Venture Capital Backing Research Articles

The IPO Derby: Are There Consistent Losers and Winners on This Track?

We examine the individual and joint relation of discretionary accounting accruals, underwriter reputation, and venture capital backing with the long‐run performance of initial public offerings (IPOs). We find that although correlated to some extent, these variables do not manifest the same underlying phenomena in their relation to IPOs' performance. The confluence of the variables is more important than using any one of them individually to identify IPOs that exhibit abnormal long‐run stock returns. The combination of their negative aspects helps identify extreme underperformers. We also identify a set of winner IPOs by combining the positive aspects of the three variables.

How Does Venture Capital Financing Improve Efficiency in Private Firms? A Look Beneath the Surface

Using a unique sample from the Longitudinal Research Database (LRD) of the U.S. Census Bureau, we study several related questions regarding the efficiency gains generated by venture capital (VC) investment in private firms. First, does VC backing improve the efficiency (total factor productivity, TFP) of private firms, and are certain kinds of VCs (higher reputation versus lower reputation) better at generating such efficiency gains than others? Second, how are such efficiency gains generated: Do venture capitalists invest in more efficient firms to begin with (screening) or do they improve efficiency after investment (monitoring)? Third, how are these efficiency gains spread out over rounds subsequent to VC investment? Fourth, what are the channels through which such efficiency gains are generated: increases in product market performance (sales) or reductions in various costs (labor, materials, total production costs)? Finally, how do such efficiency gains affect the probability of a successful exit (IPO or acquisition)? Our main findings are as follows. First, the overall efficiency of VC backed firms is higher than that of non-VC backed firms. Second, this efficiency advantage of VC backed firms arises from both screening and monitoring: the efficiency of VC backed firms prior to receiving financing is higher than that of non-VC backed firms and further, the growth in efficiency subsequent to receiving VC financing is greater for such firms relative to non-VC backed firms. Third, the above increase in efficiency of VC backed firms relative to non-VC backed firms increases over the first two rounds of VC financing, and remains at the higher level till exit. Fourth, while the TFP of firms prior to VC financing is lower for higher reputation VC backed firms, the increase in TFP subsequent to financing is significantly higher for the former firms, consistent with higher reputation VCs having greater monitoring ability. Fifth, the efficiency gains generated by VC backing arise primarily from improvement in product market performance (sales); however for higher reputation VCs, the additional efficiency gains arise from both an additional improvement in product market performance as well as from reductions in various input costs. Finally, both the level of TFP of VC backed firms prior to receiving financing and the growth in TFP subsequent to VC financing positively affect the probability of a successful exit (IPO or acquisition).

Governance Structures of Initial Public Offerings in Australia

We study the relationship between venture capital financing, CEO ownership, compensation structure, and board structures for a group of Australian IPO firms. Results suggest that board structures are influenced by the industry the firm is in, and presence of venture capitalists results in a larger board with a higher number of outside directors. CEOs in non VC‐backed firms own a significantly higher fraction of firm shares, and CEO ownership is negatively related to both board size and outside blockholders. VC‐backed firms are significantly more likely to disclose information about CEO compensation packages, but the relationship between actual board size and structure and disclosure is insignificant. Finally, we also find that venture capital backing significantly decreases the time to change‐in‐status for firms, whereby firms cease to exist as independent entities.

The effects of venture capitalist affiliation to underwriters on short- and long-term performance in French IPOs

This paper explores the signalling and monitoring effects of venture capital (VC) backing and venture capitalist affiliation to lead underwriters on performance of IPOs in France. IPOs in which VCs are affiliated to lead underwriters ( i.e., affiliated VCs) have lower underpricing than both non-affiliated VC-backed IPOs and non-VC-backed IPOs. Similarly, affiliated VC-backed IPOs exhibit greater earnings surprise and better market performance at the end of the one-year period following the IPO date. Controlling for Fama and French [Fama, E.F., & French, K. 1993. Common Risk Factors in the Returns on Stock and Bonds. Journal of Financial Economics 33, 3–56] risk factors, our results suggest that IPOs with affiliated VCs in general, and particularly those affiliated with more prestigious underwriters, have a higher long-term abnormal return than both non-affiliated and non-VC-backed IPOs. Our analysis of IPO performance indicates that more prestigious underwriters enhance effective screening, certification and monitoring roles of affiliated VCs.

Second time lucky? Withdrawn IPOs that return to the market

We investigate issuers withdrawing an IPO (after security regulation filings) that return later for a successful offering. Venture capital backing and reputation of the lead underwriter are key factors in predicting successful return. The possibility of returning has a significant impact on the decision to withdraw and the pricing of offerings that succeed. Our sample of returning IPOs also provides a unique setting to investigate underwriter switching after a withdrawal but before a successful IPO. We find that switching occurs in response to poor bank performance and when switching firms “graduate” to banks that have high industry market shares.

