Insight Partners Interview: HireVue Video, Phone Round, Superday

An Insight Partners application asks for a resume, a transcript and a HireVue video cover letter, submitted online and reviewed earliest-first. From there, a phone interview, and for finalists, an in-person superday, moving from a broad screen toward partners over several rounds. All of it runs through one of three named programs, and all three sit in New York.

The firm behind that process was founded there in 1995 on a bet that looks obvious now and wasn't then: buy software companies, stay on the cap table from a company's first institutional round through its IPO, and build an entire firm around nothing else. Three decades later, that single idea has produced a firm running more than $90 billion, with over 900 portfolio companies and more than 55 IPOs to its name.

Insight Partners at a Glance

How the Insight Partners Interview Process Works

Insight runs exactly three named campus programs, and all three list only a New York address.

1. The Full-Time Investment Analyst Program, targeting a September start, aimed at candidates coming straight from an undergraduate or master's program.
2. The Summer Investment Analyst Program, targeting a June start, for students a year or so out from graduating.
3. The Onsite Diligence & Growth Strategy Program, the operations-analyst track that has carried a couple of different names over the years.

The two full-time tracks point at different parts of the platform. Investment Analyst sits with the deal team, sourcing and evaluating new companies to back. Onsite Diligence & Growth Strategy sits closer to the portfolio side, running diligence on prospective deals and then operational work once a company is already backed.

What Each Round Actually Tests

Every complete application asks for the same three things regardless of track: a resume, a transcript, and a HireVue video cover letter. No particular major is required, and Insight states directly that needing visa sponsorship, now or later, doesn't disqualify a candidate.

Early rounds test motivation and communication as much as raw ability; a first conversation is looking for someone who can explain why Insight specifically, not venture capital in general. The superday, once a candidate reaches it, weighs judgment on a live case and comfort defending a point of view under real pushback.

None of the three programs publishes an exact interview-round count, but a candidate who reaches a superday should expect to have already cleared at least two prior conversations. Compensation and target class size aren't published either, which is normal for a firm this size.

Who You'd Be Interviewing With

Jeff Horing remains an active co-founder and managing director. Reporting on a spring 2026 sourcing summit shows him still directly training the firm's newest analysts on how Insight actually sources deals, three decades after founding it. Hilary Gosher, who joined more than two decades ago, founded and still leads Insight Onsite.

Managing directors Deven Parekh and Jon Rosenbaum, chief operating officer Ian Sandler, chief financial officer Mark Lessing, chief compliance officer Andrew Prodromos and general counsel John Weinstein round out the leadership Insight names publicly.

Beneath that leadership sits the deal team itself, principals, vice presidents, associates and analysts doing the sourcing and diligence work Onsite doesn't, organized by sector rather than by geography. Outside estimates put the firm's overall staff in the several hundreds across six continents, a figure no firm-wide headcount on Insight's own site confirms.

Two changes landed inside the last two years. In December 2025, Insight added retired General Timothy D. Haugh, a former NSA director and U.S. Cyber Command commander, to a Government Advisory Board. In January 2026, Amir Malayery joined as managing director to lead a new secondaries strategy the firm announced the same month.

A Software-Only Bet, Made in 1995

Horing arrived at Insight from Goldman Sachs and then Warburg Pincus's technology-investing team. Murdock co-founded the firm alongside him and stepped back from active investing around 2011.

Their first fund, raised in 1995, was small: $24.1 million. What it established was a shape, not a size — every check from the earliest institutional round to a company's IPO, one platform, one sector. That shape held as the firm grew a $24 million debut into a business now measured in tens of billions.

Most venture firms of that era picked a lane, early or late, and stayed in it. Insight built a single platform designed to follow a winner from a Series A through a public listing and, in later years, into growth buyouts, backed by cheques that now run from roughly $5 million to more than $500 million per company.

