Switching Venture Firms Is Not a Job Search

Most people in venture feel lucky to be there.

At least at first.

Breaking in is hard. The odds are long. And when you finally land the role—associate, senior associate, principal—it can feel like you’ve won the job lottery. You don’t question it. You focus on learning, executing, proving you belong.

But after a few years, once the novelty wears off and you’re past the point of just being grateful to have the seat, a quieter question sometimes creeps in:

Is my firm actually right for me?

Not in a dramatic way. Nothing is obviously broken. The people are smart. The work is interesting. On paper, everything looks fine.

But you start to wonder. About the partner path. About the firm’s long-term trajectory. About whether you’re growing faster than the platform—or whether the platform is growing at all.

And if that question even might have an answer other than yes, a second one follows immediately:

How do I explore that without creating risk for myself?

That’s a tough question. Venture is small. Reputations travel. Signaling disloyalty—even unintentionally—can feel dangerous. And it’s not always obvious who you can talk to without tripping a wire you can’t untrip.

The first thing I tell my venture coaching clients is that moving from one VC firm to another is not a simple job search.

It doesn’t behave like one. It doesn’t follow job-search timelines. And it doesn’t reward job-search behavior.

Firm-to-firm moves are slow by design, because the candidate pool already exists—at least at the senior level. You’re unlikely to get a senior level or partner track position in venture if you don’t already have some investing experience—and that’s a finite pool. Narrow it down to a specific sector and they already know dozens of plausible candidates.

They’ve looked at deals together or competed head-to-head.

It’s extremely unlikely they’re going to ignore all of that context and hire someone simply because that person decides it’s time to look.

Which means the real starting point isn’t who’s hiring.

It’s who already knows you, and what they think of you.

Time to Take Stock in Your Network

I encourage people to start with a brutally honest inventory of their relationships. Who would actually hire you tomorrow if there were a seat? Who would take a serious meeting? Who knows your name but not your work? Who barely knows you exist?

If most of your relationships sit in the middle, that’s not a failure. It usually just means you’re earlier in the process than you think.

But relationship strength alone isn’t the whole story. What matters just as much is how you’re categorized inside other people’s heads.

Every partner you interact with is unconsciously force-ranking you. Not on paper, but mentally. Once that classification sets, it’s surprisingly sticky. Relationships are the input; perception is the output.

The Rankings

At the bottom of that mental ranking are people who technically work in venture but aren’t really considered candidates. They’re seen as executional, with no visible judgment, no ownership, and no independent point of view. These are people who could take a first call if it came to them, but aren’t likely to “find” anything versus just “sort”.

Above that are people who are clearly competent but findable out in the pool. Smart, capable, trustworthy. The kind of person who would do fine in the role, but doesn’t yet bring a clear edge. If they left, the firm could replace them with someone similar and keep moving. That’s not enough to trigger a firm-to-firm hire and risk being seen as poaching.

If I’m going to poach someone from within my circles, they better be more than just “replacement level”.

The first real inflection point is when someone is seen as a good VC currently, and maybe a very good future one, who still needs a platform. At this stage, people think: I’d bet on them, I’m just not sure how much of this is them versus their firm. These people get meetings, or maybe their business card does.

From there, the shift is to independent judgment and reputation. People seek meetings with them. This is when people believe you can originate, not just execute, regardless of what firm they’re at. Co-investors start following you, not just your firm. Founders reference you by name. Other VCs ask what you’re seeing.

Your judgment and network begins to travel.

The next step up is where firm-to-firm moves actually start happening. You’re seen as an outperformer—someone who makes wherever they sit better. You consistently get to things earlier, go deeper in a space than peers bother to, and become associated with a category or insight. This is where speed and depth compound. You’re not louder; you’re earlier, because you’re deeper.

Above that is the moment people sometimes describe sheepishly as: we’d rather have them inside the firm than outside it. Firms follow your writing, show up to what you host, and hear your name from portfolio companies. You’ve flipped the dynamic. You’re no longer pitching yourself; you’re creating pull.

At the very top are people whose names shortcut conversations. They’re associated with a sector, a talent pool, or a way of seeing the market. Hiring them isn’t about filling a role; it’s about acquiring leverage. Rarer still are people who bring true proprietary advantage—deal flow others can’t access, an angel or advisory footprint, pattern recognition built through ownership. At that point, the ROI is immediate.

To recruit or Not to Recruit?

I’m skeptical of recruiters at the senior end of the market.

Once you’re in principal-to-partner territory, if you need a recruiter to find you a role—or a firm needs a recruiter to find you—you’re often already starting at a disadvantage. Joining an existing partnership without pre-existing trust is incredibly hard. The best firms don’t need help identifying talent. They’ve been tracking peers and up-and-comers for years, and they have the gravitas to pull someone out of a seat they already occupy.

