6 Reflections from my 6 Months Interning in Venture Capital

TLDR

• Matias Salonen, a byFounders intern turned full-time investor, shares six hard-won lessons from seven months in early-stage VC.

Key Takeaways

• There is no blueprint for VC work; the job requires self-directed learning and leaning heavily on colleagues in the first weeks.
• Creating personal processes and automation around repetitive tasks frees cognitive capacity for the binary judgment calls that define the job.
• Feedback loops in early-stage investing can span years or never close; byFounders runs quarterly reviews of passed deals to refine decision-making.
• Early-stage VC is relationship-driven by nature; introverts can manage energy drain by cultivating a small number of deep connections rather than maximizing volume.
• The power law dominates returns: the top investment in a fund typically outperforms all others combined, so every bet must have multi-billion-dollar potential.

Why It Matters

• Reflective practitioner accounts from working investors are rare; this one surfaces operational details like quarterly pass reviews that are not covered in standard VC literature.
• Salonen’s path through Aaltoes, Bain, Nordea, and a Finnish startup accelerator before landing in VC illustrates the multi-domain background that generalist early-stage roles tend to favor.
• The emphasis on curiosity as a core job requirement over sector expertise has direct implications for how founders should approach cold outreach to generalist funds like byFounders.

byFounders · 2025-06-10 · Read the original