From Investment Banking to VC & Impact Investing

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Hi everyone - I’m excited to share the third episode of The Early interview series! Today’s conversation features my friend Everett Sanderson, investor at City Light Capital 🎉 

Today’s Agenda 📈:

• Welcoming This Week’s Guest, Everett Sanderson! 🎉 

• Key Takeaways: Breaking into Investment Banking & VC, Impact Investing, & Relationship-Building 💭 

• My Favorite Quotes from Everett 🧠 

• Poll: Share Your Feedback 💫 

• Refer a Friend 👭 

• Say Hi! 👋 

Welcoming This Week’s Guest, Everett Sanderson! 🎉 

This week, I’m sharing an amazing conversation with my friend and fellow early-career investor, Everett Sanderson. 🎉 Everett is an investor at City Light Capital where he focuses on the climate, edtech, and healthcare sectors. Everett graduated from Cornell and worked in greentech investment banking at Nomura before joining City Light.

We chat about:

• Positioning yourself for success in VC

• Pros and cons of investment banking as a path into VC

• The importance of finding ways to add value early in your career

• Impact and climate investing

• Advice for young professionals on networking and relationship-building

• & more! 🙂

You can find Everett on LinkedIn or via email at [email protected] 🙌 

Read on for highlights from our conversation ⬇️ 

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Key Takeaways 💭 

💡 Here are a few key takeaways from our conversation (you can watch the full interview here.) ⬇️ 

Starting Your Career in Investment Banking 📈 

• Investment banking can help establish a baseline skill set for the rest of your career. If you’ve gone through investment banking, you’ve proven that you’ve honed skills in financial modeling, creating presentations, and working long hours - this can help signal to firms that you’re ready for an investing role down the road.

• IB has a relatively ‘straightforward’ interview and recruiting process. Unlike VC, IB is linear in the sense that, as long as you build relationships in the industry, prep thoroughly for interviews, and get the right experiences on your resume, you put yourself in a likely position to get the job.

• If you choose to go into consulting or banking as a stepping stone to VC, it can be helpful to focus that initial role on the industry you ultimately want to focus your VC career on. Everett knew he was ultimately interested in working in impact investing, so he picked a banking role in a related field (clean tech), where he was exposed to many sub-sectors within sustainability.

Pros and Cons of Investment Banking as a Path into VC ⚖️ 

• While there is no “straightforward” path into VC, investment banking may be one of the more linear options, since some VC firms primarily hire former bankers and consultants. A background in IB tells a clear story when it comes to your skill set and gives the person hiring you conviction in your financial training.

• Working in banking can establish a brand name on your resume. Investors at VC firms are often familiar with the banking ecosystem and may know the bank you worked for and even the people working there. So, having the name on your resume may help with credibility.

• The investment banking lifestyle can be rough. While it pays well, the banking workload is brutal - you’re working 80-100 hours a week. In abstract this sounds hard, but when you’re actually doing it .. it’s really hard.

• In terms of getting the job, IB is a solid path to VC. In terms of preparing you for the job, it doesn’t touch on all the important pieces other than financial modeling. Other paths like working for a startup may be better preparation for succeeding in the role itself, but might not be as straightforward a path to a VC role. All in all, there is no one perfect role to prepare you for VC - you’ll mostly learn on the job.

Networking and Relationship-Building Advice 🚀 

• Before reaching out to a potential mentor, try to hold a basic level of competency in the subject you want to learn about (e.g. VC). This way, you’ll be able to ask more thoughtful questions, be more efficient with the conversation, and help your mentor help you.

• Networking is a matter of reps - you may reach out to 10 people, and only 1 or 2 will reply. You need to push through and not get discouraged even if people are unresponsive.

• Think about how you can add value to the person you’re reaching out to. For VCs, this can be sharing interesting deals or making intros to founders in your network. Everett and I both know people who scored VC jobs just by sharing relevant deals over a period of time.

