Séminaire d’économie de Bordeaux
Olivier Brossard
(Sciences Po Toulouse)
« Proximity relations and the fate of VC-backed startups:
evidence from a worldwide 34-year-long dataset »
(avec Nicolas Bédu et Matthieu Montalban)
Abstract :
« The characteristics of financial arrangements established to finance startups affect their fate. Among these features, we particularly focus on the proximities and differences between venture capital (VC) investors in syndicated investments. We consider the proximities between investors in a startup and between them and the startup. On the background of the theoretical literature dealing with proximity relations, we distinguish five types of proximities between VC investors and between VC investors and the startups they finance: geographic, institutional, organizational, social and cognitive proximities. We then test six hypotheses regarding the impacts of these proximities on the likelihood of three events that can happen to VC-backed startups: obtaining a later stage round of funding; going public; being merged or acquired. We implement these tests on a 34-year-long-68-countries-large sample, using survival models adapted to account for tied failures and competing events. We find that the five forms of proximity relations are influential, but with distinct roles. We also find that their impacts are nonlinear, in the sense that too much proximity/distance always ends-up reverting the effects of proximity/distance. Finally, we observe that, like theoretical literature predicts, cognitive proximity is positively correlated to the probability of a M&A, but negatively correlated to the likelihood of an IPO »