Venture Capital & Private Equity: A Casebook (5th Edition)

Josh   Lerner; Felda  Hardymon; Ann  Leamon

Casebook | 2012

Venture Capital & Private Equity: A Casebook (5th Edition)

by Josh Lerner, Felda Hardymon and Ann Leamon

Abstract

Venture Capital & Private Equity: A Casebook, 5th edition provides an understanding of the ways in which private equity groups work. The casebook builds an understanding of the key distinctions in the industry and reviews and applies key ideas of corporate finance. The 5th edition continues to explore a wide variety of valuation approaches, from techniques widely used in practice to methods less frequently seen in practice today but likely to be increasingly important in the future years.

Keywords: Venture Capital; Private Equity; Books;

Format: Print

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Lerner, Josh, Felda Hardymon, and Ann Leamon. Venture Capital & Private Equity: A Casebook (5th Edition). New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2012. (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2001 (second edition) (with Felda Hardymon). Beijing: Economic Science Press, 2002 (Chinese translation of the second edition). Tokyo: Toyo Keizai Shinposha, 2003 (Japanese translation of the second edition). New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2004 (third edition) (with Felda Hardymon and Ann Leamon). New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2008 (fourth edition) (with Felda Hardymon and Ann Leamon). Beijing: CITIC Press, 2013 (Chinese translation of the fifth edition).)

This paper undertakes a comprehensive analysis of alternative investment vehicles in private equity, using unexplored custodial data about 112 limited partners over four decades. We differentiate between alternative vehicles that are GP-directed versus those where the LP has some discretion. Of the roughly 5500 distinct investments made by the LPs in our sample, 32% of investments (17% of capital commitments) were in such alternative vehicles; the allocation increased by more than 10 percentage points over the last decade. Alternative vehicles were far more likely to be offered by larger and North America-based buyout funds. The average performance of these alternative vehicles lagged that of the GPs’ corresponding main funds. The best LP performance was among endowments, private pensions, and insurers. Finally, LPs with better past performance invested in alternative vehicles with better performance, even after conditioning on the GPs’ past records. This result suggests that bargaining between GPs and LPs leads to gradation in investment performance based on the parties’ outside options.

Patenting in software, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence has grown rapidly in recent years. Such patents are acquired primarily by large US technology firms such as IBM, Microsoft, Google, and HP, as well as by Japanese multinationals such as Sony, Canon, and Fujitsu. Chinese patenting in the US is small but growing rapidly, and world-leading for drone technology. Patenting in machine learning has seen exponential growth since 2010, although patenting in neural networks saw a strong burst of activity in the 1990s that has only recently been surpassed. In all technological fields, the number of patents per inventor has declined near-monotonically, except for large increases in inventor productivity in software and semiconductors in the late 1990s. In most high-tech fields, Japan is the only country outside the US with significant US patenting activity; however, whereas Japan played an important role in the burst of neural network patenting in the 1990s, it has not been involved in the current acceleration. Comparing the periods 1970-89 and 2000-15, patenting in the current period has been primarily by entrant assignees, with the exception of neural networks.

Ayash and Rastad (2017) express several concerns about our 2014 analysis of private equity buyouts. We welcome their interest in our work but think their criticisms are off the mark. Some of their claims reflect a misunderstanding of the Census Bureau’s Longitudinal Business Database (LBD) and its underlying data inputs. Because the LBD has emerged as a major laboratory for empirical studies in economics and finance, we use this opportunity to reiterate and clarify some of its important features. In a similar spirit, we elaborate on steps taken to develop our large sample of private equity buyouts. We also address Ayash and Rastad’s remarks about the empirical design of our establishment-level analysis, our methods for distinguishing between leveraged buyouts (LBOs) and other private equity transactions, bankruptcy rates among firms acquired in LBOs, their assertion that we undercount large public-to-private LBOs, and other matters.

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Venture Capital & Private Equity: A Casebook (5th Edition)

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