Undergraduate Blog / Career Development

4. My Quick Exposure into Venture Capital

Start ups need to start up. To do this the need capital. The venture capital (vc) industry provides those much needed dollars to companies and takes an equity stake in the startup in return. It may be a hot form of investing right now, but the venture capital industry only takes up 0.3% ($30 billion) of all investing methods (2013). Even with this microscopic amount of money invested, vc has made some truly massive impact in our way of life today and made many people’s pockets a lot fatter. 43% of companies have taken funding from vc firms, 38% of all employees in the United States work for a company that has taken vc funds, and 82% of all research and development has been funded via vc money. This has allowed companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, and Tesla to become the behemoths that they are today.

In my extremely short time with venture capital, it has taught me that it’s not size that is important, but how you allocate your resources that truly matters.