Second Time Lucky? Withdrawn IPOs that Return to the Market

We investigate issuers withdrawing an IPO (after security regulation filings) that return later for a successful offering. Venture capital backing and reputation of the lead underwriter are key factors in predicting successful return. The possibility of returning has a significant impact on the choice to withdraw and the pricing of offerings that succeed. Our sample of returning IPOs also provides a unique setting to investigate underwriter switching after a withdrawal but before a successful IPO. We find that switching occurs in response to poor bank performance and when switching firms graduate to banks that have high industry market shares.

Venture capital funds: Do they meet the expectations of portfolio firms?

This paper examines the expectations and post-investment perceptions of value added activities from venture capital funds. Exploring the perspective of the company that is backed by venture capital, the deviation between expectations and post-investment perceptions are analysed. Insight from resource-dependence theory is employed as a theoretical point of departure. The empirical results show that significant gaps exist between the expectations of entrepreneurs and what they perceive to be the contributions from their venture capital backers. Indeed, the venture capitalists (VCs) do not even meet the entrepreneurs' modest expectations of their potential contribution. The difference between expectations and perceived outcome from the venture capitalist's involvement may be due, either to the overselling of their competence by venture capitalists, or to the limited amount of time that they allocate to each venture on account of their large investment portfolios.

Operating characteristics, risk, and performance of born‐global firms

PurposeTo determine what characteristics distinguish firms that conduct international business within three years of going public and six years from founding, and how these firms perform.Design/methodology/approachA logistic regression analysis is used to identify characteristics that distinguish firms that are international at the time they go public, versus those that are not. The paper also assesses post‐IPO performance and apply multivariate analysis to determine how performance varies among these firms.FindingsCompared to firms of similar age who do not pursue rapid internationalization, born‐global firms are generally larger, more diversified, and have more venture capital backing. Their founders, board members and managers exhibit more international experience. The returns 12 and 18 months post‐IPO are significantly higher for born‐global firms than for a control sample of firms who do not engage in rapid internationalization. Furthermore, those born‐global firms with joint ventures or acquisitions in several countries perform better than those that only export within the first six years since their inception.Research limitations/implicationsManagerial implications include having a board of directors with sound international business experience as well as using a venture capital firm to provide monitoring and oversight of operations at home and in the foreign market.Originality/valueThis paper is original in that it is the first to provide a financial markets‐oriented empirical investigation of the “born‐global” phenomenon using a sample of newly public American firms.

Do Venture Capitalists' Characteristics Affect the Performance of the Firms They Back?

Previous research has already addressed the issue of the impact of venture capital (VC) backing on the growth patterns of investee firms. Based on qualitative, hand-collected data, other studies analyzed the different tasks performed by venture capitalists (VCs) to add value to their portfolio companies. The aim of this paper is to provide evidence of the effect of some VCs’ characteristics on the performance of the portfolio firms over time. The characteristics tested are: age of the VCs, size of the funds under management, number of portfolio companies per investment manager and specialization strategy. We base our analysis on a highly representative, unbiased sample of VC-backed firms in a country that ranks third in the Continental Europe VC market. The sources of data are two databases, one reporting VC activity and the second one including financial accounts of the firms. Additionally, historical and observable VCs’ characteristics have been added. The findings are based on panel data methodology, analyzing several years of financial results, from the year of the first round of financing, for each VC-backed firm. This approach allows us to keep track of the changes over time and to control for the effect of the money invested and the value added by VCs separately. We analyze the whole sample and three subsets based on the portfolio company stage. Our findings show that value added is significant in companies at the expansion stage for some VCs characteristics, such as age, size or number of portfolio companies per investment manager, whereas performance on start-up companies seems related to funding alone.

Venture Capitalists and Cooperative Start-up Commercialization Strategy

This paper examines the possible impact of venture capital (VC) backing on the commercialization direction of technology-based start-ups by asking: To what extent (if at all) do VC-funded start-ups engage in cooperative commercialization strategies (strategic alliances or technology licensing, or both) relative to a comparable set of start-ups, and with what consequences? To address these questions, I assemble a novel data set that matches firms receiving a federal research and development subsidy through the U.S. Small Business Innovative Research program to VC-funded firms by observable characteristics in five technology-intensive industries. These data allow decoupling of cooperative activity resulting from start-up development via the passage of calendar time from that due to association with VCs. An analysis of the 696 start-ups in the sample (split by an external funding source) suggests substantial boosts in both cooperative activity associated with VC-backed firms and in the likelihood of an initial public offering.

