This article studies French venture capitalists' screening and valuation process of investments in unquoted companies. Due to information asymmetry problems, data and valuation methods used are very spe-cific. French, American and English practices of ventures capitalists are also compared.

Unsatisfied with the dominatingshareholders' point of view, that appears to betoo limited to build a relevant theory ofcorporate governance, we propose an enlargeddefinition of the value which may be called,the stakeholder value. This definition and itsassociated measure are more suitable for...