Essays on Entrepreneurial Finance and Venture Capital
Authors:   , Kwon Sungjoung , Lowry Michelle B 
Published: September 2022

In the first essay, I examine what motivates young startup firms to rely on external intellectual property rights. While startups are better suited to exploration than exploitation, I find that approximately 10% of VC-backed companies acquire external patents while still private. They are neither low-quality firms nor firms with low patent output, lending little support to the hypothesis that patent acquisition is a response to low productivity. Rather, patent litigation risk appears to play an important role. Startup firms are significantly more likely to buy external patents when they are sued for patent infringement or exposed to a high threat of litigation. Using a difference-in-differences design around the Supreme Court decision Alice Corp. vs. CLS Bank, I show that firms whose patent litigation risks are reduced the most become significantly less likely to buy patents. Consistent with these findings and with the litigation risk preventing firms from reaching their full potential, firms buying patents are significantly less likely to go public. The second essay (with Michelle Lowry and Yiming Qian) examines mutual fund investments in private firms. Historically, a key advantage of being a public firm was broader access to capital, from a disperse group of shareholders. In recent years, such capital has increasingly become available to private firms as well. We document a dramatic increase over the past twenty years in the number of mutual funds participating in private markets and in the dollar value of these private firm investments. We evaluate several factors that potentially contribute to this trend: firms seeking extra capital to postpone public listing, mutual funds seeking higher risk-adjusted returns and initial public offering (IPO) allocations, and venture capitalists (VCs) seeking new investors to substantiate higher valuations. Results provide the strongest support for the first two factors. The final essay explores potential conflicts of interest in venture capital investments. VC firms occasionally make investments in startups founded by their own employees. The agency hypothesis predicts that this practice is motivated by conflicts of interest-VCs pursue their private benefits by financing themselves or coworkers. Alternatively, the information hypothesis posits that VCs are utilizing their networks-the connection with founders enable VCs to better evaluate the prospects of the venture. Using historical employment data in Crunchbase, I identify connections between entrepreneurs and VC firms. My findings provide strong support for the information hypothesis. Startups raising financing from connected VCs outperform their peers in the long run. VCs exhibit superior investment performance from connected deals, and these deals generate higher demand from other VCs as well. Finally, VCs making investments in connected startups are better able to raise follow-on funds. In sum, my findings suggest that, in the venture capital industry, private benefits from self-dealing is not sufficient enough to outweigh reputation concerns and/or the potential financial compensation from investing in better companies.