Founders' Characteristics, Venture Capital Syndication and Governance in Entrepreneurial IPOs

Using a unique sample of 444 entrepreneurial IPOs in the UK and France this paper examines links between founders' characteristics, venture capital (VC) syndication and the development of effective boards in entrepreneurial firms. It argues that VC-backed IPOs suffer from two sets of agency problems which are related to principal-agent and principal-principal relationships between the founders and members of the VC syndicate. The empirical evidence shows that there is a curvilinear relationship between the intensity of founders' external ties and VC syndication. Founders' retained share ownership is negatively associated with VC syndication. We also find that in syndicated IPOs there is a higher involvement of passive private equity firms and “business angels” investing alongside VC firms, both in terms of their number and equity presence. VC-syndicated IPOs have more independent boards than IPOs with no VC involvement. Board independence is negatively associated with founders' retained equity. These results are consistent with the assumption that board independence is used to mitigate agency costs associated with VC involvement in IPO firms. Our findings also identify significant differences in governance characteristics between the UK and France. While French IPOs have less independent boards, they involve more VC backing in general and syndicated VC funding in particular, than UK IPOs.

Debt Financing, Venture Capital, and Initial Public Offerings

We examine the comparative roles of debt financing and venture capital in the performance of companies that go public. For a sample of more than 5,000 IPOs during the period 1980-2002, we find that firms with high debt financing tend to exhibit characteristics of lower valuation uncertainty and risk than firms that are backed by venture capital. We document a strong negative relation between debt financing and initial returns (or underpricing), after controlling for other factors affecting these returns. For the entire sample, one standard deviation change in leverage is associated with 7% lower underpricing. Our results are especially pronounced during periods with high valuation uncertainty. For example, during the 1999-2000 period, firms with high debt levels and without venture capitalist backing averaged 60% lower underpricing than firms with low use of debt financing but backed by venture capitalists. Our results confirm the theories of James and Wier (1990), who hypothesize that debt financing is associated with lower initial returns, and Ueda (2004) who hypothesizes about the comparative effects of banks and venture capitalists on IPO firms. Also consistent with Ueda's theory, we document that debt financing and venture capital tend to be substitutes. We also examine the comparative effects of debt financing and venture capital on the long-term performance of IPO firms. Overall, we find that high levels of debt financing are associated with negative aftermarket performance in the five years after the IPO, in contrast with the comparatively positive performance of venture capital-backed firms, after adjusting for market risk, size, and book-to-market effects. Brav and Gompers (1997) show that the negative long-term performance of IPOs is primarily associated with small firms that do not have venture capital backing. We find that firms with substantial debt financing tend to have especially low performance. Furthermore, we show that the firms characterized by Brav and Gompers as small (in market capitalization) and without venture capital are generally also firms with high debt financing. Thus, the characteristics of firms with extensive debt financing help to account for both their lower initial returns at the IPO, and their negative long-term performance following the IPO. While the underperformance of debt-backed firms demonstrates a statistically meaningful anomaly, it may suggest further need for incorporating the effect of debt in examining investment performance, as suggested recently by related results for non-IPO firms by Billett, Flannery, and Garfinkel (2005).

The Valuation of Biotech IPOs

The valuation of initial public offerings (IPOs) is of considerable interest, given the important role these enterprises play in economic growth and investors' decisions. IPO valuation is particularly challenging due to the meager information available about new enterprises at offering dates. We extend the research on IPO valuation in various directions. First, we penetrate deep beyond the traditional proxies for value drivers, such as R&D expenditures and cash flows, by defining and testing a host of specific product-related and competitive environment value drivers; second, we examine IPO valuations at three distinct phases of the going-public process; third, we employ both the direct valuation and relative valuation approaches; and fourth, we round up the analysis by examining the long-term performance of IPOs. Based on a sample of biotech IPOs from the 1990s, we document the overwhelming importance of product-related and intellectual property fundamentals, as well as the irrelevance of several key signals, such as venture capital backing and the quality of underwriters, which played prominent roles in previous research.

Investment Screening and Market Conditions: Evidence from Venture Capital

Asymmetric information and agency theories of investment predict that informationally opaque firms suffer from liquidity constraints, and that these constraints are particularly severe during market downturns In this paper, we test this hypothesis by examining a sample of more than 2200 firms that were seeking venture capital (VC) financing in the European VC market between 1996 and 2001. Consistent with the asymmetric information theories, we find that young firms, firms without prior venture capital backing, and firms with unproven entrepreneurs were relatively more liquidity constrained after the market downturn in 2000. We also find evidence suggestive of behavioral theories of investment behavior. In particular, VCs started to focus more on fundamentals after the market downturn, suggesting that VCs were over-investing during the boom.

