Broadening versus reinforcing investor portfolios: Social structure and the search for venture capital investors

This paper highlights the venture capital investor (VC) portfolios of startups, and explores how the portfolios evolve. We emphasize the important trade-off between broadening and reinforcing VC portfolios (i.e., expanding to new VCs versus relying on existing VCs). This is because, to startups, new and existing VCs generate very different opportunities and constraints. Focusing on the social structure of existing VCs, we argue that startups are...