How Venture Capitalists Bet: Evidence from Two Randomized Controlled Trials

Abstract

Understanding the importance of both human and non-human assets in firms' early-stage financing process is crucial to examining theories of the firm. However, it is difficult to empirically generate causal evidence due to data limitations and the lack of exogenous variations. This paper uses two randomized controlled trials with real venture capitalists mainly from the U.S. to identify characteristics of both the project and their teams that causally affect venture capitalist funding. Specifically, I also check their relative importance on investors' decisions. I find that multiple team characteristics (i.e. founder's educational background and previous entrepreneurial experiences) and project characteristics (i.e. traction, business model, location, comparative advantages, etc.) causally affect investors’ contact and investment interests by influencing their evaluation of startups' potential financial returns, risk, and loyalty. Although project traction matters the most in my experimental setting, it is fundamentally the investors' belief in the startup’s profitability that matters the most. I also find the traditional correspondence test method, to an extent, inappropriate in testing the significance of project characteristics in virtue of the different signal-to-noise ratio problem.