We are meeting for lunch near where she lives, as she's working from home that day. She is a tall woman, in her early 30s, born and raised in an African country, with impeccable English and a vocabulary that sent me for the dictionary a few times. Dressed as if she is going jogging next, she has lively eyes and a sharp tongue. She smokes one cigarette after another, while taking sips of her green tea.

"Sometimes I help people out, when they hear that I work in banking. I tell them: 'But you know what, it's really boring.' This helps deflect resentment, but it's not true. It's somehow not acceptable to work in finance and love your job. I did not choose venture capital as a career, quite the contrary. But I have totally fallen in love with it.

In venture capital (VC) you connect entrepreneurs looking for capital with investors looking to invest. How it works: we are constantly on the look-out for entrepreneurs with a great idea, and for smaller businesses with the potential for growth. Then we go to our investors and ask them for money to invest in these companies. If we raise the capital we commit for a number of years to advise and help the entrepreneur or small business. We get a seat on the board, at least once a week there are intense consultations, quarterly reports, annual meetings …

Amounts invested vary from $5 million to $25 million. A commitment of 10 years is maximum, most VC firms hope to 'exit' after seven years. These 'exits' can be really emotional affairs. You will have spent five years or more with that entrepreneur, going through highs and lows, seeing the business go from something run from his kitchen to a company employing 200 people … The man is now a millionaire, his life has completely changed but you still know him from the days before all that. Then it's time to say goodbye.

This is what I love so much about this job. Very soon you forget it's about money. You're helping companies grow. And results are very measurable, it's difficult to blag. Reputations flounder really quickly. If you lose investors' money in such a tight-knit community you're finished.

So the world of venture capital divides in two streams: one is finding the promising small businesses and the entrepreneurs with the brilliant ideas – Dragon's Den style. The other is raising funds from investors. As a firm we get paid a percentage of the invested sums we manage, plus what we call 'carry': when there's an exit, we share in the profits. 'Carry' is quite controversial because in the UK it is taxed at a lower rate. There can be really good exits – a return of 10 times the amount invested is not unheard of.

My venture capital fund is sharia-compliant, which means we can't invest in gambling, alcohol and tobacco. Most importantly, there can be no leverage. The company we invest in cannot have debt on their books, or use debt in any way for expansion. So we need to go through their operations and check. There are some really exotic financial instruments out there, so sometimes I need to find the right Islamic scholar in Malaysia to make sure it's all right. Compare it to the Jews and their kosher laws: just like there are rabbis with food specialisations, the same is true for Islamic scholars and financial instruments. I assumed being a woman might be a problem with the bearded sheikhs but the contrary is true. They like the change, there are not so many women around in this sector.

There's something to sharia-compliant venture capital; if the entire economy were run like that, you'd probably have no desperate recessions and no booms. Same for companies, without debt injections you don't have that freakish growth, but neither do you these busts when suddenly borrowing becomes much more expensive. If you're happy to forego huge potential, I'd say, sharia economics is fine.

I never planned to go into finance. My parents expected me to become a writer, or active in politics. I interned at the UN, thought about working for an MP. But work at the UN was so bureaucratic, so inward-looking, so few tangible results after all the work that is being done … I did take some courses in university about Islamic finance. My parents were quite disapproving, their interests were more cultural and intellectual. But they soon came round when they saw what a help my income was to raising and educating my siblings.

I started in investment banking, a huge international bank. And I was enamoured. The massive lifts, the food corners, the expensive suits. I thought it was arrival. But after a year I began to have these serious doubts. This feeling as I walked out of the building: what have I actually accomplished today? At the end of the year, what has my team achieved, in a physical, real life sense of the word? I felt a bit of a fraud.

So I moved to a private equity firm next, which was a nightmare. This was the world of the big buy-outs, you'd buy a company, strip it to make it meaner and leaner and try to sell it off for a lot more. It's a terrible world, but very lucrative. You'd buy a hospital conglomerate, grow it by 50% and sell it for a big profit. After a while I realised that really, anyone could do this, it's not something incredibly special.

I find that in finance, everybody goes through a few years of this; you work insanely hard, you will have no social life, no weekends … It is temporary and you know it. Seen from that perspective, my time at the private equity buy-out firm was very useful. I learnt a lot and made many good contacts: investors all over the world. All of them have their specialisations and preferences and strengths and weaknesses; if they trust you, and they know you are not going to waste their time with proposals they won't be interested in anyway, that's very valuable. So when this venture capital firm hired me, I could take these investors' contacts with me.

In my earlier job at that major investment bank, the senior people were frighteningly similar to one another. Without fail they went to Eton or Westminster, then Oxford or Cambridge, then Insead, Wharton Business School or Harvard. They married young, to someone they had met at university, and by the time they're in their 40s they have teenage kids and – this took me some time to figure out – then they seem to have decided 'this is my life'. I am done. These senior people were completely different from those in venture capital. That world is full of eccentrics, whereas senior bankers are often crushingly boring, I find. They seem to have lost interest in anything that doesn't help them meet the demands of their jobs. Sometimes I got to look at their CVs and it would list among their hobbies 'reading French literature' or 'mountain climbing' and it was hard to see when they had any time or inclination to indulge. Such a CV item is purely performative. Even these fabulous holidays can be like that: look at me, being successful on this fabulous holiday.

