ABSTRACT

Venture studios present an intriguing proposition for entrepreneurship theory – a shift from venturing as an entrepreneur-driven activity to venturing as an “assembly line” serialization in an organization. We ask the question whether between-venture studio differences explain the differences in outcomes among the ventures they create. We hypothesize that venture studios explain meaningful variance in explaining venture outcomes. Our empirical study is based on a sample of 350 venture studios from 34 countries, 257 industries, and startup-founding years, ranging from 1994 to 2022. We focus on the sales, employees, and whether the venture was acquired or went IPO. Using variance decomposition analysis, we find that differences in venture studios explain most of the variance in differences in venture outcomes (~30%), with low teens to single-digit variances explained by studio-founding year, venture founding year, country, and industry effects. To our knowledge, this is the largest and most comprehensive empirical study of venture studios to date, and variance decomposition analysis presents an important first step to assessing whether the unique resources and the transaction cost benefits afforded by venture studios explain differences in performance between ventures.

摘要

风险投资工作室为创业理论提出了一个有趣的命题——从作为企业家驱动的活动的冒险转变为作为组织中“流水线”序列化的冒险。我们问的问题是，工作室之间的差异是否解释了他们创建的企业之间结果的差异。我们假设风险工作室在解释风险结果时解释了有意义的差异。我们的实证研究基于来自 34 个国家、257 个行业和初创公司成立年份（从 1994 年到 2022 年）的 350 家风险投资工作室的样本。我们关注销售额、员工以及风险投资是被收购还是进行 IPO。使用方差分解分析，我们发现风险投资工作室的差异解释了风险投资结果差异的大部分差异（~30%），工作室成立年份、风险投资成立年份、国家和行业影响解释了从十几岁到个位数的差异。据我们所知，这是迄今为止规模最大、最全面的风险投资工作室实证研究，方差分解分析为评估风险投资工作室提供的独特资源和交易成本收益是否解释了风险投资公司之间的绩效差异提供了重要的第一步。