At Bessemer, we believe venture capital thrives in an apprenticeship model. For almost twenty years, we’ve been fortunate enough to bring on three to four bright, ambitious, and aspiring investors each year to join the program as a foray into their careers.
While there are skills and lessons you can learn in school, many elements of venture capital, such as developing investment judgment, sourcing emerging new startups, and refining roadmaps for the future, are uniquely learned on the job by engaging with entrepreneurs and experienced investors.
Throughout this selective, two-year program based in our New York office, analysts will collaborate on projects with Bessemer partners across the globe and work with emerging founders and exceptional operators.
Our partners and the broader investing team provide hands-on training to gain the foundational skills for your investing career, mentorship on the art of the industry, and invaluable experience. Our analysts are critical, valuable members of the team; they participate in our weekly partnership meetings and make a tremendous impact on the firm.
Analysts are oftentimes the first touchpoint startup founders have with Bessemer. It’s a role that requires an enterprising spirit, empathy, and a deep understanding of what makes a business work under the hood.
Your daily schedule and responsibilities include sourcing new companies, deep research in the diligence and roadmap process, and assisting Partners on the Board level should Bessemer invest.
The skills and experience you gain in this program are investments in your career — whether opportunities continue at Bessemer or elsewhere, the possibilities are endless.
When you join Bessemer’s Analyst Program you’ll join a close-knit community of investors, experts, and operators who are on the cutting edge of technology and are shaping category-defining companies.
Many who have joined The Analyst Program have gone on to become partners at our firm or others, joined political campaigns, and have become successful entrepreneurs themselves. In addition, more than half of our alumni have applied to business school after the program, and 100% have been accepted into a top-ten school.
Twitch: Mackey Craven created an Alexa Tracker which helped him source Twitch, the live streaming platform. After a few “near-death” experiences after Twitch pivoted from Justin.TV, the startup eventually saw amazing growth among gamers. By 2014, Twitch was acquired by Amazon for $970 million and positioned itself as a platform where culture thrives and gamers, entertainers, and even politicians continue to congregate.
Truebill: In 2019, after countless attempts to get someone else on the team to join a call, Alexandra Sukin sold Kent Bennett on a meeting with brothers by blood and founders by choice, Haroon and Yahya Mokhtarzada. And after two years of following the company closely before and during the COVID pandemic, Alexandra had deep conviction that Truebill was going to change how consumers thought about their monthly spending. Bessemer invested in Truebill’s Series C and D before the company was acquired by Rocket Companies for $1.275 billion in December 2021.
MindBody: Believing that vertical software could enable small to mid size businesses in the health and wellness space, Brian Feinstein went down the INC 5000, eventually finding this solution for yoga studios, salons, and spas. We first invested in the San Luis Obispo-based company in 2010, and by 2018, MindBody was acquired by Vista Equity. (However, Brian continues to use the tool when booking the occasional workout class!)
Diapers.com: In 2007, Mitchell Green tracked the founding team over the course of nine months and persuaded the Bessemer partnership to pursue e-commerce. Eventually, the parent company changed its name to Quidsi and sold to Amazon for more than half a billion dollars in 2010.
Wikia/Fandom: Once again, known for his tenacity, Mitchell Green cold emailed Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia fame about a dozen times before the founder agreed to host us for a meeting in St. Petersburg, Florida, where he was based at the time. In 2006, Bessemer led the $4 million early-stage investment.
The applications for the 2024 Summer Analyst positions are open.
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“Bessemer’s analyst program was the perfect training for a career in venture capital. The opportunity to meet with hundreds of startups across a variety of stages and sectors provided an extraordinary breadth of knowledge and pattern recognition. This was the foundation upon which the rest of my career at Bessemer was built.”
"My time in the program helped me develop foundational investor skills from sourcing to diligence to supporting portfolio companies. But most importantly, it helped me hone my intuition. The funny thing about venture capital is that it is full of paradoxes. It's comprised of exceptions and outliers yet pattern recognition is critical. I'm constantly trying to strike a balance between being opportunistic and being roadmap driven."
"The program is a great opportunity to gain a holistic education on the fundamentals of tech startups—things like team building, product strategy, and go-to-market approaches. Having since moved into an operating role at a portfolio company, I've found that examining top performing startups as an analyst has given me insight on best practices across a range of business functions and the tools to implement them."
"As a Bessemer analyst, I learned how to distill large amounts of information quickly, ask the right questions, and form educated opinions. These are skills that I rely on today as a product manager – to be roadmap-driven, drill down to what really matters, and make decisions with discipline."
"The Bessemer Analyst Program was the perfect launchpad for my career in the startup world. I learned the fundamentals of what makes companies valuable and how to think strategically about growth. What makes BVP unique is a track record and culture with a lineage that dates back to the very inception of venture capital, and an exceptionally thoughtful process for developing perspectives and newly shaping markets — from SaaS to frontier technology."
“There is truly no better place to gain this hands-on experience than at Bessemer – I had immense ownership and autonomy in my work while also getting mentored by and working closely with some of the best partners in the venture world. And as I’ve gone on to work in other sectors and other roles, I have realized that it's the “intangibles” I gained at Bessemer – the hustle, the judgment, the first principles thinking – that have continued to serve me really well.”
"Young people interested in VC: If Bessemer offers you a job, take it."
"There is no better place to start your venture career than Bessemer. I learned everything I know from the firm—from how to run a great diligence process, all the way to being an upstanding and thoughtful board member. Don't think twice, BVP is the place to be."