Venture Capitalists’ Evaluations of Start–Up Teams: Trade–Offs, Knock–Out Criteria, and the Impact of VC Experience
通过联合实验发现，风险投资家评估初创团队时存在特征间的效用权衡，且新手关注个人资质，经验丰富的投资者更看重团队凝聚力。
The start–up team plays a key role in venture capitalists’ evaluations of venture proposals. Our findings go beyond existing research, first by providing a detailed exploration of VCs’ team evaluation criteria, and second by investigating the moderator variable of VC experience. Our results reveal utility trade–offs between team characteristics and thus provide answers to questions such as “What strength does it take to compensate for a weakness in characteristic A?” Moreover, our analysis reveals that novice VCs tend to focus on the qualifications of individual team members, while experienced VCs focus more on team cohesion. Data were obtained in a conjoint experiment with 51 professionals in VC firms and analyzed using discrete choice econometric models.