founders and investors actually are.
High‑leverage places include:
Major conferences and forums where startups exhibit, and investors roam the floor, such as Money20/20, Leap, Biban, and similar events.
Demo days hosted by accelerators and incubators (Flat6Labs, 500 Global, Plug & Play, etc.), where multiple early‑stage founders present their startups.
In these places, you are surrounded by founders actively building and investors actively hunting. Your job is to move from being a passive attendee to being the person who consistently leaves with meaningful conversations and follow‑ups.
How to Build Connections That Actually Stick
Simply meeting people is not enough. The core of relationship‑building in VC is not “being friendly”; it is being valuable. People stay in touch with those who help them move forward.
With founders, your value might be:
Strategic perspective: helping them think through positioning, pricing, or go‑to‑market from a broader market view.
Introductions: connecting them to a potential customer, partner, or hire, including portfolio companies that could benefit from a partnership.
Tactical support: sharing relevant resources, feedback on their deck, or reflections on investor expectations at their stage.
With other VCs, your value is often:
Sending them deals they are unlikely to see first themselves.
Giving them early looks at themes or companies where you have unique access.
If both founders and investors associate you with “this person sends me useful things,” your network compounds much faster.
Stay Informed: Make Knowledge Your Edge
You cannot be valuable to founders or VCs if you have nothing to bring into the conversation. Staying close to market information is part of your job, not a side hobby.
Make it a routine to:
Follow funding news and new rounds, so you understand who is backing what and at which stage and valuation ranges. Useful resources: Axios Pro Rata, Zero to One, VC React
Track macro and sector news, so you can think through how changes in regulation, interest rates, or technology waves might affect startups. Useful resources: Digital Digest, Argaam
Expose yourself to many startups, ideas, and business models, so your pattern recognition becomes richer over time.
When you do this consistently, conversations with founders and VCs become more interesting. You can connect dots, reference examples, and offer context instead of asking basic questions. That is how you move from “junior note‑taker” to “thoughtful counterpart”.
Build an Online Presence That Amplifies Your Work
In a reputation‑driven industry, your online presence can quietly work for you while you sleep. It is not about personal branding for its own sake; it is about making your thinking and your value visible.
You can:
Share short insights on markets you follow: sector dynamics, emerging models, or key questions you are exploring.
Highlight startups you believe in (without disclosing anything confidential) and explain your rationale clearly.
Write blog posts or threads that show how you analyze companies, markets, or product strategies.
Over time, this creates a public track record of how you think. Founders might reach out to you because something you wrote resonated. Other investors may start to recognize your name before meeting you in person.
When You’re Ready: Moving to the LP Wing
After years of doing the work on the Founders wing, sourcing, evaluating, supporting companies, and contributing to real outcomes, you start to have something crucial: evidence. Deals you sourced that closed. Companies you backed that performed well. Founders who advocate for you.
At that point, you can begin contributing meaningfully on the LP side by:
Helping your fund articulate its edge, using concrete stories from your deals.
Building relationships with potential LPs and explaining why your portfolio and strategy deserve their capital.
Supporting the fundraising process with data, narratives, and access to founders who can speak to the fund’s value.
Fundraising becomes much more credible when it is anchored in a track record and reputation you have already built in the market.
Closing Thought: Earn the Right to Ask for Capital
As a junior in VC, your career accelerates when you accept one simple sequence: start with founders, then move to LPs. First, learn how the industry works. Then, build a network where you consistently create value. Then, turn that into a track record that speaks louder than any pitch deck.
If you respect that order and focus on being useful every day, you will not just “work in VC”, you will become one of the people others in the ecosystem actively seek out.