• Ask people targeted questions based on their own unique backgrounds. Don’t ask general questions about the VC industry - ask them targeted questions that relate to their own backgrounds and experiences. In industries like VC, people are often eager to give back and pass on their knowledge.

Impact Investing 🤗 

• City Light focuses on making impactful investments that also generate financial returns. In practice, this means investing in companies that can be underwritten to a 10x return while still creating impact via a company’s core business model. The flywheel is: as the company grows, so will its impact.

• In impact investing, there is a spectrum of investing styles. On one end are firms who dabble in impact but mostly care about returns, and on the other firms who are content with slightly lower returns to maximize impact. You need to figure out where you personally fit on that spectrum when looking at impact investing roles.

• The Climate Tech VC (CTVC) newsletter is a helpful resource for breaking into clean tech and impact investing/VC.

Breaking into VC 🤩 

• VC recruiting can be a matter of serendipity - it’s important to be ready to discuss the industry and your specific interests when an opportunity comes up. Everett met one of City Light’s team members at a birthday party, which later led to him getting a job at the firm. Everett had already done his research on the climate tech and VC landscape, so he was prepared to discuss the subject in detail. It’s a matter of being ready when your opportunity comes.

• Reach out to and meet as many people as you can in the VC ecosystem, and be a sponge during those conversations. Many VC roles get filled before they’re ever posted. Every connection you make in VC will help with your recruiting process, and you may get added to a short list when that firm decides to hire. Plus, as you meet more stakeholders in VC, you’ll learn more and more about the industry.

Everett’s Role at City Light Capital 🌟 

• City Light Capital is an early-stage, impact-focused VC fund investing across three core verticals: climate, education, and health & safety. The firm is focused on product-based impact, which means that the core business model of its investments has to be impactful.

• Everett’s day-to-day schedule as a VC is highly variable - it can include meetings with startup founders and other investors, research, working on internal operations, leading impact reporting, or attending climate and VC-focused events. The biggest chunk of the job is talking to founders and other investors.

• In VC, you get to constantly meet and learn from experts in their respective fields. This challenges you to stay on top of many different markets at once, and can be the best part of the job if you’re someone who loves learning and context-switching.

• As an early-career VC, you have the opportunity to ask questions and be taken seriously by experienced founders who may have sold previous companies for many millions of dollars. This is a unique aspect of VC, where other early-career roles can be much more hierarchical and limiting in terms of what you are exposed to.

General Career Advice 🙌 

• Internships are your chance to get a glimpse into what a career path can look like without having to commit to that role for an extended period of time. If you want to try a new role, internships are a great time to do it.

• Figure out how you can best provide value to others. It’s helpful to establish a baseline of: why is it helpful for others to talk to me? Especially as a student, find ways to help provide value to more experienced leaders. In VC, this can take the form of offering market insights (e.g. this is how college students/young professionals feel about X market) or sharing interesting deals.

My Favorite Quotes from Everett 🧠 

• “There are very few people in their early twenties in VC - in almost every room I walk into, I’m the youngest person. But you start to realize that doesn’t matter so much. It’s your familiarity with the field and your ability to talk about topics that matters, not how old you are.”

• “In venture, you’re doing a bunch of jobs all at once - every day is different.”

• “Know as much as you can, talk to as many people as possible.”

• “This whole job is talking to people, and that’s where I get my energy from.”

• “I try not to ask dumb questions, but I do ask a lot of questions.”

Share Your Feedback 💫 

What do you think of the series so far? Want to suggest a future guest? Let me know below 🙂 

Refer a Friend 👭 

Enjoying the newsletter? Click the button below to refer a friend 🙂 

Say Hi! 👋 

And that’s all for this week!

You can find Everett on LinkedIn or via email at [email protected] 🙌 

You can find me on LinkedIn and X. As always, feel free to reach out to [email protected] with any questions or feedback. I’d love to hear from you! 🙂 

-Mic