LEARNING HUB
Learn the Language of Venture Investing
Investing has its own vocabulary — term sheets, cap tables, valuations, SAFEs. Nobody starts out knowing this. There's no single course that gets you there. The fastest way in is immersion: listening to how experienced investors talk about deals, reading what they read, and showing up to real events — the same way anyone learns an apprenticeship. The questions and videos below are a starting point for that immersion, not a syllabus to complete.
What is Venture Capital?Venture capital — not "venture capitalism" — is money that professional investors raise from others (called Limited Partners, or LPs) and invest into early-stage companies in exchange for equity. The bet: a small number of those companies will grow big enough to return the whole fund many times over.
What is a venture capitalist?A venture capitalist (VC) is the person who manages that money and makes the investment decisions — sourcing deals, evaluating companies, negotiating terms, and supporting the startups they back after the check is written. It's a job, usually at a firm, working on behalf of the fund's LPs — not a personal investment of their own money (that's what makes it different from angel investing).
Angel Investing vs. VC — what's the actual difference?An angel investor uses their own personal money to invest directly in a company. A venture capitalist invests other people's money — a fund — as their full-time job. Both are betting on early-stage companies; the difference is whose money it is, and whether it's a profession or something you do alongside another career.
What makes a startup "investable"?This is the question almost everyone new to investing gets wrong first. Investors aren't looking for a good business — they're looking for one that can grow very large, very fast — what's called being scalable. A software company can often serve a million customers with roughly the same team and cost structure it needed for a thousand. A restaurant can't: every new location means new staff, new rent, new equipment, from scratch. That's not a knock on restaurants — they can be great, profitable businesses — it's just not the shape of bet venture investors are built to make.
Are You an Accredited Investor?A lot of people assume "accredited investor" means someone who has already made investments — it doesn't. Accreditation is about your financial profile, not your track record. You can be fully accredited and have never made a single investment.
Broadly, under SEC guidelines, you're accredited if you meet at least one of the following: individual income over $200,000 (or $300,000 combined with a spouse) in each of the last two years, with a reasonable expectation of the same this year; a net worth over $1 million, excluding your primary residence; or certain professional certifications, licenses, or knowledge-based qualifications recognized by the SEC.
This is a simplified summary, not the full legal definition, and SEC rules may change over time. For the authoritative, current definition, see investor.gov.
Recommended Podcasts & Books
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Books
Training Resources
A note on the videos below
Some of these recordings go back over 10 years. A few speakers have since changed roles or firms, and parts of the market have shifted since they were recorded. The core concepts, though — what makes a company investable, how VCs think, the basics of deal terms — hold up. Treat the specifics as a snapshot in time and the fundamentals as the lasting part.
