Investors

In this paper we explore whether or not the experience as a founder of a venture capital-backed startup influences the performance of founders who become venture capitalists (VCs). We find that nearly 7% of VCs were previously founders of a venture-backed startup. Having a successful exit and being male and white increase the probability that a founder transitions into a venture capital career. Successful founder-VCs have investment success rates that are 6.5 percentage points higher than professional VCs while unsuccessful founder-VCs have investment success rates that are 4 percentage points lower than professional VCs. While successful founder-VCs do get higher quality deal flow than professional or unsuccessful founder-VCs, observably higher deal quality does not explain the entire difference in performance. Using an instrumental variables approach to separate unobservable deal quality from value-add, we find that the outperformance of successful founder-VCs is consistent with them adding more value post-investment.

Our study introduces venture capital (VC) investors’ personality as a new perspective on investment performance. We assemble a sample of 911 VC investors with 8,258 investments and apply novel text analysis methods to assess investors’ personality traits based on their Tweets. Drawing on interactionist perspectives of the personality– performance relationship, we develop and empirically test theory on the impact of VC investors’ personality traits on investment success. We find that extraversion relates positively, while agreeableness and conscientiousness relate negatively, to the likelihood of a successful exit. By disentangling treatment and selection effects, we find that personality is primarily related to investors’ ability to create more value for the venture post-investment rather than select higher quality ventures ex-ante."