Learning Path
Your guide to the VC analyst & associate role
7 chapters, 29 modules, and the best stuff we know of for each — books, podcasts, videos, newsletters, and external deep-dives. No account, no quizzes, no certificate. Read what you need, skip what you do not.
Start from your seat
Track · Principal · VP · senior associate starting to lead
Principal & VP
The principal seat is where nobody hands you work anymore. You're judged on deals you found, won and can defend, on how you behave in a boardroom, and increasingly on whether LPs would back you. This track starts with the chapter on leading deals, then pulls in the mechanics and fund-level context a lead needs from elsewhere in the learning path.
10 modules across the learning path
Track · CFO · controller · fund accountant · IR · compliance · platform · talent
Fund Ops & Platform
Ops isn't a rung on the investing ladder, and it isn't one job. Fund operations is a finance and compliance discipline; platform is a talent and go-to-market one. Both sit outside the analyst-to-partner path, both are real ways into a firm, and very little is written for either. This track pulls the modules each needs from across the learning path, in reading order, and says how deeply to read each one.
11 modules across the learning path
The VC World
Start here. The basics: what venture capital actually is, how a fund makes money, why investors obsess over one-in-ten-wins math, and what an analyst or associate does all day. If you're already in a VC seat, you can skim. You probably know most of it.
4 modules
Startups as Investments
You know the VC world now. Time to look at what VCs are actually buying. This chapter is about the thing on the other side of the cheque: the startup. How it grows, how it makes money, what separates the ones that work from the ones that don't, and how to tell a real market from a pitch-deck market.
4 modules
Deal Mechanics
This is the chapter with the Excel in it. Cap tables, SAFEs, convertible notes, term sheets. The actual plumbing of a VC deal. If you ever find yourself in a case interview being asked to model a Series A, everything you need is here.
3 modules
Evaluating Deals
Now for the craft. Every associate picks these skills up on the job, but there's no reason you can't start now. Sourcing. Reading a pitch deck. Running a first meeting with a founder. Doing real diligence. Writing an investment memo that gets a deal through an IC.
6 modules
After the Check
Most of the internet treats VC like the job ends when the wire hits the founder's bank account. It doesn't. The back half of the associate role is everything that happens with the portfolio: the support, the follow-ons, the reserves. This chapter keeps it light enough that you'll know what people are talking about, without pretending you can do the job yet.
3 modules
Leading Deals
Chapters 1-5 prepare you to support a deal. This one is about owning one: winning it against other firms, pricing it so it can matter to the fund, sitting on the board afterward, and building the thesis that brings the next one to you. It's written for the principal and VP seat, and for senior associates starting to lead. It closes with the part nobody puts in the job description: what it takes to make partner.
5 modules
Running the Fund
Chapters 1-6 follow the deal. This one follows the money around it: how committed capital gets called and returned, how the portfolio gets marked, what LPs receive every quarter, and the rules a fund operates under. It's the core of the fund operations seat, and the part of the partner job nobody sees from the analyst desk. Analysts can skim it. Anyone heading toward ops or a GP seat should read it properly.
4 modules