Squaring Venture Capital Valuations with Reality

We thank Nicholas Crain, Michael Ewens, Joe Grundfest, Sabrina Howell, Steve Kaplan, Arthur Korteweg, Adair Morse, Trent Read, Mike Schwert, and Toni Whited for helpful discussions and comments. We are also grateful to seminar participants at the Ross Business School, University of Michigan; Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia; Stanford University Graduate School of Business; and University of California Berkeley Workshop on Finance and Innovation. We are especially grateful to Mark Aurelius, Zalina Alborova, Mory Elsaify, Raymond Lee, and Ronaldo Magpantay for excellent research assistance; to Amy Loo, Mark Nevada, Hossein Sajjadi, and Michala Welch for invaluable legal research assistance; to Leonard Grayver, Cynthia Hess, Joseph Kao, Mark Radcliffe, Mark Reinstra, Joseph Kao, Trent Read, and Sven Weber for clarifying many legal intricacies; and to Kathryn Clark for editorial assistance. We are grateful to a number of VC industry practitioners who prefer to remain anonymous. Gornall thanks the SSHRC for its support. Strebulaev thanks the Venture Capital Initiative at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

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