#BreakIntoVC: How to Break Into Venture Capital And Think Like an Investor Whether You're a Student, Entrepreneur or Working Professional (Venture Capital Guidebook Book 1)

Cost of goods sold (COGS), or cost of sales are any expenses incurred for producing a good or service. This includes raw materials, labor or any manufacturing costs required to make all the products sold.

I would say relying on career fairs or job postings isn’t necessarily that helpful. I didn’t get any of my internships or jobs based off of those postings. It was all about reaching out to a person.

How to Pitch a Company In order to pitch a company, you need to be aware of their level of funding, key hires, material events and partners, what you admire about the company and your suggestions for management.

Therefore, pre-money valuation is the value of a company before that latest round of capital has been invested. This is typically the value of the idea, opportunity, the management team and perhaps any patents or intellectual property that comes with the founders.

A study by Bessemer Venture Partners notes that an acceptable annual customer churn rate is anything below 7 percent, which comes out to about a .58 percent monthly churn.15

For instance, VC firms return 25 percent on average, while the typical stock market return in a given year is 8 percent annually.

The process works like this: private equity firms look for companies with a high free cash flow, great management and strong consistency in sales. When a firm becomes interested, they execute an LBO in order to purchase a company and then transfer that debt, or money owed, to the target company. They will then use the free cash flow of the company

From there I asked if we could help out with any extra work that their portfolio companies may need and that’s pretty much the direction we’re headed in now. We’re still ironing out a few kinks but we’re going to continue with the strategy of working with the portfolio companies of venture firms as well as helping out with investment through resear

I think it’s still great to take financial modeling or other courses that will be relevant, but a lot of people think that they need 2-4 years in finance or a 4.0 GPA, but VC is ultimately driven by that passion to find out the companies that are disruptive and find out who the early adopters are.