Is a VC Partnership Greater than the Sum of Its Partners

By Mike Ewens, Matthew Rhodes-Kropf. 2014

157 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper investigates whether individual venture capitalists have repeatable investment skill and to what extent their skill is impacted by the VC firm where they work. We examine a unique dataset that tracks the performance of individual venture capitalists' investments across time and as they move between firms. We find evidence of skill and exit style differences even among venture partners investing at the same VC firm at the same time. Furthermore, our estimates suggest the partner's human capital is two to five times more important than the VC firm's organizational capital in explaining performance.

Subfields: Accounting, Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/250b1525b1104f55d2a02e71643f6bbd77f1c2d1

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Citations in the corpus

The Effects of Business Accelerators on Venture Performance: Evidence from Start-Up Chile (2017, background): “focuses on the importance of networks and human capital in the private equity industry (Hochberg, Ljungqvist, and Lu, 2007; Ewens and Rhodes-Kropf, 2015).”
What Is a Patent Worth? Evidence from the U.S. Patent “Lottery” (2019, background): “…located in hubs of 41 This is likely to be the case even if such areas also concentrate a large number of VCs, given that even in highVC-density areas like California, most VC firms tend to be small (Ewens and Rhodes-Kropf 2015) and competing VC firms do not coordinate their screening efforts.”
Top Management Human Capital, Inventor Mobility, and Corporate Innovation (2018, background): “Ewens and Rhodes-Kropf (2015) use a similar fixed-effects methodology to investigate whether individual venture capitalists have repeatable investment skill and the extent to which their skill is impacted by the venture capital firms for which they work.”