Thomas F. Hellmann

Venture Capital and the Professionalization of Start-Up Firms: Empirical Evidence

This paper examines the impact venture capital can have on the development of new firms. Using a hand-collected data set on Silicon Valley start-ups, we find that venture capital is related to a variety of professionalization measures, such as human resource policies, the adoption of stock option plans, and the hiring of a marketing VP. Venture-capital-backed companies are also more likely and faster to replace the founder with an outside CEO, both in situations that appear adversarial and those mutually agreed to. The evidence suggests that venture capitalists play roles over and beyond those of traditional financial intermediaries.

The Interaction between Product Market and Financing Strategy: The Role of Venture Capital

Venture capital financing is widely believed to be influential for new innovative companies. We provide empirical evidence that venture capital financing is related to product market strategies and outcomes of start-ups. Using a unique hand-collected database of Silicon Valley high-tech start-ups we find that innovator firms are more likely to obtain venture capital than imitator firms. Venture capital is also associated with a significant reduction in the time to bring a product to market, especially for innovators. Our results suggest significant interrelations between investor types and product market dimensions, and a role of venture capital for innovative companies. Article published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Financial Studies in its journal, The Review of Financial Studies.

The Allocation of Control Rights in Venture Capital Contracts

Venture capitalists often hold extensive control rights over entrepreneurial companies, including the right to fire entrepreneurs. This article examines why, and under what circumstances, entrepreneurs would voluntarily relinquish control. Control rights protect the venture capitalists from hold-up by the entrepreneurs. This provides the correct incentives for the venture capitalists to search for a superior management team. Wealth-constrained entrepreneurs may give up control even if the change in management imposes a greater loss of private benefit to them than a monetary gain to the company. The model also explains why entrepreneurs accept vesting of their stock and low severance.

A theory of strategic venture investing

Some venture capital investors seek purely financial gains while others, such as corporations, also pursue strategic objectives. The paper examines a model where a strategic investor can achieve synergies, but can also face a conflict of interest with the entrepreneur. If the start-up is a complement to the strategic partner, it is optimal to obtain funding from the strategic investor. If the start-up is a mild substitute, the entrepreneur prefers an independent venture capitalist. With a strong substitute, syndication becomes optimal, such that the independent venture capitalist is the active lead investor and the strategic partner a passive co-investor. The expected returns for the entrepreneur are nonmonotonic, lowest for a mild substitute, and higher for a strong substitute as well as for a complement. The paper also explains why a strategic investor often pays a higher valuation than an independent venture capitalist.

IPOS, ACQUISITIONS, AND THE USE OF CONVERTIBLE SECURITIES IN VENTURE CAPITAL

This paper provides a new explanation for the use of convertible securities in venture capital, which is based on the trade-off between acquisition or IPOs. A key property of convertible preferred equity is that it allocates different cash flow rights, depending on whether exit occurs by acquisition or IPO. The paper builds a model with double moral hazard, where both the entrepreneur and the venture capitalist provide value-adding effort. The optimal contract gives the venture capitalist more cash flow rights in acquisitions than IPOs. This explains the use of convertible preferred equity, including automatic conversion at IPO. Contingent control rights are shown to be instrumental for achieving effcient exit decisions. The model also explains when to use simple versus participating convertible preferred equity.

The changing face of the European venture capital industry: Facts and analysis

The Survey of European Venture Capital (SEVeCa) is the largest academic study to date on the European venture capital industry, providing information on more than 1,300 investment companies, 400 venture partners, and 150 venture funds. The European venture capital industry is found to be more integrated than previously believed: 27% of all venture firms have an office in a foreign country, and 24% of investments are cross-border. Significant links to the U.S. lead to increasing emulation of U.S. investment practices. However, distinctively European aspects, such as the prominence of bank and corporate investors, do remain. The study also debunks the belief that all European venture capitalists are conservative and “hands-off.” A majority of the deals are early stage, and involvement with portfolio companies is substantial. The experience and education of of venture partners (their “human capital”) is shown to play an important role in promoting an active investment style.

Credit and equity rationing in markets with adverse selection

Previous theories of financial market rationing focussed on a single market, either the credit or the equity market. An interesting question is whether credit and equity rationing are mutually compatible, and how they interact. We consider a model with two-dimensional asymmetric information, where entrepreneurs have private information about both the expected returns and the risk of their projects. We show that credit and equity rationing may occur individually or simultaneously. Moreover, competition between the two markets may generate the adverse selection that leads to rationing outcomes.

Banks as Catalysts for Industrialization

We provide a theoretical framework to address the historical debate about the role of banks in industrialisation. We introduce banks into a model of the big push to examine under what circumstances profit-motivated banks would engage in coordination of investments. We show that banks may act as catalysts for industrialisation provided that: (I) they are sufficiently large to mobilise a critical mass of firms, and (ii) they possess sufficient market power to make profits from coordination. Our model also shows that universal banking helps reduce endogenously derived coordination costs. Our results delineate the strengths and limits of Gershenkrons (1962) view of banks in economic development, and help explain a diverse set of historical experiences. We examine both countries where banks were associated with industrialisation, showing that our theoretical condition holds, as well as countries where the failure to industrialise can be related - at least in part - to the absence of our necessary conditions.

The Effects of Government‐Sponsored Venture Capital: International Evidence

This article examines enterprises funded by government-sponsored venture capitalists (GVCs). We find that enterprises funded by both GVCs and private venture capitalists (PVCs) obtain more investment than enterprises funded purely by PVCs, and much more than those funded purely by GVCs. Also, markets with more GVC funding have more VC funding per enterprise and more VC-funded enterprises, suggesting that GVC finance largely augments rather than displaces PVC finance. There is also a positive association between mixed GVC/PVC funding and successful exits, as measured by initial public offerings (IPOs) and acquisitions, attributable largely to the additional investment.

Incentives and Innovation: A Multitasking Approach

This paper examines how employees trade off planned activities versus unplanned innovation, and how firms can choose incentives to affect these choices. It develops a multi-task model where employees makes choices between their assigned standard tasks, for which the firm has a performance measure and provides incentives, and privately observed innovation opportunities that fall outside of the performance metrics, and require ex-post bargaining. The model shows how firms adapt incentive compensations in the presence of such unplanned innovation. If innovation are highly firm-specific, firms provide lowerpowered incentives for standard tasks to encourage more innovation, yet in equilibrium employees undertake too few innovation. The opposite occurs if innovation are less firm-specific. We also investigate the effectiveness of several possibilities to encourage innovation, such as tolerance for failure, investing in employee innovation, stock-based compensation, and the allocation of intellectual property rights.