Entrepreneurs who deal with a venture capital firm (VC) for the first time often find themselves unprepared for the experience. The financing terms (deal structure), which specify the percentage of the firm's common stock that goes to the VC often require that the entrepreneur forfeit a large...

This paper analyses the factors that drive the dynamics of French new technology-based and venture-backed companies, using a hand-collected database with 216 companies created between 1998 and 2005. The Venture Capital (VC) firms can choose between three outcomes: the company exits from their...

The conventional wisdom is that entrepreneurs seek financing for their high-growth, high-risk start-up companies in a particular order. They begin with friends, family, and bootstrapping. Next they turn to angel investors, or accredited investors (and usually ex-entrepreneurs) who invest their...

Observable resources, particularly patents, alliances, and team experience, are known to impact a start-up's ability to attract venture capital financing. In this context they potentially fulfill a two-fold function: as productive assets and, likely, as signals of characteristics of a venture...

Using a new European Union-sponsored firm-level longitudinal dataset, we assess the impact of government-managed (GVC) and independent venture capital (IVC) funds on the sales and employee growth of European high-tech entrepreneurial firms. Our results show that the main statistically robust and...

The venture capital literature has established the positive impact of coinvestment networks on the performance of start-up investments. In early stages, however, often angel financing is the primary source of external equity. Using a novel in-depth data set of U.S. high technology start-ups we...

This paper examines venture capital investment activity in the United States during the period 1995 to the first quarter 2009, taking into consideration both location and industry sector. The research question is whether industry and region are important factors in determining venture capital...

I show that VCs frequently have the right to veto specific operational and financial decisions even though they are equity investors with access to other powerful governance mechanisms. Across 182 first-round U.S. venture capital investments, restrictive covenants are commonplace with 92 percent...

This Article examines a third exit option in venture capital to supplement IPOs and trade sales: secondary markets for the sale of individual ownership interests in start-ups and venture capital (VC) funds. While investors can readily buy shares in publicly-traded companies, until recently they...

The venture capital market is characterized by personal interactions between VC firms and the startups they finance. Yet we have little systematic evidence of how startup founders get matched with partners at VC firms. By assembling data at the individual partner and founder level, we compare...