What Analysts & Associates Actually Do

The seats and what they actually mean

The titles in VC vary wildly between firms, but the rough hierarchy looks like this:

At a small fund, the analyst and associate roles often blur together. At a large multi-stage fund, they're distinct.

What every junior seat shares: you're not the one who decides whether the firm invests. Your job is to make the partners' decision better — by surfacing better deals, doing better diligence, and writing memos that sharpen the partners' thinking.

A typical week

The cadence varies, but a junior VC's week usually looks something like this.

Hours are variable. 50-65 hours is typical when there's an active deal in flight; 40-50 in slower weeks. Most of the work is calendar-driven — founder meetings cluster on Tues/Wed/Thurs, internal stuff fills around them.

Sourcing in practice

Sourcing is the part of the job that's hardest to learn from a book. The mechanics are simple. Doing it well takes pattern recognition you only build over time.

Junior VCs source through three main channels:

Outbound. Cold outreach to founders building in spaces the firm is interested in. Done well, this is research-heavy: you find a thesis (e.g., "we want to invest in AI tooling for legal workflows"), you map every company you can find in that space, you reach out to the most interesting ones with a specific reason. Done badly, it's spam.

Inbound triage. Founders email the firm. The associate is usually the first reader. The job is to triage: which deals are worth a partner's time, which deserve a 30-minute first meeting, which get a polite pass. The hardest skill is calibrating your filter so good deals don't get dropped because they pattern-match wrong.

Network. Other VCs, ex-founders, angel investors, scouts, ecosystem people. A senior associate has a network of 100+ people who occasionally send them deals. Building this network is the single most leveraged thing a junior VC can do.

A reasonable junior-VC week processes 30-100 inbound items, attends 5-10 first meetings, and runs serious diligence on 1-3 companies.

What "diligence" actually looks like

When a deal moves past the first-meeting filter, the junior VC drives the diligence work. This is where the seat earns its keep.

A typical diligence workstream for an early-stage deal includes:

• Customer reference calls. Talk to 3-10 of the company's customers, structured questions, capture verbatim quotes. Listen for retention signals, pricing power, organic vs paid acquisition.
• Founder reference calls. Backchannel with people the founder has worked with — past colleagues, former managers, peer founders. Calibrate against the public version of the founder.
• Financial model review. Stress-test the founders' projections. Look for daydream growth assumptions, missing operational costs, mismatches between revenue and the team they say they'll hire.
• Market sizing. Build the TAM/SAM/SOM independently. Don't trust the deck's number.
• Cohort and metrics work. For SaaS, marketplace, or consumer deals, pull cohort retention data, compute LTV/CAC against your own assumptions.
• Competitive map. Find every competitor (especially the ones the founder didn't mention).
• Background checks. Run formal checks on the founders.

The output is a mix of raw data, the analyst's synthesis, and one or two key insights that should change the partners' view of the deal. A great diligence pass surfaces something the partners didn't already know.

Investment memos

The memo is the artifact that survives the deal. Module 4.6 covers it in depth, but at a junior level the structure is roughly:

1. The deal in one sentence (company, round size, valuation)
2. The opportunity (problem, market, why now)
3. The team (why these founders, why this team)
4. The product and traction
5. The risks and why we're comfortable
6. The path to a fund returner

The memo's job is not to convince the IC the deal is great. It's to give the IC the information and framing they need to make a good decision. A memo that hides the risks isn't useful; a memo that lays them out plainly and explains why we're investing anyway is.

Junior VCs draft memos. The lead partner edits. The team debates. The memo evolves through several drafts before going to IC.

Portfolio support

After a check is written, the firm has to help the company. The day-to-day of this falls heavily on associates and principals.

▸What "portfolio support" actually looks like at the junior level

• Intros. Customers, hires, other investors. The associate maintains a list of relevant contacts and pings them when a portfolio company has a need. This is the most common form of useful support.
• Hiring help. Sourcing candidates from the firm's network, doing reference calls on shortlisted candidates, occasionally helping write a JD.
• Strategic input. Lighter touch. Founders often want a sounding board, not advice. The associate is sometimes that sounding board (especially after the partner has built the relationship).
• Operational help. Pricing benchmarks, customer success patterns, financial model templates. Some firms run ops teams that do this; at most firms it's the associate hand-rolling.
• Crisis support. When a portfolio company is struggling — a deal is falling through, a key hire is leaving, runway is short — the associate often runs interference and keeps the partner briefed.

A reasonable expectation: a junior VC will spend 20-30% of their time on portfolio work. The rest goes to sourcing, diligence, and memo writing.

Analyst vs associate: the actual difference

Both roles do most of the same work. The differences are mostly about ownership.

The biggest difference is the implicit one: an analyst is being trained; an associate is being evaluated for partner-track potential. By the time you're a senior associate, the firm is asking, "could this person make money for the fund as a partner?"

What this means if you're getting into the role

Three things that are worth getting good at quickly.

1. Take great notes. Founder meetings move fast and you'll forget specifics within a day. A note-taking system that captures verbatim quotes, follow-ups, and your raw read on the founder is the single highest-leverage habit. The partners will lean on these notes when the deal goes to IC.

2. Build a sourcing thesis early. What spaces are you obsessed with? Who's building in them? Why is now the right moment? Junior VCs who drift in unfocused outbound get nowhere; the ones with a sharp thesis attract better deals to themselves and stand out internally.

3. Be useful to the partners, but don't kiss up. The best junior VCs are honest in disagreement, fast to deliver, and visible in the parts of the firm that move deals forward. The worst are reactive and try to predict what the partner wants to hear. Partners can tell.

The role is mostly a craft, learned by doing. Module 4 covers the specific craft skills (sourcing tactics, founder meetings, diligence, memo writing) in depth. This module just sketches the shape.