The Past Is Prologue? Venture-Capital Syndicates’ Collaborative Experience and Start-Up Exits

Past research has produced contradictory insights into how prior collaboration between organizations—their relational embeddedness—impacts collective collaborative performance. We theorize that the effect of relational embeddedness on collaborative success is contingent on the type of success under consideration, and we develop a typology of two kinds of success. We test our hypotheses using data from Crunchbase on a sample of almost 11,000 U.S. start-ups backed by venture-capital (VC) firms, using the VCs’ previous collaborative experience to predict the type of success that the start-ups will experience. Our findings indicate that, as prior collaborative experience within a group of VCs increases, a jointly funded start-up is more likely to exit by acquisition (which we call a focused success); with less prior experience among the group of VCs, a jointly funded start-up is more likely to exit by IPO (a broadcast success). Our results deepen understanding of the connections between organizational performance and collaboration networks, contributing to entrepreneurship research on the role of investors in technology ventures.