v2 Ventures Interview Questions
& Process

It started with a recruiter cold-calling me. He talked about the job and company, then asked me 5-10 screening questions. A couple days later, I got a case study via email. It involved analyzing a small dataset and answering questions about my experience. I thought the test was poorly designed and the methodology flawed. After another couple days, the recruiter scheduled a phone interview with the hiring manager and another team member. This interview was mostly technical, focusing on my case study answers. The hiring manager seemed uninformed, not understanding concepts like randomization and suggesting linear regression for binary responses. The other interviewer was more knowledgeable but intimidating. About a week later, I was invited for a 4-hour onsite interview in Kansas City. This interview was unconventional, with the hiring manager asking questions chronologically from high school to my current experience. We covered high school, college, and grad school in the first 1.5-2 hours, asking about GPA, activities, awards, likes/dislikes about schools, high/low points, study habits, spare time activities, motivations, and influences. Then, I was given a list of 50-60 words to pick 10 strengths and weaknesses from, which was difficult due to ambiguous terms. Lunch with the team was the only technical part, asking about my past work. In the afternoon, the hiring manager asked about my previous jobs, including responsibilities, titles, salaries, likes/dislikes about companies, high/low points, coworker intelligence, and manager's perception of my strengths/weaknesses and vice-versa. Finally, he asked about career goals and about 10 situational questions. The hiring manager told me I wouldn't get the job due to vague answers and not answering enough questions. I found the educational questions overly personal and unrelated to the job. The process made me uncomfortable sharing personal details. I also struggled with questions about 'low points' as I hadn't experienced significant failures. I felt I had to fabricate answers to succeed, which made me question the company culture. Adknowledge also didn't reimburse meals, citing that food is a daily necessity, which struck me as cheap and exploitative, impacting their ability to attract top talent.

This was one of the worst interview processes I've been through. Ultimately, I wasn't chosen because my skills didn't align with their tech stack, and a top executive basically told me I didn't fit their mold because I've worked for big companies. They wanted a DevOps expert who's also a database tuning guru and skilled in the specific mapreduce model they use for emails. Normally companies look at adaptability, but they judged solely on how well your skills matched theirs. I really wish they'd done a second phone screen instead of making me waste a full day on an onsite where I had no chance from the start. Even if they had offered the job, I doubt they would've matched my current pay; the hiring manager mentioned new hires aren't usually included in bonuses their first year after I shared my current bonus details. For the onsite, there was a mapreduce round that focused on how their model differed from my real-time processing experience with Apache Storm and Kafka. There was also a coding and caching round, which was the only part I enjoyed. Then a round with two DevOps folks, one of whom didn't ask any questions. The final round was with a top executive.

I was first reached out to on LinkedIn. The recruiter was available to answer all my questions about the role and we had a good chat on the phone. After that, I set up a phone interview with the hiring manager. The next steps involved a case study, a personality test, and a detailed career history document. While the actual interviews weren't too tough, the case study presented a real challenge, and filling out the career history took a significant amount of time.

I applied online via LinkedIn and got contacted by HR a few days later. The first round with HR was pretty basic and generic. Then I met the Director of Sales for the second round, which was a good interview with a personal touch. After waiting a week, I had another round with a peer who is based internationally, followed by a final round with the HR head.