Startup cash flows and venture capital investments: a real options approach
Résumé
This paper studies venture capitalists' (VCs') sequential investment decisions in a real options model. We account for VCs' risk aversion, agency costs and VC activism. We identify two separate investment policies: when startups have positive cash flows, more risk averse and more active VCs expedite their investments while higher agency costs delay staged investments. The opposite is true for negative-cash-flow startups. The model predicts a negative relation between risk aversion and stage length in line with the idea that VCs use stage length as a monitoring tool. We also show that higher growth rates and lower volatility encourage earlier investments.