Venture Capital Initiative

The Venture Capital Initiative brings together faculty, staff, students, and practitioners to advance and promote research and teaching on innovation and venture capital.

Venture capital plays a critical role in the innovation ecosystem, providing the financial foundation that enables entrepreneurs to transform breakthrough concepts into market-leading companies. The venture funding model has proven remarkably effective, with seven of America’s ten largest companies by market capitalization having received venture backing during their formative stages.

Our goal is to advance understanding of the venture capital and innovation ecosystem through conducting research, collecting high quality data, and developing teaching methodology. We aim to bring together leading academics and practitioners to help solve the problems that are highly relevant to entrepreneurs, financiers, policymakers, and researchers worldwide.

Featured Video

As the inaugural event of the Stanford GSB Venture Capital Initiative, the Stanford Financing of Innovation Summit, brought together leading researchers and practitioners to discuss the direction of research in the field of innovation and venture capital and to exchange ideas and share expertise.

Updates

Papers

Working Paper
Working Paper

How Do Venture Capitalists Make Decisions?

Paul Gompers William Gornall Steven N. Kaplan Ilya A. Strebulaev
August2016

We survey 885 institutional venture capitalists (VCs) at 681 firms to learn how they make decisions across eight areas: deal sourcing; investment selection; valuation; deal…

Research Paper

Venture Capitalists and COVID-19

Paul Gompers Will Gornall Steven N. Kaplan Ilya A. Strebulaev
Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis (open access)
August132021

We survey over one thousand venture capitalists (VCs) on how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected their decisions and investments.

Faculty Director

The David S. Lobel Professor of Private Equity

Contact the Venture Capital Initiative

VCI welcomes inquiries about the initiative’s work and research.

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