Breaking into Venture

An Outsider Turned Venture Capitalist Shares How to Take Risks, Create Power, and Build Life-Changing Wealth

Venture capitalists are a small, elite group quietly funding and shaping the technology that runs the world — and almost no one outside the club understands how they actually operate. Breaking into Venture pulls back the curtain.

Whether you're an aspiring investor, a founder, or a career-focused professional, this is a guide to how this historically exclusive and lucrative industry really works. Through my own stories — the mistakes, the hard lessons — alongside insights from other investors who came in from unexpected backgrounds, the book lays out nine fundamental principles for success in VC: how to access great opportunities, how to decide which ones to pursue, and how to add value once you're in.

I wrote it to democratize a world that too often stays closed — to show the ropes to people who aren't already part of the "in crowd," aren't already wealthy, and don't even know where Sand Hill Road is.

In a bold act of democratizing access to one of the most enigmatic but influential corners of our economy, Baum Gates brings us a remarkable and delightful insider's guide to venture capital. Hayagreeva Rao, Atholl McBean Professor, Stanford Graduate School of Business