Shaping the link: Venture capitalists’ investment portfolio and start-ups’ technological portfolio
研究了风险投资家的投资组合策略如何影响其对初创企业技术组合多样性的干预，发现投资组合越多样，风投持股与初创技术多样性之间的负向关系越强，且投资经验越深，负向关系越强。
We investigate how venture capitalists’ (VCs) investment portfolio strategy affects the way they exert influence on the diversity of start-ups’ technological portfolios. Drawing on the attention-based view (ABV), we argue that a VC’s investment portfolio strategy serves as a situational cue that determines its focus of attention on either the specialty or the flexibility of a start-up, thereby predicting its effort to encourage the start-up to reconfigure its technological portfolio. We test our conjectures with 1,023 firm-VC observations from China’s new energy domains, spanning the period from 2000 to 2019. Taking VCs’ equity share as a conduit through which influence is exerted on start-ups’ technological portfolios, our regression analysis shows that the greater the investment portfolio diversity, the stronger the negative relationship between VC equity share and the diversity of start-ups’ technological portfolios. We further show that as investment track depth increases, the negative relationship becomes stronger. Our study adds to our understanding of how VCs intervene in invested start-ups’ technological development and contributes to the portfolio management literature by linking VCs’ investment portfolios with start-ups’ technological portfolios.