Matchmakers or chaperones? How venture capital investors facilitate startups’ corporate venture capital partnership formation through aligning and disciplining

Abstract

Building upon the recent extension of resource dependence theory, this study examines how venture capital (VC) investors provide social defenses for startups by playing the role of matchmakers through the trust-based aligning effect and the role of chaperones through the power-based disciplining effect, encouraging them to form ties with established corporate venture capital (CVC) investors. We argue that the aligning effect stems from VC investors’ prior ties with CVC investors and is mitigated by the disciplining effect from their network centrality and coalition formation likelihood. In our empirical analysis of the IT industry in the United States between 2001 and 2015, we find support for our theory and hypotheses. The results also show that network centrality and coalition formation are not complementary but substitutable as coalition formation is less effective for more central VC investors.