How do European Venture Capitalists make Decisions, make Investments, and are Organized? Methodological Considerations of a European Project

The “Survey of European Venture Capitalists” project in 2022 collected responses from Venture Capitalist (VC) managers across Europe about their decision-making, important decision factors, and organization. Inspired by the mainly US-based paper published in 2020 by Paul Gompers, Will Gornall, Steven Kaplan, and Ilya Strebulaev in the Journal of Financial Economics, this project aims to better understand the European specificities in VC, both in comparison with the US but also between European areas and countries. Local teams from each country promoted the survey using a variety of technics. The dataset consists of 821 responses by VC professionals working for 521 unique VC firms. The economic size of these VC firms is significant and represents over 44% of the European Venture Capital market based on invested capital in 2022. Supplementary investment data will be added in a second phase by linking the survey with the VICO project (Bertoni and Martí Pellón, 2011)