This article proposes that the attention allocated by venture capitalists to portfolio companies impacts their performance. The article develops arguments for optimal portfolio size and for the moderating roles of syndication frequency and role. The hypotheses receive support from analyses employing longitudinal data of the leading U.S. venture capital firms. Our results indicate the value of venture capitalist involvement and give guidance for its optimal allocation and syndication.

Policy makers have become increasingly concerned at the lack of risk capital available to new and early stage entrepreneurial ventures. As a public response to a perceived market failure, several governments have set up programs to channel equity finance to capital constrained but high potential, young enterprises. Critically, government support is often directed through the agency of private venture capital funds. We examine the profit distribution and compensation structures used in these hybrid public/private funds. We appraise government policy makers' ability to use these structures to improve the expected returns in market failure areas in order to attract private sector investors and professional managers to participate in these funds. The results derived from our simulation study suggest that such asymmetric profit sharing models can only resolve relatively modest market failures unless the programmes also manage to attract highly competent investors who are able to produce above average gross returns in market failure areas.

Syndicating with prior partners through relationally embedded ties may be widespread, but not always optimal when investing across borders especially if few prior partners operate in the focal market. However, the substitutes of relational embeddedness for trust creation in cross-border partner selection are poorly understood. We develop and test a model of how relational embeddedness interacts with structural embeddedness and legal and normative institutions and how relational embeddedness and these three substitutes jointly affect cross-border partner selection in venture capital syndicates. We test the hypotheses in the context of cross-border venture capital syndication in 12 European countries. Our findings based on a case-control analysis suggest that although relational embeddedness is a key driver of future partnering, structural embeddedness and trust generating institutions such as high quality legal frameworks and industry associations facilitate cross-border partnering and diminish the need to rely on relationally embedded ties in cross-border partner selection

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This paper reviews the literature on the emergence of industries and the theoretical and methodological approaches employed. The analysis reveals that industry emergence can be depicted as a three‐stage process. In the first, initial stage, a disruption to the existing industrial order triggers the second, the co‐evolutionary stage, which includes four sub‐processes related to developments in technology, markets, activity networks and industry identity. The convergence of these sub‐processes leads to the third stage, a growth stage and the birth of a new industry. While these three stages and the four sub‐processes are well covered in the literature, the authors find that there is a lack of understanding in terms of the transitions between the stages, the interactions and interdependencies between sub‐processes and moderating factors of industry emergence. Future research can bridge these gaps by exploring the different origins and initial conditions of industries, the processes and interactions in the earliest stages of industry emergence, and the role of facilitating and managing industry emergence. This implies a shift in the research focus from the industries that have emerged to the nascent processes of emergence.

This paper reviews and synthesizes the extant literature on venture capital syndication. By considering the questions of how, why, and when syndication affects the performance of VC firms and their portfolio ventures, we form a schematic structure of the syndication literature and identify areas for further research. The results of the review show that while the venture-level aspects are relatively well understood, the current literature lacks an understanding of how and why syndication affects the performance of VC firms. This suggests that more attention should be directed towards syndication as a component of the overall strategy of VC firms.

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