An Examination of the Effects of Venture Capitalists on the Alliance Formation Activity of Entrepreneurial Firms

Abstract

Alliances offer benefits such as access to capital, knowledge and markets. Yet, due to their lack of legitimacy, entrepreneurial firms find it challenging to engage in alliances. Thus, it is important to examine which factors may drive alliance formation for entrepreneurial firms. and we examine whether the presence of venture capitalists (VCs) is such a factor. Whereas current research suffers from endogeneity concerns that make the comparison of VC- and non-VC-backed firms problematic, our empirical design reduces this problem. Overall, we find that the presence of a VC and a VC’s experience with taking firms public are positively associated with entrepreneurial firms’ alliance formation, and that VCs are more active in forming an alliance when the exit outcome is an acquisition, rather than going public.

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; VC; IPO; Google; Search; Signaling; Information Economics