MBA grads are often warned not to take jobs in venture. 3 young VCs tell us why they did it anyway.

• Conventional wisdom says MBAs should not take jobs in venture straight from school.
• Insider spoke with 3 MBAs who say they are happy they launched immediate careers as VCs.
• They all said they had to be very choosy about what firm they picked.

Conventional wisdom says that MBAs should not go directly into a venture capital jobs but should first spend years toiling away at companies, preferably startups, to get operating experience.

Some VCs won’t even hire new grad MBAs as investing associates.

But Insider spoke with three early-career VCs with MBAs who say they are pleased with their decision to go directly into venture after school, even though all warned of potential pitfalls.

“At Stanford, most of the professors said if you want to be in VC you should go to a growth-stage startup,” said Jesse Wedler, a partner at CapitalG. “I ignored their advice.” Wedler worked his way from MBA associate to partner at CapitalG in less than a decade.

Priya Purewal, a senior associate at March Capital, said that VCs are not even actively recruiting from MBA programs.

“Unless you know people at a fund, it’s difficult a to get a role in VC,” Purewal said. She attended Columbia to switch careers from a Deloitte consultant to a venture investor, and took on internships in venture while in school.

“I had three internships and two years to network my way through the industry. If I had still been at Deloitte, there’s no way I would have met VCs,” she said.

It was those internships that taught her how to model a young startup’s value to determine investment terms.

“If you were trying to switch from consulting to investing, it would be a steep learning curve,” Purewal said. “There isn’t time to get caught up.”

The first big decision new MBAs must make: take a job at a small fund or a larger one?

When she graduated last year, Purewal received offers from small firms where she says she would have been able to weigh-in on every deal but also would have had to spend much of her day handling administrative tasks.

“If you go to smaller fund, you end up in a cross functional role,” she said.

There was also the matter of compensation. Smaller firms were offering a cut of returns – known as carry – but a much lower salary. And even though going to a new fund could mean a bigger upside, it also carried more risk because the partners had limited track records.

“I had loans to pay off from business school so I prioritized hard cash,” Purewal said.

Though she does not get carry at March, Purewal is part of a profit sharing pool that will give her some upside in successful deals.

Purewal says it was also important for her career to join a firm that plans to keep expanding and raising new capital.

“You need a new fund to be promoted,” she said.

As a senior associate she says she meets with three to four founders a week, performs diligence, and has veto power over any deal.

“It’s a pure VC role,” Purewal said. “I got lucky.”

Wedler advises that unless a new grad can somehow get hired at a very top firm like Sequoia, Benchmark, or, in his case, Google’s powerhouse venture arm CapitalG, he says MBAs are usually better off going to a smaller firm.

“You have huge potential to have an impact on the firm and could play a role in its direction,” Wedler said.

Eddie Lee, a principal at White Star Capital who graduated from Columbia Business School in 2019, said MBAs should try to get a sense in interviews of how quickly they will advance.

“If you want partnership, then go for a younger, leaner team,” Lee said. “Carry is the biggest reason to go into VC.”