Venture Capitalists’ Human Capital: Investigating the relation between human capital and venture capital strategy

Because of the risks involved in financing in new high-tech, high-growth ventures, one of the few funding sources available is venture capital. Venture Capital firms are businesses that are owned and managed by venture capitalists (VCs). Within these firms the VCs manage Venture Capital funds, one VC or Venture Capital firm can manage multiple funds. The money in these funds is supplied by external investors. VCs have certain experiences and educational backgrounds (human capital) that leads them to implement a certain investment strategy which influences the returns of the funds. Historically the returns for Venture Capital funds have been very low. This threatens the supply of capital to future technology start-ups. One of the reasons for the low returns may be because VCs lack the necessary human capital related to the investment strategy they implement. The problem is that it is currently not known how the strategy of a Venture Capital Fund and the knowledge and experience of the managing VC influence each other. Earlier research has found that there is a relationship between a top management team’s human capital and their ability to execute a strategy. And additional research has shown that a VC’s human capital and the returns of the funds he manages are related. However, it is not known how these relationships work. Institutional investors limit the risk of their investment through diversification. VCs limit their investment risk through specialization. A VC that is specialized in a specific sector and invests in that sector should in the long run perform better than a VC with less sector specific human capital. This exploratory research investigates the relationship between VCs´ human capital and the investment strategies of their funds. Using a multiple case-study approach, several VC funds have been investigated by interviewing partners of the managing firms. This research did not look at the extended relationship between VCs’ human capital and the returns by their funds. The results show there is a strong relation between the specific industry experiences of VCs and the investments they make. When a VC starts at a VC firm the human capital that a VC has matches the investment strategy of the firm/fund they join or start. VCs do not change their investment strategy easily. On the one hand this appears to be by design of the Venture Capital system where a VC is limited by his Limited Partners from modifying his investment strategy significantly. On the other hand this appears to be because of a self-reinforcing cycle, where a VC invests in a specific market according to a specific strategy and by doing this gains more experience and social capital in that market. This helps him make better investments in that market in the future, which leads to more human- and social capital in that specific market. This self-reinforcing cycle (lock-in) makes it difficult for a VC to move to different markets. This is not a problem when the market a VC is specialized in offers a lot of good investment opportunities. However, when the market does not offer good investment opportunities, the VC is limited by his experience, reputation and legal obligations from investing in different markets or according to different strategies. The most important management implication of this research is how VCs can change their strategy over time. Several of the interviewed VCs have changed their strategies by using their social capital to internalize new human capital. The strategy formation process can be characterized as highly emergent but deliberately confined.

Subject

venture capital
vc
human capital
strategy
entrepreneurship
investing

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Student theses

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master thesis

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