Performance of Private to Public MBOs: The Role of Venture Capital

Abstract: Using a unique dataset, we examine financial performance, and venture capital involvement in 167 MBOs exiting through IPOs (MBO‐IPOs) on the London Stock Exchange, during the period 1964 –1997. VC backed MBOs seem to be more underpriced than MBOs without venture capital backing, based on average value‐weighted returns. MBOs backed by highly reputable VCs tend to be older companies, and exit earlier than MBOs backed by less reputable VCs. The results contradict ‘certification’ and ‘grandstanding’ hypotheses supported by US data (Megginson and Weiss, 1991; and Gompers, 1996, respectively). We found no evidence of either significant underperformance, or that VC backed MBOs perform better than their non‐VC backed counterparts in the long run. However, MBOs backed by highly reputable venture capital firms seem to be better long‐term investments as compared to those backed by less prestigious venture capitalist firms. The results remain robust after using different methods to measure performance, and after controlling for sample selectivity bias.

Venture Capitalist Certification of IPOs

This article analyses a set of 4606 IPOs from the 1986 to 2000 period, specifically focusing on the certification effect associated with venture capital backing. It concludes that venture capitalists, particularly those of higher quality, are associated with lower issuance costs (both direct and indirect), increased upward price adjustments, and shorter lockup periods, all of which are consistent with a valuable certification role. In addition, it is found that even lower quality venture capitalists perform a certification role; however, it is specific to a set of penny stock (i.e. high information asymmetry) IPOs.

The Role of Venture Capital Backing in Initial Public Offerings: Certification, Screening, or Market Power?

We empirically distinguish between three possible roles of venture backing in IPOs: certification, where venture-backed IPOs are priced closer to intrinsic firm value than non-venture backed IPOs due to venture capitalists' concern for their reputation; screening and monitoring, where VCs are able to either select better quality firms to back (screening), or help create such higher quality firms by adding value to them (monitoring) in the pre-IPO stage; and market power, where venture capitalists attract a greater number and higher quality of market participants such as underwriters, institutional investors, and analysts to an IPO, thus obtaining a higher valuation for the IPOs of firms backed by them. We argue that IPO underpricing is not the most appropriate measure to evaluate the role of venture backing in IPOs. Instead, we compare four sets of more direct measures between VC backed and non-VC backed (and between high-reputation VC backed and low-reputation VC backed) IPOs. The evidence strongly rejects the certification hypothesis, while finding considerable support for the market power hypothesis and some support for the screening and monitoring hypothesis. We find that venture capitalists attract higher quality market participants to the IPOs of firms backed by them, thus increasing the heterogeneity in investor beliefs about these firms, resulting in higher valuations for the equity of these firms (both in the IPO and in the secondary market immediately following the IPO).

The Formation of High-Tech University Spinouts: The Role of Joint Ventures and Venture Capital Investors

We explore the joint venture route to commercializing university owned intellectual property. We present comparisons between two spinouts formed as joint ventures between universities and industrial partners and two spinouts where this was not the case. The research employs a resource-based framework, with new high tech spinout firms (or firms in gestation) facing severe resource and capability constraints. We show that spinouts typically lack the financial means and managerial expertise to acquire the resources and develop the capabilities they need in order to fully exploit the commercial potential of their technologies. We argue that creating a spinout company as a joint venture with an industrial partner, may be a means of overcoming some of the potential problems associated with managing resource weaknesses and inadequate capabilities that may be difficult to achieve as a free-standing spin-out company with or without venture capital backing.

Taxation and Venture Capital Backed Entrepreneurship

In recent years, venture capital has increasingly become a factor in the financing of new firms. We examine how the value of mature firms determines the incentives of entrepreneurs to start up new firms and of venture capitalists to finance and advise them. We examine how capital gains taxes as well as subsidies to start-up costs of new firms affect venture capital backed entrepreneurship. We also argue that dividend and capital gains taxes on mature firms have important consequences for start-up firms as well.

VENTURE CAPITALISTS AND COOPERATIVE START-UP COMMERCIALIZATION STRATEGY.

The article discusses a study that investigates the impact of venture capital backing on the commercialization of technology-based start up companies. The article looks at what extent venture capital-backed start-ups use cooperative commercialization strategies and how that compares to other start-ups. The article states that after analyzing the cooperative activity in 701 start-ups, there is a substantial increase in such activity for venture capital-based firms. The study hypothesizes that venture capitalists differ in reputation and that start-ups affiliated with those with a higher reputation forge more cooperative outcome alliances.