That doesn’t mean recruiters are useless. This advice doesn’t apply the same way to associates or other junior folks, and it only partially applies to principals. But the more senior you get, the more relationship-led these moves become.

A venture recruiter should be additive, not foundational. Talk to them to get a sense of the market, comp, and which firms are expanding—but your best shot at landing those firms is if you already know them.

Party Fouls

There’s one other practical point I emphasize in coaching, because people underestimate it: try very hard not to get caught looking.

Once it becomes clear inside your current firm that you’re actively exploring, your timeline accelerates whether you want it to or not. Even well-intentioned partners start planning around the possibility that you might leave. You may stop getting pulled into certain conversations. The firm may quietly begin hedging. At that point, the move is no longer fully on your terms.

This doesn’t mean being secretive or dishonest. It means being intentional. Build relationships, do great work, share projects, and explore alignment before you signal intent. The strongest firm-to-firm moves happen when you still have leverage—when staying is a real option, not a shrinking one.

Is moving Worth It?

Another thing people underestimate is how hard it is to verify whether the grass is actually greener.

Everyone puts their best foot forward during a hiring process. You don’t see the cracks right away. You see them six months in, or a year in, when incentives, personalities, and firm math start to reveal themselves.

If the firm you’re considering has been around for a while, your best source of truth usually isn’t the current partners trying to hire you. It’s someone who used to work there. Former principals. Former partners. People who left without drama. Those conversations will tell you far more about how a firm actually operates than any interview process ever will.

It’s also worth naming that many people don’t leave firms because they want to. They leave because the firm itself is winding down or structurally changing. In those cases, searches are often conducted with transparency and partnership support. Those aren’t failures. They’re reminders that firm-to-firm moves are often driven by circumstance, not ambition.

What people consistently get wrong is thinking these moves hinge on timing, optics, or saying the right thing.

They don’t.

They hinge on where you already sit in other people’s heads. You don’t get ranked higher because you declare readiness. You get ranked higher because people already have evidence.

Put Me In Coach

There’s also a specific anxiety that comes up here that’s worth addressing head-on: the fear that switching firms is a negative signal.

In practice, it usually isn’t.

Firms don’t grow linearly, and partner seats don’t magically appear. Sometimes a firm simply has the right number of partners for its size, and that’s it. I often use a baseball analogy when coaching people through this. You can be a top-tier rookie and still be blocked by an All-Star who plays the same position. There’s nowhere to go. In baseball, that player gets traded from a position of strength to a position of need. Venture doesn’t have trades — but the dynamic is the same. Blocked is blocked. And that’s structural, not personal.

Good firms understand this. In many cases, a thoughtful move is actually read as self-awareness, not failure — especially when it’s paired with strong references and a clear track record. Staying in a seat with no path out of loyalty or fear rarely improves how you’re perceived.

That’s why outperforming matters, and why it has to be visible. Outperforming doesn’t mean being busy. It means being ahead. In practice, it comes down to speed and depth. Depth lets you see things earlier: talent before it’s obvious, teams before they’re fundraising, patterns before they’re consensus. That’s where most top-tier firms don’t have time to go—and where ambitious senior people can stand out.

A common mistake is waiting until you’re “looking” to become visible. That’s backwards. The strongest moves happen when firms find themselves following you—reading your work, hearing about what you’re building, repeatedly running into you in deals. At some point the thought flips from interesting to we should probably be on the same side of the table.

People also overthink the first real conversation. They worry about sounding eager or saying the wrong thing. In reality, most outcomes aren’t that fragile. If there’s real alignment, it shows. The best framing is usually honest and direct: you admire how they think, you feel aligned with their values, and you’d love to explore whether there’s a way to be helpful. Good firms don’t recoil from that; they appreciate it.

More often than not, the immediate answer isn’t a job. It’s let’s do a deal together. That’s not a no. That’s the path. Working together builds trust faster than any interview process ever will.

Finally, a word on economics. Carry, clawbacks, and restrictive clauses matter, but behavior matters more. I’ve seen aggressive and vindictive exit behavior. I’ve also seen thoughtful, professional transitions. How a firm handles your departure is a culture tell. If a firm can only keep people through golden handcuffs rather than admiration, alignment, and opportunity, that’s worth paying attention to.

The question I leave people with is simple: if someone evaluated you tomorrow, what concrete evidence would they have that you operate at the next level—without your current firm’s brand doing the work for you?

If you can answer that clearly, you’re probably closer than you think.

If you can’t, that’s not a failure.

It’s a roadmap.