Don't Go Chasing Waterfalls: Fiduciary Duties in Venture Capital Backed Startups

Early Employees of Venture-Backed Startups: Selection and Wage Differentials

While much attention has been paid to company founders, very little is known regarding the first set of non-founder employees who join high-growth startups ("early employees"). This paper explores the wage differential between venture capital-backed startups and established firms given that the two firm types compete for talent. Using data on graduating college students from MIT, I find that VC...

Prediction of Equity Values for Venture Capital Backed Firms

This study investigates the predictability of firm values for venture capital-backed firms. Having insights into the internal documents of more than 300 venture capitalists, we derive three common categories of firm value drivers: team characteristics, firm and market characteristics, and accounting information. Based on these value drivers, we provide a regression based valuation approach, whi...

Investment Bank Compensation in Venture and Non-Venture Capital Backed IPOs

We address two puzzles of the IPO literature: (1) Why do investment banks earn positive profits in a competitive market? And (2) Why do banks receive lower gross spreads in VC backed IPOs? We model the IPO procedure as a two-stage signaling game. In the second stage banks set offer prices given their private information and the level of the spread. Issuers anticipate the bank’s pricing decision...

Fiduciary Duties and Equity‐Debtholder Conflicts

Working papers are in draft form. This working paper is distributed for purposes of comment and discussion only. It may not be reproduced without permission of the copyright holder. Copies of working papers are available from the author. Abstract. We use an important legal event as a natural experiment to examine the effect of management fiduciary duties on equity‐debt conflicts. A 1991 Delawar...

Fiduciary Duties and Equity-Debtholder Conflicts