Despite the central role played by human capital in entrepreneurship, little is known about how employees in entrepreneurial firms are compensated and incentivized. We address this gap in the literature by studying 18,935 non-CEO compensation contracts across 1,809 privately-held venture-backed...

We document the role of entrepreneurial founder and venture capital (VC) partner co-ethnicity in shaping investment relationships. Co-ethnicity increases the likelihood that a VC firm invests in a company. Conditional on investment, co-ethnicity strengthens the degree of involvement by raising...

Despite the central role played by human capital in entrepreneurship, little is known about how employees in entrepreneurial firms are compensated and incentivized. We address this gap in the literature by studying 18,935 non-CEO compensation contracts across 1,809 privately-held venture-backed...

I study how often and why a serial founder receives financing for his new company from a venture capital (VC) firm that also invested in his previous company. One in 10 VC investments leads to a repeated relationship and one in three serial founders enters into a repeated relationship with any...

The venture capital market is characterized by personal interactions between VC firms and the startups they finance. Yet we have little systematic evidence of how startup founders get matched with partners at VC firms. By assembling data at the individual partner and founder level, we compare...

We study the evolution and renegotiation of the cash flow rights that venture capitalists (VCs) obtain in their portfolio companies. When company performance between financing rounds is poor, subsequent contracts contain stronger VC cash flow rights, and existing VCs tend to either give new VCs...

We study how entrepreneurs evaluate the ability of different U.S. venture capitalists (VCs) to add value to start-up companies. Analyzing a large dataset on entrepreneurs' stated preferences on VCs, we show that entrepreneurs view independent partnership VCs more favorably than other VC types...