The Venture Capital Cover Letter Most Funds Don't Want

Point Nine doesn't ask for a cover letter. Its hiring posts ask a candidate to answer three of six named questions instead: a favourite company, a view on investment strategy, a take on crypto, a personal definition of a marketplace, an admired investor, and a startup recommendation.

Creandum wants something else again: a 90-second video naming a startup and arguing the investment case for it. Northzone wants three written answers sent by email, one of them a startup the candidate would back. Some funds compress the same idea further still: one company, one paragraph, one clear view on why it fits that fund specifically, not just the candidate's personal taste.

None of that is a cover letter, and none of it is an accident. A striking number of European venture funds have quietly thrown out the letter and replaced it with a structured prompt, because a letter tests writing and enthusiasm, and the job is neither of those things. It tests judgement on one company.

Answering one of these prompts well is a different task from writing a nice letter, and the difference is worth understanding before you write anything.

What Funds Ask For Instead of a Letter

Line the funds up side by side and the pattern is obvious.

The Pattern Behind the Prompts

None of these funds explain why they built the prompt this way. But the pattern across each of them is consistent enough to read as a structural choice, not a handful of unrelated quirks.

A venture investment team is small even at a well-capitalised fund. HV Capital, managing more than €2.8 billion, describes an investment and operations team of just over sixty people across every fund it has ever raised. A team that size, reading a large volume of applications for one seat, needs a filter that is cheap to grade and hard to fake.

A cover letter fails both tests. Enthusiasm cannot be verified, length can be padded without adding information, and a well-written letter proves writing ability rather than investment judgement. A structured prompt fixes all three problems at once: it is graded in seconds, it cannot be answered generically, and it asks for exactly the skill the job requires.

A conventional cover letter

• Enthusiasm that cannot be verified
• Length that can be padded without adding information
• Proves writing ability, not investment judgement

A structured prompt

• Graded in seconds, cannot be answered generically
• Asks for exactly the skill the job requires
• Tests whether a candidate already does the fund's core work, unpaid

Finding and qualifying companies before anyone else does is what a venture junior actually spends most of their working time on. A prompt that asks a candidate to name a company is a direct, low-cost test of whether that candidate already does the fund's core work, unpaid, before they are ever hired to do it.

The One Thing Every Format Is Actually Testing

Look past the surface differences. A 90-second video is nothing like a written email answer, and the same underlying requirement shows up in every format above:

• A specific, named, checkable company. Not a sector, not a trend, not "AI" or "climate," but a company someone could look up before the interview ends.
• A stated view on why it could return a fund's kind of capital, not merely why it is a well-run or interesting business.
• Visible reasoning. The two or three assumptions the case actually depends on, stated plainly, rather than a confident conclusion with nothing underneath it.

One fund's own phrasing makes this explicit in a way most postings do not bother to. Its careers page does not ask for "a startup you like." It asks for one you "would have invested in ... as Cherry Ventures," which forces the candidate to reason from inside the fund's own investment lens rather than describe personal taste.

Point Nine's six-question format and Northzone's three-prompt email are both variations on the same demand, compressed to different lengths. The compression itself is informative: a fund that wants a company named in a short written prompt is testing whether a candidate can compress a real investment case, not whether they can write at length about nothing in particular.

Point Nine's Three-of-Six Questions

Point Nine's own Berlin hiring posts drop the cover letter field entirely and ask instead for a CV, links to a candidate's professional online presence, and written thoughts on three of six named questions. The six cover a favourite company or two, a view on investment strategy, an opinion on crypto, a personal definition of what makes something a marketplace, an admired investor, and a startup recommendation.

Letting the candidate choose three of six is itself a small, deliberate design choice. It removes the excuse that a candidate had nothing to say on a topic outside their experience, while still forcing a real, specific answer on whichever three they do pick. A candidate who chooses only the safest, most generic-sounding pairing, favourite companies and admired investors, without ever touching the startup-recommendation question, has quietly avoided the one question hardest to fake.

That avoidance is visible to anyone reading the application. Choosing the startup-recommendation question voluntarily, even when two safer options exist, is itself a signal worth sending.

Northzone's CV-Plus-Email Format

Northzone's own recruiting instructions, for junior investment roles, ask for a CV and a short email rather than a formal letter, and specify exactly what that email should contain: why the role interests the candidate, one or two of the most relevant experiences or projects, and a startup in the fund's relevant market the candidate is genuinely excited about.

The format is deliberately informal in tone, an email rather than a letter, but not informal in substance. All three prompts are checkable: the startup exists or it doesn't, the experience described either matches the CV attached or it doesn't, and the stated reason for interest either says something specific about Northzone or could be sent to any fund unchanged.

The most common failure on this exact format is treating the "why this role" prompt as the main event and the startup prompt as an afterthought squeezed into a final sentence. The reverse ordering of effort is closer to what the format is actually testing.

Reasoning From Inside the Fund's Lens, Not Personal Taste

The clause worth reading twice, wherever a fund's own posting includes it, is the one that names the fund itself: not "a startup you like," but a startup this specific fund should have backed. That framing rules out an answer built from personal taste alone.

A candidate who names a company they find exciting as a consumer, without any argument for why it fits a specific fund's stage and geography, has answered a different, easier question than the one actually posed. That distinction, a company you like versus a company a specific fund should have backed, separates a strong answer from a weak one in every format that follows.

How to Answer "Name a Company" Well

This is the section worth reading twice, because it is the one place a candidate can make a genuinely wrong move without realising it. Two kinds of answer look reasonable on first read and fail for opposite reasons.

