- Nicole DeTommaso had no venture-capital experience when she got an internship at Harlem Capital.
- Then she developed a plan to turn it into a full-time job.
- She’s now a senior associate and loves to share her best tips on how to land a VC job.
Harlem Capital’s senior associate Nicole DeTommaso had no idea what she was getting into when she applied for her first role in venture capital.
As a first-generation college student, DeTommaso knew she wanted a career that could provide her with financial security. She majored in economics and mathematics and had worked several internships in investment banking, and she took a job after graduation as an investment banking analyst at RBC Capital Markets. After a few years there, she was ready to move on but unsure what else she was qualified to do.
“I was sort of lost,” DeTommaso said. “I knew about private equity, which is later-stage investing, but didn’t know much about early-stage investing.”
She said she also didn’t know any venture capitalists and “didn’t really know where to find firms.”
“I didn’t know how to find job openings,” she said. “I didn’t know where they were posted. I didn’t even know what a VC case study was.”
She was scrolling through job postings on LinkedIn when she saw that one of her connections had liked Harlem Capital’s announcement that it had closed its first fund. After she clicked on its profile, she said, she went down a “full rabbit hole” researching the firm and learning more about venture capital.
She was struck by Harlem Capital’s mission of investing in founders from diverse backgrounds and wanted to participate.
“I’m Puerto Rican and I also identify as LGBTQ,” she said. “Coming from banking, which is quite homogenous, having people around the table that looked like me or on
Zoom
calls that look like me was an added bonus.”
Still, she said, she had “never even heard of venture capital” in college so didn’t know much about the VC world. She saw the firm had an open internship role on its website and applied anyway. A few days later, she was contacted for an interview.
To prepare, DeTommaso spoke with everyone she could find who had worked there as an intern. She read all of Harlem Capital’s blog posts and listened to as many podcast interviews with the firm’s partners as she could.
The team was so impressed with her knowledge of its firm at her interview that it hired her for the internship, and she stayed on in the fall as a venture fellow.
But that was only a temporary role, and DeTommaso wanted to be full time, she said. When she learned the firm was fundraising for its second fund, she realized she had a chance. The fund would need more people to help it find investments.
So she wrote a 10-page pitch presentation emphasizing where she could fill gaps in the team for new projects. The leadership team was so impressed that it hired her the next day as a senior associate to help with the launch of the new fund.
Now, DeTommaso spends her free time paying it forward to everyone who wants to break into VC but doesn’t know where to begin. She shares open VC roles and career advice on her Twitter feed to her nearly 15,000 followers and is passionate about sharing these opportunities with others.
She told Insider some of her best tidbits.
“You should track fund life cycles, because VCs always hire towards a new fund’s launch,” she said.
“If you can figure out which funds or track the funds when they hit their third year, their current fund life cycle, you can sort of preempt those open roles,” she added. “So you can network with them before the role becomes public, and then you will be top of mind.”
She also recommends that if you find a fund you want to work for, then “act like a VC” and send that fund startups that fit its investment strategies.
“If you send an opportunity, you’re now adding value to the VC, where they’re going to want to chat to you about the opportunity and will appreciate that you took the next step,” she said.
Once you make it to an interview stage, DeTommaso still believes in using a deck or presentation to show your strengths. “No one knows your value-add like you do, and it’s your responsibility to prove that the firm,” she said. “Create a deck on why this is the perfect firm and how you fit in.”
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