How Insight Actually Invests: Buy, Then Keep Buying

The full-lifecycle model shows up most clearly in Databricks. Insight has invested across several of the data-and-AI company's financing rounds rather than writing one check and stepping aside once a later-stage investor arrived.

That's a genuinely different job from stage-specific venture investing: a seed fund hands a company off once it needs a bigger check than the fund can write, while Insight's platform is built so the same team, often backed by the same Onsite resources, can stay involved from a company's first institutional round through a public listing.

A growth buyout takes that a step further. Rather than a minority stake with existing management left in place, a growth buyout can mean acquiring a controlling interest, sometimes buying out earlier investors outright — a capability Insight built onto its platform in recent years, most visibly through the Growth Buyout Fund that closed alongside Fund XIII in January 2025.

Insight Onsite: The Team It Sells to Founders

Insight backs its software-only mandate with an in-house operating team, Insight Onsite, built in 2000 to give portfolio companies direct access to software operators rather than outside consultants. Hilary Gosher, who founded and still leads Onsite, sits on Insight's own investment committee, an unusually integrated structure for a firm Insight's size.

Onsite specialists work across a handful of functions built to plug directly into a portfolio company:

• Sales and marketing — building or scaling a go-to-market motion from close to scratch
• Product and data — instrumenting a product for the metrics a growth-stage board actually wants to see
• Talent — recruiting operators into portfolio companies directly, not just staffing the fund itself
• Mergers and acquisitions — running add-on deals once a company is ready to buy rather than only build

Insight's recruiting materials describe Onsite as more than 130 dedicated professionals. Reporting citing Dealogic data put Insight's 2021 activity at roughly 230 portfolio companies backed, worth a combined $39 billion, and its 2022 pace at around 173 companies worth $13.5 billion — a typical early-stage venture fund closes 15 to 30 deals a year, so Insight runs at a different order of magnitude entirely.

Every Fund on the Record

Insight doesn't publish a complete fund-by-fund history. What's known is enough to see the shape of it:

Fund XII, at roughly $20 billion, was more than double the size of the flagship that preceded it, the single biggest jump anywhere in the firm's fund history. A European fund distributor separately describes the firm as having raised 25 private-equity vehicles across its history, consistent with a platform running numbered flagships alongside opportunities funds and continuation vehicles under one roof.

Fund I (1995)

$24.1M

Fund XII (2022)

~$20bn

Fund XIII combined (2025)

$12.5bn

A $24 million debut fund, three decades on, sits inside a firm now closing single raises in the tens of billions.

Continuation Vehicles, Secondaries and Jurisdictions

Continuation Fund II, closed in May 2023, works differently from a numbered flagship: rather than force an older fund to sell its winning positions on a fixed timeline, Insight rolled some of them into a new vehicle and brought in fresh investors, led by two large secondaries specialists, to keep backing them.

The secondaries strategy Insight announced in January 2026, led by Amir Malayery, extends the same idea: buying and managing existing fund stakes rather than only writing cheques into new companies.

Insight is privately held, with no public stock and no annual report available for public inspection. Fund filings show CalPERS and the New York State Common Retirement Fund each committing roughly $300 million to Fund XIII, though no complete public list of the firm's LP base exists.

The firm runs parallel vehicles across jurisdictions for the same numbered fund: a Cayman-registered vehicle, a matching Luxembourg-style EU vehicle, Delaware-registered entities, and a registration with Norway's financial regulator, built to let genuinely EU-domiciled capital sit alongside the U.S. fund.

What Insight Has Backed

Insight's own portfolio spans some of the most recognizable names in software: Shopify, Twitter (later X), Qualtrics, HelloFresh, and that long-running position in Databricks.

• Shopify — the ecommerce platform millions of small businesses run their stores on
• Databricks — data and AI infrastructure, backed across several rounds rather than one
• Qualtrics — experience-management software used to run customer and employee surveys at scale
• HelloFresh — meal-kit delivery, one of the portfolio's earliest consumer subscription bets
• Wiz — cloud-security software, acquired by Google in 2025 for roughly $32 billion, now commonly described as the largest-ever acquisition of a venture-backed company

Reporting from Fortune put 2024 as a strong year for realizations: nearly $8 billion returned to investors across all of Insight's funds, including the four notable sales below.

