Venture capital firms’ lead orientation, network position, and selection of familiar syndicate partners

Abstract

This study explores how a venture capital (VC) firm’s lead orientation (i.e., acting more as a lead investor rather than a follower investor in past syndication investments) influences its selection of familiar syndicate partners. By conducting empirical research that uses detailed information of 11,219 investment deals in China from January 1999 to June 2016, we find that a VC firm’s lead orientation has an inverted U-shaped relationship with its propensity to select familiar syndicate partners. In other words, as a VC firm’s lead orientation increases, its familiarity degree with the partners in the subsequent syndicated investment will first increase and then decrease. In addition, a VC firm’s network centrality and network constraint imposed by the VC network structure both weakens the inverted U-shaped relationship between its lead orientation and the selection of familiar partners. Robustness checks with different measures and samples, together with the instrumental variable approach and the Heckman selection model that address potential endogeneity problems, show the reliability of our findings.