October 8, 2024 5:30pm ET
University of Pennsylvania
The Analyst Program
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.
Analysts typically join our selective, two-year program directly from their undergraduate studies or soon after. The program is based in our New York office, but 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.
About the program
Analysts are oftentimes the first touchpoint startup founders have with Bessemer. They play a role that requires an enterprising spirit, empathy, and a deep understanding of what makes a business work under the hood.
A day in the life of an analyst
Your daily schedule and responsibilities include sourcing new investment opportunities, deep research in the diligence, roadmap, and deal-making processes, and working alongside Bessemer team members to help our portfolio companies flourish. The skills and experience you gain in this program are foundational to your career. Whether you pursue additional opportunities at Bessemer or elsewhere, your Bessemer analyst experience will be formative and open endless possibilities.
- Interact with 100+ CEOs to identify seed-stage to Series C startups disrupting a wide range of industries: vertical software, AI infrastructure, supply chain, healthcare, climate, and consumer internet.
- Work closely with the firm’s partners to conduct due diligence on the investment opportunities you discover and help develop new investment roadmaps.
- Develop an eye for identifying the most exciting sectors and business opportunities in the innovation economy, build a deep understanding of business models, and grow an extensive network of entrepreneurs and VC colleagues.
Attend an on-campus event!
October 9, 2024 2:00pm PT
University of Chicago
October 9, 2024 6:00pm CT
Northwestern University
October 17, 2024 5:30PM PT
Stanford University
October 16, 2024 6:00PM ET
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
October 16, 2024 6:00PM PT
University of California Berkeley
October 29, 2024 6:00PM ET
Harvard University
October 30, 2024 7:00pm ET
University of Notre Dame
November 5, 2024 6:00PM ET
University of Michigan
November 20, 2024 5:00PM ET
University of Virginia
November 13, 2024 8:30 PM ET
Columbia University
Summer Analyst Opportunities
We have concluded our hiring process for 2025 Summer Analysts. The 2026 Summer Analyst application will open in February 2025! 2026 Summer Analysts will be students who are set to graduate from a bachelor’s degree program or five year combined Bachelor/Master’s program either in the winter or summer of 2027.
Full-time Analyst opportunities
We are no longer accepting applications for 2025 Full Time Analysts. In the late 2025 Summer, we may seek undergraduates or 5-year masters students, graduating between December 2025 – June 2026 for full time positions.
Contacting Us
We receive a high volume of email requests from students seeking various engagements with Bessemer Venture Partners. While we value your enthusiasm, we unfortunately are unable to accommodate individual internship requests or coffee chats outside of our formal recruiting process at this time. However, if you have questions about our application process, please contact recruiting@bvp.com.
Where are they now?
When you join Bessemer’s Analyst Program you become part a close-knit community of investors, experts, and operators who are on the cutting edge of technology and are shaping category-defining companies.
Former analysts have gone on to take senior roles at Bessemer, join later-stage firms in venture and private equity, start their own funds, and join or found startups.
Alumni highlights
Sourcing Hall of Fame
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.
Brian Feinstein - Partner at Bessemer
“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.”
Talia Goldberg - Partner at Bessemer
“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.”
Aman Kandola - Business Operations Manager at Courier
“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.”
Emily Lu - Chief of Staff, Growth & Commercial at Nilus
“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.”
Josh Benamram - CEO of Databand.ai
“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.”
Jenny Gao - Senior Advisor, White House
“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.”
Sarah Tavel - General Partner at Benchmark
“Young people interested in VC: If Bessemer offers you a job, take it.”
Anna Khan - General Partner at CRV
“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.”
Kristen Faulkner - Olympic Gold Medalist, Team USA
“A lot of what I learned to do is how to take calculated risks, how to assess risk,” she explains to the Wall Street Journal. “If there’s high risk but the reward is high, it might be worth it…What is the risk-reward of being patient versus being aggressive? That’s something I definitely take with me.”