SAP's purchase of WalkMe extended its enterprise-software footprint into digital-adoption tools; Mastercard's purchase of Recorded Future brought a threat-intelligence business inside a payments company already focused on fraud. None of those four deals involved a name from Insight's original 1990s vintage, a reminder that today's outcomes are compounding from bets placed well after the firm's founding era.

FTX, WeWork and the 2023 SEC Settlement

A record with only winners reads like marketing, and Insight's doesn't only have winners. Insight put roughly $40 million into FTX, including participation in a Series C round, before the exchange collapsed at the end of 2022. It also invested in WeWork shortly before that company's 2021 public listing; WeWork filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2023.

That 2021 IPO class is worth a closer look. Of twelve Insight portfolio companies that went public that year, three were later sold outright, and only one still traded above its offering price years afterward.

12

Insight-backed 2021 IPOs

3

later sold outright

1

still above its IPO price

By March 2024, the fund behind much of that era — the roughly $20 billion Fund XII, raised in February 2022 — was reporting a negative net IRR and a roughly break-even multiple, according to figures the Washington State Investment Board, one of Insight's own limited partners, disclosed itself.

That sits alongside the genuinely strong 2024 realization year covered above, and neither cancels the other out. 55-plus IPOs and a fund running close to flat are both true at once, and a candidate who only rehearses Shopify and Wiz hasn't actually read the record.

The 2025 Breach Disclosure

Both are fair, specific details for a candidate to reference without turning into an attack on the firm — a regulator's order and a breach notification are matters of public record, not a verdict on next year's returns.

What a Strong Answer Contains

• Know which office you're actually applying to. The campus programs are a New York seat, not a general entry point into the firm's EMEA business, so naming the right one signals real research.
• Pick a track and mean it. Investment Analyst and Onsite/DGS are different jobs wearing similar-sounding names, and treating them as interchangeable reads as unprepared.
• Name a win and a real setback in the same breath. A complete answer about what Insight has actually backed treats both as part of the record, not just the highlight reel.
• Treat Onsite as the pitch, not a footnote. It's a real part of what a founder is buying when they take an Insight cheque, and a real part of the job for anyone who joins it.
• Read the fund history as a story. A $24 million debut in 1995 growing into a $12.5 billion single close in 2025 says more than any AUM figure on its own.

How to Prepare, and the Bottom Line

1. Learn the firm before the process: the software-only thesis, the Onsite model, and at least one named win and one named loss.
2. Decide which office is realistically in reach, New York's documented campus pipeline or a lateral route into London, since preparation for each looks different.
3. If it's the campus pipeline, choose between Investment Analyst and Onsite/DGS before applying. There's no running both in the same cycle.
4. Build a specific, arguable point of view on a company or sector, since sourcing judgment is what the job and the interview both actually test.
5. Know the firm's last two years cold — the January 2025 fund close and the new secondaries strategy — and if an interviewer raises FTX, the SEC settlement, or last year's breach disclosure, don't get defensive about it. Naming what went wrong, and what changed since, is a stronger answer than pretending the record is spotless.
6. Bring one detail that shows you read past the homepage, the Databricks reinvestment pattern or the 2021 IPO class.

Insight Partners is a thirty-year software-investing platform that turned a $24 million debut fund into a firm running more than $90 billion and took Shopify and Wiz to some of the largest outcomes in tech — a record with real setbacks in it too, which a well-prepared candidate should be ready to discuss plainly rather than pretend away.

Its hiring pipeline is real, thoroughly documented, and entirely built around New York — one true and useful part of the story, and never the whole thing. A candidate who understands both halves is the one who sounds like they read the firm, not just the careers page.