Why I joined Verve Ventures as a visiting analyst

In this article, Henry Waldersee talks about his experience as a visiting analyst at Verve Ventures. Learn more about our visiting analyst internship program at Verve Ventures.

Hi, I’m Henry and until a few weeks ago, I was a Visiting Analyst in Verve Ventures’ Zurich-based investment team, but also worked very closely with the Paris and Berlin teams.

Over the last six months I had over 110 meetings with founders, prepared due diligence reports for almost a dozen investment opportunities, helped to build Verve’s Fintech and AI investment thesis and participated in 2 investment committees. Last but definitely not least, I worked on three investment rounds (and hopefully a few more to come from the pipeline).

Why I wanted to join Verve

I had applied for a job at Verve Ventures after meeting Samir Jola and Alex Lund (a Visiting Analyst at the time) at Start Summit 2022. We spent the evening talking about tech and sharing our opinions on some of the talks we had attended at the event.

It was great to meet some investors at this tech event who were grounded and interested in talking about the actual technology and implementation, rather than discussing the “flavor of the month” trends (at that point we were still at peak “Metaverse” hype). The next week I saw that Verve was hiring a Visiting Analyst and decided to apply for the position.

After having worked at a few start-ups to learn about the ecosystem, I knew that what I wanted to do was jump in on the investor side. I was mainly looking for a VC where I would get deal experience as well as a chance to learn directly from some of the best founders. As I consider myself a very opinionated person I was also looking for the opportunity to channel that energy into the work I did and have daily exchanges about the tech world.

Daily work at Verve

I mainly worked in two teams: the Paris team with Martin and the Berlin team with Oleg. When I arrived my first task was to help develop our investment thesis in specific areas (Fintech and AI) that we could then use to both build conviction around investments as well as producing content and build Verve’s brand as an investor in these areas. In the Fintech space this led to us pursuing the future of payments. Here I had the chance to dive into topics such as Open Banking, Embedded Finance, B2B BNPL, Payment Reconciliation and many more technologies changing how businesses deal with money. On the AI side of things we started by diving into the ecosystem of Cloud & Data Infrastructure before building a detailed thesis around the future of AI and Generative AI (this was a few months before the release of ChatGPT). Being able to exchange thoughts and ideas with some of the most forward thinking founders and learn directly from those moving the needle in this space is an opportunity that you will only get with a company like Verve that lets you earn the trust to be a voice at the table.

Beyond my work around Fintech and AI within the investment team I also had the chance to get to know the work of other teams. I quickly understood that If you want to learn about all the other teams at Verve, including Portfolio Success, Portfolio Management, Marketing and Investor Relations people are always happy to help you learn. One thing you learn pretty quickly in VC is that you never know which task might come through the door on a given day and the ability to be agile and put out fires quickly or jump on a hot deal as well as knowing how to prioritize these tasks is essential to the life of a Visiting Analyst at Verve Ventures.

Being part of Verve

Although I mostly worked from the Zurich office I got to spend a great amount of time with the teams from the other offices in Paris, Cambridge and Berlin. During my internship I got to travel to Berlin twice to attend networking events and accelerator demo-days. At Christmas and during our offsite in October I had the chance to meet most of the people from other offices, which was always a highlight. The office is very young and lively overall, making it incredibly easy for a Visiting Analyst to feel integrated socially and the effort that the more senior staff make to make you feel part of the team is outstanding!

People are incredibly interested to learn about you, be it David asking about your taste in music, discussing my favorite restaurants in Zurich with Jeong or getting career advice from Alex. Although the office environment is a very hardworking one, people also value taking the time to have coffee chat, as everyone values getting to know their team members a little better as well as being happy to help where they can. For example, Clara, Friedi and Gabriel were really glad to involve me in the investor relations team when I had told them that I wanted to learn more about sales. Lukas also gave me a lot of responsibility to support him in the fundraising efforts which really helped me learn more about the whole fund lifecycle.

Being a part of the Investment Team

When it came to the investment team, people were always excited to collaborate on a number of different projects. For example, after discussing my interest and curiosity regarding the Edge AI space with Emma, we began to look into start-ups in this space together and getting on calls with some of the most exciting start-ups in the space. I had the chance to look into some Energy start-ups with Stefan and some Digital Health start-ups with Vinciane. The investment team has a “New Deals” meeting once a week and it is an incredible experience to participate in these heated debates with people who have such diverse technical backgrounds and investment experience.

I particularly appreciated the degree to which the involvement of the Visiting Analysts was appreciated in these sessions. When Oleg or Martin and I were presenting an investment case, as a visiting analyst I had the chance to pass my conviction onto the team as well as defend that conviction from the scrutiny of the rest of the team. From the moment you are in the room your opinion is valued and you are expected to leave no stone unturned. This is definitely not an internship where you will just be taking notes and preparing coffee. Obviously, as a Visiting Analyst your responsibilities include some of the more mundane tasks, but as long as you can manage those, you get the chance to make the Visiting Analyst position your own. Verve and especially Oleg and Martin were always happy to involve me in exciting projects and stay true to the title “Visiting Analyst”.

Living in Zurich

Living in Zurich was another highlight of the internship. Beyond the incredible variety of cuisines for dinners there are also some adorable cocktail bars to choose from for post-work drinks. Zurich is just an incredibly beautiful city that makes it easy to live a healthy lifestyle while offering a variety of activities and cultural events almost every week. Be it beating Romeo at padel or spinning classes that almost made me collapse, the team at Verve was always happy to join sporting activities after work.

Finally, Verve values team fit greatly, which really helped me integrate into a city such as Zurich where I had never lived before, as many people from the Zurich office were always happy to grab a drink or dinner after work and experience the Zurich nightlife.

Please feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn for any further questions about the experience as well as for some great restaurant recommendations in Zurich! Learn more about our visiting analyst internship program at Verve Ventures.

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1. Introduction


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