I spent the past three weeks at an internship for young women to explore careers in venture capital. The inaugural internship was held at three of Australia’s top VC firms that together control almost half a billion dollars in investable capital. I had the opportunity to spend time at Blackbird Ventures, Main Sequence Ventures and Reinventure, respectively. I found myself at the center of many meetings in which leading VCs and startup founders deliberated on deep tech like quantum computing, launching Australia’s space industry or the application of machine learning to financial services.

Lessons learned:

1. Creating your own opportunities is a competitive advantage.

To me, VCs make investments in catalysing the future and I wanted to learn exactly how. My journey began with a DM on Twitter, which led to pitching the idea of interning at Blackbird. Taking that initiative was how I knew that an internship program organised by Blackbird Ventures and Reinventure was in beta. I applied immediately after the official launch of the internship at The Sunrise conference. I’m not a startup founder but cultivating the spirit of entrepreneurism taught me that ambition coupled with action is how you try and create opportunities in a world bereft of it.

1. #VCIntern

These three weeks were jam packed with starting the day at one part of Sydney and ending the day at another. With an all access pass I was involved in partner meetings, pitch meetings, board meetings, investor meetings as well as fly to Melbourne and spend the day at Startmate, attend Vogue Codes and Blackbird’s Investor Day. I learned about what’s involved in crafting portfolio reviews, conducting due diligence, how VCs raise funds from limited partners, the mechanics of portfolio return in a typical 10 year lifespan of a fund or fielding questions on the future of venture capital.

1. The state of venture capital in Australia.

I had the unique experience of interning at three VC firms with diverse portfolios. Blackbird invests in global from day one companies (Canva), in interplanetary from day one companies (Fleet, Gilmour Space) or in the infrastructure for the transportation of the near future (Baraja, Zoox). Reinventure invests in emerging fintech (Coinbase), agencies of data (HyperAnna) or security (Auror) and embedded financial services (Valiant). Main Sequence Ventures is a new fund investing in startups with a connection to public research such as CSIRO, universities or research institutes.

Collectively, $568M in venture capital was raised in 2016, however, as Rick Baker points out this is a fraction of US VC funding (see). Venture capital in Australia has historically garnered upended returns on investments and yet, like the ouroboros of Reinventure, the nascent Australian venture capital industry is in a regrowth phase. The true impact and size of the return on investment of venture capital for Australia will be reported within a couple of years as the concurrent set of investments reach fund maturity.

1. Think like an investor.

Charlie Munger advocates for building mental models to better equip and aid in understanding a problem from multiple dimensions. For a VC, intuition guided by heuristics whilst challenging your cognitive biases prevents missing a potential investment because a VC with broken heuristics is likely to fail.

The difference between a good VC and a great investor is being able to derive the simplest equation that being able to convert $1 into $3 (or 10x / 100x if you got game). It doesn’t matter whether it’s a GP raising a fund from LPs or a founder pitching to VCs for capital.

Finally, helping someone who reaches out to you should be incentivised like any investment because you never know how and when that investment will pay off. Success is not a zero-sum game.

Part II: Stepping stone (continued).