Meet the NYC Venture Capital Internship Alumni: Mariana Gonzalez

Before I ever heard the word “entrepreneurship,” I was already doing it. Growing up in Caracas, I sold my old toys out of my bedroom, ran a lemonade stand, and sold homemade sweets to people in my building. When I moved to New York at age 12, that instinct didn’t skip a beat. By 8th grade, I was selling quesillos to my teammates before practice. I didn’t have a name for what I was doing. I just knew I liked building a business out of nothing.

At Baruch College’s Zicklin School of Business, on-campus startup competitions pulled my entrepreneurial instinct into focus. What hooked me wasn’t just the mechanics of building a company. It was the intersection of that with my lifelong pull toward international business and different cultures. I started thinking less about single markets and more about how a good idea in one place finds its next home somewhere else entirely. That led me to venture capital.

This summer, I’m working as a Summer Analyst at Thomson Reuters Ventures, focused on sourcing and mapping the startup landscape across legal tech, fintech, risk, fraud, and compliance. The scope has been wide, and I’ve loved that. I’ve researched agentic wallets, the creator economy, risk and fraud, global trade, insurance, and tech, building sourcing pipelines and going deep on verticals like sanctions technology and nearshoring infrastructure.

No two days at TRV look the same. I’ve talked to founders building at the earliest stages, helped plan events that bring investors and operators into the same room, and connected with funds around the world to understand how they think about opportunity. I’ve built decks, written meeting-ready research for partners, worked on due diligence, and even helped build AI tools to support the team’s own workflow. I also worked through a structured reading list to build macro fluency across trade finance, compliance, logistics, and geopolitics before narrowing into a vertical of my own. Every project has taught me something new about what it takes to find a good investment long before the term sheet shows up.

None of this happens in a vacuum. I genuinely could not have asked for a better team, from the partners who let me sit in on real conversations to the colleagues who took the time to explain the “why” behind a decision instead of just the “what.” I’ve learned that the technical skills are teachable, but the judgment, knowing which questions to ask and which signals to trust, comes from people who are genuinely willing to invest in you.

What surprised me most about VC is how much it rewards the same instincts I had as a kid selling quesillos out of a backpack: paying attention to what people actually want, reading a room, and being unafraid to make the ask. The scale is different now. Instead of sweets, it’s sourcing the next founder or spotting the next market. But the muscle is the same one I’ve been building my whole life.

My advice to other students eyeing this path: Stop waiting to feel “ready” or “qualified enough,” because that feeling doesn’t arrive on its own. You build it by doing the reps. Read the deals you don’t understand yet. Ask the question that makes you feel a little exposed. If you’re coming from a non-target school, a different country, or a background that doesn’t look like the typical VC pipeline, that’s not a gap to apologize for. It’s the exact lens this industry is short on. Keep aiming high, stay exactly who you are, and trust that you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be.