Individual VC Investor Characteristics and Investment Success

Advisor: Svenja Barth, M.Sc. (please contact svenja.barth[at]tum.de)

Start: January 2024

Topic

• Previous literature has shown that individuals are around four times more important than the organization in explaining venture capital success. 
• However, empirical patterns on the role of individual characteristics, such as education, work or entrepreneurial experience are not well documented yet. 
• The Chair in Entrepreneurial Finance is kicking-off a large empirical research project in which we will combine several relevant data bases and exploit this novel data set to analyze heterogeneity in VC manager profiles and whether it is structurally correlated with differences in career success.

Requirements

Interest in Venture Capital; interest in empirical work (data collection and basic statistics); attention to detail.

Set-up & supervision

• Depending on the level of student interest, the topic may be coordinated in a group for several students. If so, supervision is done in group meetings, but every student writes an own thesis.
• In (bi-)weekly meetings with supervisors, students will gain deep insights in the venture capital industry, research skills, and statistical analysis.

Literature

• Ewens, M., & Rhodes‐Kropf, M. (2015). Is a VC Partnership Greater than the Sum of its Partners?. The Journal of Finance, 70(3), 1081-1113.
• Gompers, P. A., & Mukharlyamov, V. (2022). Transferable Skills? Founders as Venture Capitalists (No. w29907). National Bureau of Economic Research.

Contact & application
If you are interested in writing your master thesis on this topic, please indicate so in your application.