Venture Capital Roles - Salary and Responsibilities | F1GMAT MBA Admissions Consulting, Essay Editing and Interview Prep

Pursuing an MBA from a top Business School is key to making it big in the Venture Capital Industry if you don’t have any entrepreneurial experience or a Finance background.

While one could start off as an Analyst or as an investment banker after a Bachelor’s degree and then move on to an Associate position, getting an MBA significantly improves the odds of promotion.

The Career of a VC transitions from Senior Associate to Vice-President or Principal to Junior Partner to Senior/Partner to a Managing Director/General Partner role.

As short as it might look, the difficulty to get past each stage gets harder as one goes higher up the hierarchy.

Venture Capital - Roles and Responsibilities

• Analyst (Pre-MBA): The role of a venture capital analyst includes financial modeling, due diligence assistance, and offering insights as needed.

The analyst's job is to double-check facts and validate or refute the industry's forecasts. This position involves very little client interaction.

• Associate: Associates supervise the work of analysts and oversee other responsibilities within the organization.

Associates usually spend most of their time assessing promising businesses, interviewing startup founders about their businesses and prospects, and bringing potential clients to the attention of the leadership.

• Principal: A principal is a senior member of the investment team at a venture capital firm.

They play a key role in the VC firm's fundraising activities as well as strategic and investment decisions.
After investing, Principal VC typically takes on mentorship roles for businesses.

• Partners: A small VC firm's partners are its founders or founding team. They are driven by organizational and brand goals while also assisting portfolio companies in achieving scale with efficient fund allocation.

• Managing Director/General Partner: For medium to large VC firms, the partner role has considerable stock options to incentivize making decisions that are holistically valuable for the organization. The Managing Director or General Partner is the penultimate role in such large organization. They are often the founding team or select founders.

There are funds created by Entrepreneurs with Managing Directors as the first appointee. Such roles are earned by industry experts with experience in multiple investment processes, launches, and exits. They also have considerable control over how the funding is deployed.

The Managing Director will often spend a significant amount of time talking to outside investors, promoting the fund, and meeting with the owners of firms that are close to going public.

Salary of Venture Capital Roles – Analyst to Managing Director

The difference in salary range of each Role increases by $50,000 from Analyst to Associate to Principal to Junior Partner, while the Partner to Management Director transition showed the biggest jump in salary – in the range of $200,000 to a million dollars.

Roles	Salary Range
Analyst	$60-000 - $100,000
Associate	$150,000 - $200,000
Senior Associate	$200,000 - $250,000
Principal or Vice President (VP)	$250,000 - $400,000
Junior Partner / Partner	$400,000 - $600,000
General Partner / Managing Director	$500,000 - $2,000,000