The weak answer, safe version: naming a profitable, stable, modestly growing business. It sounds sensible, because it is a genuinely good company by most measures. It fails because venture economics are not built to reward that kind of outcome. A fund needs a rare, large winner to return capital across a portfolio where most bets fail outright or return only their own money, and a stable small business, by its nature, is not built to become that winner.

The weak answer, obvious version: naming a company everyone already knows, usually a late-stage name that has already raised several rounds and made headlines. This fails differently. It proves the candidate can read the news, not that they can find something the fund's own partners have not already seen. Sourcing value comes from being early or being unusual, not from being correct about something already public.

The strong answer, by contrast, does three things in whatever space the format allows:

1. Names a company few interviewers will already know, at a stage early enough that the fund could plausibly still get in
2. States the specific mechanism by which it could become large, not just that the market is big
3. Names the one or two things that would have to be true for the thesis to hold, and is honest about the risk to each

A Worked Example: Strong vs Weak Answers

A strong answer, compressed, might sound like this: name a two-year-old team building a specific tool for a specific underserved user, say why the market is about to change rather than why it's already big, and name the one thing that would have to go right.

That last part matters more than people think. A line like "the risk is distribution, since the product has only been proven in one vertical so far" makes a pitch more credible, not less, because it shows the reasoning didn't stop at the upside. An interviewer who hears zero acknowledged risk assumes the candidate hasn't thought hard enough to find one.

Eight Weak Answers, and the Fix for Each

The Video Format Specifically

Creandum's own Visiting Analyst posting asks for something none of the written formats above require: a video "of maximum 90 seconds," naming a Europe-based, pre-seed or seed-stage company and arguing why Creandum should invest in it. The exact wording has appeared identically across two consecutive hiring cycles, which makes it a standing feature of the application rather than a one-off addition.

Ninety seconds changes what a strong answer looks like, compared to a 500-word essay or a memo excerpt. There is no room for a hedged, multi-paragraph build-up, no space to walk through three possible companies before settling on one, and no way to bury a weak thesis inside careful qualifications.

What actually works in that format:

• State the company and the one-sentence thesis in the first ten seconds, not the last ten
• Spend the middle on the single strongest piece of evidence for the thesis, not a list of features
• Name the one real risk to the case, briefly, since a pitch with zero acknowledged risk reads as naive rather than confident
• Stop before the ninety seconds forces an interruption, since running over signals the same lack of compression the format is testing for

The Memo-Style Task: Antler's Version of the Actual Job

Some funds replace both the letter and any word-limited essay with something closer to the actual job: a written investment memo, prepared and then defended in conversation.

Antler's own UK hiring page, for its investment-team roles, describes "a working session-style first interview, including preparation of either an investment memo or structured founder/product assessment," with the specifics provided ahead of the session rather than published generically. An older Antler posting, reproduced elsewhere, is more concrete about what this has meant in practice: preparing an investment memo "for a pre-seed or seed-stage venture you choose," then presenting and discussing it live.

What separates a strong memo excerpt from a weak one is less about polish and more about structure:

• A clear recommendation stated up front, not buried at the end after pages of description
• The company's own numbers and claims treated as inputs to check, not facts to repeat
• At least one point of genuine skepticism about the deck, since a memo that agrees with everything the founder said is not doing diligence
• A specific next question the writer would ask the founder, which shows the process continuing rather than ending at the memo

The Conventional Letter, When It Is Still Wanted

Not every fund has replaced the letter, and where one is genuinely requested, the same underlying lesson from every structured prompt above still applies: specificity beats enthusiasm, every time it has been possible to compare the two.

No fund publishes a stated grading rubric for a conventional letter. The guidance below is built from what the structured-prompt funds reveal they actually value, not a rule any single firm states outright, and the same instinct still holds: say something specific, early, and skip the throat-clearing.

A strong letter, adapted from that evidence, tends to run:

1. One sentence naming a specific company or thesis point, stated immediately, before any background or motivation
2. Two or three sentences of reasoning behind it, the same visible-assumptions habit every structured prompt above rewards
3. One sentence connecting that reasoning to the specific fund, its stage, sector or ownership discipline, not a generic "why venture" paragraph
4. A closing sentence, short, that invites a conversation rather than summarising the letter that preceded it

Length matters less than density. A letter that says something checkable in 150 words beats one that says nothing checkable in 400.

What to Never Do

A handful of mistakes show up across nearly every format above, structured or conventional, and each is avoidable with a little preparation.

Each of these is fixable with the same habit worth repeating: say something specific enough that it could only be true of this application, to this fund, about this company.

An Ordered Way to Prepare

1. Before drafting anything, find out exactly what the specific fund on your list actually asks for, since the format itself is the first piece of information the posting gives you
2. If it asks for a named company, prepare one in advance: early-stage, checkable, and reasoned through rather than chosen at the last minute
3. If it asks for a video, rehearse the compressed version first and cut down to it, rather than writing a long script and trying to read it fast
4. If it asks for a memo excerpt, practice the structure, recommendation first, evidence and skepticism next, on a real, public pitch deck before the actual task arrives
5. If a conventional letter is genuinely requested, open with the specific point, not the motivation paragraph
6. Whatever the format, read the instructions twice before answering once, since following the constraint is itself part of what is being graded

The Bottom Line

Point Nine, Creandum, Northzone and Antler don't agree on format, but they agree on what they're testing for. A candidate who shows up prepared to write a warm, well-structured letter to a fund that wants three specific answers has already lost time they didn't need to lose.

The formats will keep changing by fund and by year. What doesn't change is the underlying test: a specific company, a defensible reason it could return a fund's kind of capital, and reasoning a reader can actually follow. Prepare that, in whatever length and medium a given fund happens to ask for, and the format stops being an obstacle and starts being the easiest part of the application.