A First-Time VC Shares His Tips for Nailing an Interview at a VC Fund

• Justin Ouyang never had a full-time VC job, and felt anxious about his interview at OMERS Ventures.
• After lots of research and asking for advice from his professional network, he got the job. 
• Ouyang advises those thinking about a VC career to try angel investing before diving in full-time.

Everything was going well in Justin Ouyang’s career. He had been working at

Slack

in sales strategy and operations for nearly three years, and was an

angel investor

on the side. 

But he felt like investing was his calling, and didn’t know how to break in full-time. For years, he had been an angel investor and made connections with startup founders and VCs.

“I always admired venture capital from the outside because you get paid to learn. You get to meet with people, hear their story, learn their point of view,” he said. 

Ouyang decided to update his LinkedIn profile to highlight his past investing experiences and featured key details about his angel investments and returns on his profile. 

Within a month, a message from OMERS Ventures, the venture arm of the Canadian public pension fund, showed up in his inbox asking him if he was interested in their open investor role. 

“I was excited,” Ouyang said.  “But I had not interviewed for like, three years, so I was very out of practice.” 

He agreed to take the interview, but  had no idea what to expect going into it.  “People don’t major in venture capital in college or anything like that, ” he said.

To prepare for the interview, Ouyang immediately began researching all that he could about OMERS Ventures and their investing focus. ,  

He approached it like a college student. “I thought about what I do and what I kind of knew in terms of majors and minors,” he said. That helped him articulate where his strengths were when potentially advising a startup at the board level. 

Ouyang’s first round interview was a case study on a specific topic, which he had a week to evaluate. “I was asked about tax operations from the office of the CFO, which I knew nothing about,” he said. “I thought, ‘I’m going to bomb this interview.'”

Instead of panicking, he went and spoke to friends and old coworkers who were founders, and asked them for quick intros to their acquaintances that had more expertise on tax operations.  

“I almost felt like I’m cheating a little bit,” Ouyang said. i “But in venture, that’s part of your job. They expect you to go talk to your network and figure out what you can about the space and come up with your own perspective afterwards.” 

The team at OMERS was impressed with his in-depth report, and he made it to the second round. They gave him a prospective company that the firm had already evaluated, and asked to drum up a high level term sheet without reaching out to that company. 

Ouyang knew he had to get creative. So he reached out to the company’s customers instead to learn how they felt about its products.  He then “googled what’s in a term sheet” and then drafted one with all of his compiled research and interview information. 

After a month and a half of more interviews and special projects, Ouyang finally got the job. 

Ouyang credits the interview process for giving him a clear idea about what the day-to-day work as a venture capitalist looks like. 
“After doing both those cases, I thought, if that’s a window into what my job would be like, this could be really fun.” 

Ouyang advises anyone wishing to break into venture capital to talk to as many founders and operators as possible, and to angel invest at least once or twice to learn the ropes and figure out if it’s a potential career path. 

“Make sure you’re in environments where the rate of learning is almost a little bit scary, and take jobs that will do that for you, because those are the things that give you more options in the future,” he said.