Good friends can make bad business partners

A new NBER working paper suggests that similar venture capitalists (VCs) are worse at making or managing shared investments:

This paper explores two broad questions on collaboration between individuals. First, we investigate what personal characteristics affect people’s desire to work together. Second, given the influence of these personal characteristics, we analyze whether this attraction enhances or detracts from performance. Addressing these problems in the venture capital syndication setting, we show that venture capitalists exhibit strong detrimental homophily in their co-investment decisions. We find that individual venture capitalists choose to collaborate with other venture capitalists for both ability-based characteristics (e.g., whether both individuals in a dyad obtained a degree from a top university) and affinity-based characteristics (e.g., whether individuals in a pair share the same ethnic background, attended the same school, or worked for the same employer previously). Moreover, frequent collaborators in syndication are those venture capitalists who display a high level of mutual affinity. We find that while collaborating for ability-based characteristics enhances investment performance, collaborating for affinity-based characteristics dramatically reduces the probability of investment success. A variety of tests show that the cost of affinity is not driven by selection into inferior deals; the effect is most likely attributable to poor decision-making by high-affinity syndicates post investment. Taken together, our results suggest that non-ability-based “birds-of-a-feather-flock-together” effects in collaboration can be costly.

Given that homophily rather than heterophily remains the norm, it seems these investors are not learning this lesson, or value working and affiliating with similar peers over maximising profits. All very well for them. But if you have a project that you truly want to succeed, you may be better off doing it with a talented stranger rather than the college mates you clicked with on day one. And if you are letting others invest on your behalf, you should beware of handing your money over to a homogeneous friendship group.

I wonder if this kind of research influences the institutional investors who often fund VCs? If not, it would suggest that even this highly competitive investment market is falling short of its potential to fund and grow promising new companies.

Some research suggests that corporations with more female board members perform better, though the direction of causality is disputed. I doubt females are innately more talented board members, so the causation, if real, could be the result of female ‘outsiders’ generating better management than a clique of natural friends. Shareholders don’t share the benefits of board members enjoying each other’s company, so if they had effective control of  the companies they owned you might expect then to appoint a diverse ‘team of rivals’ to the board to closely scrutinise one another’s ideas.  My impression is that precisely the opposite is the norm.