Fast track for career progression

Hi everyone and welcome to this week's edition of Cheatcode. Today we will cover the following topics:

Why a fast track for career progression might mean positioning yourself closer to revenue generation
Different ways students can already get involved in the VC and startup investment space
A strong LinkedIn post summarizing the current state of venture capital

Author’s Note

Cheatcode: The closer you position yourself to revenue generation, the faster you progress in your career.

One pattern I've noticed across a lot of careers is that the more senior you become, the more sales you have to do. This applies to consulting, banking, law, and audit, but you see the same dynamic in marketing agencies, architecture and engineering firms.

In junior roles, you have a defined lane. Investment banking analysts work on spreadsheets and decks. Consultants execute the assignment they were given. Junior architects draw up plans for projects someone else brought in. Stay in that lane and you progress on a normal timeline. But the more senior you get, and at the latest by the time you want to become a partner, there is no way around bringing in your own customers.

I therefore think that the faster you position yourself closer to revenue generation, not just executing within your designated area, the faster you can progress in your career. There's no better way to get fast tracked for promotion than being the junior consultant who spends their free time building relationships and actually brings a project back to the firm.

Learn how Investing in Startups works

A lot of people that get fascinated about the startup world at some point stumble across the venture capital and investment part of it. From the outside, venture capital can seem daunting to break into, and a lot of people are trying anyway. So naturally the question is: what steps can people take before actually getting an understanding of how VC works? That's why I wanted to list a few options to get exposure to the venture capital world early.

Becoming a Venture Scout: Different VCs have a scouting logic where students and other people in ecosystems basically keep an eye out for interesting startups to report to the VC. One leading example is First Momentum Ventures. Other VCs like UVC, Caesar or HTGF also did similar things in the past.
Student VC Initiative: You can also get involved in one of the student VC initiatives out there. Here you can have direct access to workshops, networking and VC-related activities like Startup Scouting. Examples include: Innovis VC, Founderful Campus or Baby VC
Venture Capital Bootcamp: You don't have to be part of the Baby VC Team, but can also join one of the Bootcamps they are organizing every spring and autumn all over Europe. This is an in-person program with multiple hands-on sessions across 6 weeks.
Investing yourself: You can also invest your own money via a co-investing platform like Capacura, where you can start already with a thousand euros to invest in your selection of startups.

The Current State of VC Expectations

Interesting take from Harry Stebbings on how radical the growth expectations for venture-capital-backed startups are today. Two things he is saying:

It is fine to take time to figure out what actually works, no matter how long it takes. This is often called getting to 'product market fit' and describes the stage where a company's product deeply resonates with a target market.
But as soon as a venture-backed company reaches this level, they have to move extremely fast to then reach the big revenue milestones. The reason the speed requirement is so extreme is that venture capital funds are built on the assumption that one investment has to return the entire fund, which means slow and steady growth is simply not an interesting outcome for a VC, only companies that can go very big very fast are.