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- 2022
- Working Paper
Are Transformational Ideas Harder to Fund? Resource Allocation to R&D Projects at a Global Pharmaceutical Firm
By: Joshua Krieger and Ramana Nanda
We study resource allocation to early-stage ideas at an internal startup program of one the largest pharmaceutical firms in the world. Our research design enables us to elicit every evaluator's scores across five different attributes, before seeing how would allocate...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Investment Committee Voting and the Financing of Innovation
By: Andrey Malenko, Ramana Nanda, Matthew Rhodes-Kropf and Savitar Sundaresan
We provide novel evidence on voting practices used by the investment committees of prominent venture capital investors in the U.S. A substantial share of these VCs use a voting rule for seed and early stage investments where a single `champion' is sufficient for the...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Venture Capital Booms and Startup Financing
By: William Janeway, Ramana Nanda and Matthew Rhodes-Kropf
We review the growing literature on the relationship between venture capital booms and startup financing, focusing on three broad areas: First, we discuss the drivers of large inflows into the venture capital asset class, particularly in recent years—which are related...
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- February 2021 (Revised May 2021)
- Case
SafeGraph: Selling Data as a Service
By: Ramana Nanda, Abhishek Nagaraj and Allison Ciechanover
Set in January 2021, the CEO of SafeGraph, a four-year-old startup that sold Data as a Service, looked to the future. His aim was to become the most trusted source for data about a physical place. The company provided points of interest (POI) and foot traffic data on...
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- 2022
- Working Paper
Sampling Bias in Entrepreneurial Experiments
By: Ruiqing Cao, Rembrand Koning and Ramana Nanda
Using data from a prominent online platform for launching new digital products, we document that ‘sampling bias’—defined as the difference between a startup’s target customer base and the actual sample on which early ‘beta tests’ are conducted—has a systematic and...
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- September 2020 (Revised December 2020)
- Technical Note
Impact Investment, Catalytic Capital and Blended Finance
- July 2020
- Article
The Persistent Effect of Initial Success: Evidence from Venture Capital
By: Ramana Nanda, Sampsa Samila and Olav Sorenson
We use investment-level data to study performance persistence in venture capital (VC). Consistent with prior studies, we find that each additional IPO among a VC firm's first ten investments predicts as much as an 8% higher IPO rate on its subsequent investments,...
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Keywords:
Performance;
Monitoring;
Selection;
Status;
Venture Capital;
Performance Consistency;
Investment
- Summer 2020
- Article
Venture Capital's Role in Financing Innovation: What We Know and How Much We Still Need to Learn
By: Josh Lerner and Ramana Nanda
Venture capital is associated with some of the most high-growth and influential firms in the world. Academics and practitioners have effectively articulated the strengths of the venture model. At the same time, venture capital financing also has real limitations in its...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
The Evolution of CEO Compensation in Venture Capital Backed Startups
By: Michael Ewens, Ramana Nanda and Christopher Stanton
We document new facts on the evolution of founder-CEO compensation in venture capital-backed startups. Having a tangible product (“product market fit”) is a fundamental milestone in CEOs’ compensation, marking the point where liquid cash compensation increases...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
How Resilient Is Venture-Backed Innovation? Evidence from Four Decades of U.S. Patenting
By: Sabrina T. Howell, Josh Lerner, Ramana Nanda and Richard Townsend
By comparing patenting among VC-backed firms to the universe of U.S. patents over the period 1976–2019, we document that while patents filed by VC-backed firms are of significantly higher quality and economic importance than the average patent, VC-backed innovation is...
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- February 2020 (Revised March 2020)
- Case
Prime Coalition: Catalytic Capital for Climate Innovation
By: Ramana Nanda, Benjamin N. Roth and Olivia Hull
With long development timelines and high risk, new energy technologies were often left to languish in the “valley of death,” unable to raise enough funds to bring a product to market. In 2014, Sarah Kearney founded the nonprofit Prime Coalition to solve this problem....
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Keywords:
Energy Conservation;
Renewable Energy;
Social Entrepreneurship;
Venture Capital;
Investment;
Innovation and Invention;
Technological Innovation;
Mission and Purpose;
Science-Based Business;
Nonprofit Organizations;
Social Enterprise;
Energy Industry;
Technology Industry;
Green Technology Industry;
United States
- October 2019 (Revised January 2020)
- Case
NewView Capital and Venture Capital Secondaries
By: Shai Bernstein, Ramana Nanda and Allison Ciechanover
While still a general partner at Silicon Valley–based New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Ravi Viswanathan considered the challenges presented by evolving market dynamics in the venture capital space. Startups were staying private longer, which led to limited partners...
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- 2019
- Chapter
Coordination Frictions in Venture Capital Syndicates
By: Ramana Nanda and Matthew Rhodes-Kropf
An extensive literature on venture capital has studied asymmetric information and agency problems between investors and entrepreneurs, examining how separating entrepreneurs from the investor can create frictions that might inhibit the funding of good projects. It has...
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- 2019
- Working Paper
Infrastructure and Finance: Evidence from India's GQ Highway Network
By: Abhiman Das, Ejaz Ghani, Arti Grover, William R. Kerr and Ramana Nanda
We use the construction of India's Golden Quadrangle (GQ) central highway network, together with comprehensive loan data drawn from the Reserve Bank of India, to investigate the interaction between infrastructure development and financial sector depth. We identify a...
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- June 2019
- Article
Financial Development and Technology Diffusion
By: Diego Comin and Ramana Nanda
We examine the extent to which financial market development impacts the diffusion of 16 major technologies, looking across 17 countries, from 1870 to 2000. We find that greater depth in financial markets leads to faster technology diffusion for more capital-intensive...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
Networking Frictions in Venture Capital, and the Gender Gap in Entrepreneurship
By: Sabrina T. Howell and Ramana Nanda
We find that male participants in Harvard Business School’s New Venture Competition who were randomly exposed to more VC investors on their panel were substantially more likely to start a VC-backed startup post-graduation, indicating that access to investors impacts...
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- April 2019
- Technical Note
A Note on Boards in VC-Backed Ventures
What is the value of a Board, and why does a company need one? The note documents the formal role of a Board of Directors as going beyond simply acting as legal representation of corporate ownership. Moreover, this role changes as the company moves through different...
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- April 2019
- Teaching Note
Chai Point: Disrupting Chai
By: Shikhar Ghosh, Ramana Nanda, Rachna Tahilyani and Shweta Bagai
Teaching Note for HBS No. 818-020.
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- November 2018 (Revised December 2020)
- Technical Note
Initial Coin Offerings in 2018
In 2018, Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) were an emerging fundraising method for blockchain-based projects. As the ecosystem grew, there were many open questions on regulation, pricing, and even which projects were a good fit for blockchain. However, there was already...
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