I have been in this job for eight years and in the industry for about 10. I have not experienced sexism or racism beyond the occasional idiot. It's such a meritocratic environment, people simply don't care how you look. That's this job at its best, when I find myself in a room with people from every corner of the globe. You hear different accents, different levels of English but even so, people don't even seem to register those different backgrounds anymore. It's really colour blind.

It can be hard work and a tough life. Travelling is not glamorous. When I am in Hong Kong I have 10 meetings, go to my hotel and work some more. Yes, it's a five-star hotel. But I am still all alone, eating a sandwich in the bathroom.

I suppose only with strip clubbing (which is confined to certain circles of banking) and maternity leave there is a very clear gender divide. This job is not like teaching, where you can step out and back in with relative ease. If you are on maternity leave, somebody has to be trained to fill in for you, especially if you have a complicated job that took years of training and experience. When you come back, you need to be retrained because so many things will have changed. Now if you then announce after six months you're pregnant again, how do you expect a manager to react? A colleague was offered and took $1m to leave, after she announced her second pregnancy. The organisation simply couldn't cope with having to train another substitute, then after four months taking her back and getting her updated again with everything that had changed in the meantime. It wasn't about the money, the firm was losing so much more through the disruption.

I am single now but I find that working in finance is not a downside when dating. Men tend to assume you are of reasonable intelligence and not a pushover. Men who work in finance may get a girl because they make a lot of money, but it doesn't work the other way round.

Some of my male friends don't take it well, which they tend to express in an indirect, passive-aggressive way. When I have to cancel because of work, they paint me as this Cruella de Vil money-obsessed creature. It's all done in a jokey, teasing kind of way, but underneath there's something more sinister going on. 'Did you kill any interns today?' and that sort of thing. They go on about how they don't make a lot of money and this is a conscious choice on their part – implying that they could easily do the work I do, they have simply opted not to. I spent a great deal of the money I made on my family. So it's not like I am rubbing it in their faces. But if you can afford something and they can't, it makes some people very uncomfortable, insecure even.

There's this paradox with some of my friends: they accept me having a high-powered well-paying job, but I have to seem to be suffering for it. So I cannot also have time to see them and travel and have a work-life balance and also enjoy my job. Some people need to see that you have made a pact with the devil, compromised something. They want me to be one of those lonely career women with nothing in her fridge but one bottle of champagne and a carton of milk, out of date. And then there's the moral grandstanding. You may have this great job that pays really well and which, apparently, you even enjoy. But. You. Are. Evil. And I may be an underpaid teacher. But. I. Am. Good.

I have this female colleague at our firm, incredibly bright, really ambitious, partner by the time she was 30, razor sharp. Then I saw her husband and he was typical of the kind of men to marry those high powered women in that industry: what you call a beta-male. He was a bit younger, good-looking, bohemian, hopeless with money, not very hungry for status, when people talk markets he simply tunes out. He loves a family and will push the pram while she is out there doing huge deals. She will come home, all worried and stressed about something, and he'll say: oh sweetie don't you worry about all that, I have found this free open air concert in the park nearby, let's get a bottle of wine …

It would appear the typical husband of a female in finance is a grounding force, whereas the typical male banker's wife is an asset; an extension of his desire to project an image of success. You really can't generalise about men in the financial sector. It's too vast, too diverse. But lots of men do spend years of their lives building mathematical models; such an activity must have an impact on them. At some point they become scared of things you can't measure or quantify. Like love.

My pay? I make £100,000 a year in salary. There can be a bonus but it's not factored in. In banking when you don't get any bonus, it's really a message that says: go! In venture capital a bonus is really what the word originally meant; something extra. Finally there can be 'carry' when we've had a good exit. On average bonus plus carry comes to another £50,000, in a good year they can be multiples of your salary many times over. But as I said, it can also be zero."

Joris Luyendijk replies to your comments

Vraaak says:

Much of the article is humble and self effacing, i.e. 'anyone can do it', until this little bombshell:

"This job is not like teaching, where you can step out and back in with relative ease. If you are on maternity leave, somebody has to be trained to fill in for you, especially if you have a complicated job that took years of training and experience."

Teaching takes years of training and experience, and as you move through it from primary to secondary, undergrad to postgrad, you find that when someone has maternity leave, you get to do two jobs until they come back, and even if it took years of training or not to do the other persons job, you don't have a choice.(...)

JorisLuyendijk replies:

Joris Luyendijk banking blog Photograph: Guardian

Hi Vraaak, maybe her point has not come across as well as it could have. What she meant is that the job itself is undergoing permanent change. As you say, teaching takes years of training and experience, but once you've got that under your belt, you can move in and out of the job with more ease than somebody at a firm of this type.

I thought this was an interesting point about maternity leave that I had never quite appreciated. I am hearing a similar thing about the impossibility of working part-time as a trader; apparently you have to be active in the markets every day of the week; you cannot miss, say, Fridays, as you will have missed something that is very difficult if not impossible to catch up with later - or so the traders claim.