Networking Frictions in Venture Capital, and the Gender Gap in Entrepreneurship

Sabrina T. Howell () and Ramana Nanda
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Sabrina T. Howell: New York University

No 19-105, Harvard Business School Working Papers from Harvard Business School

Abstract: Exploiting random variation in the number of venture capitalist (VC) judges assigned to panels at Harvard Business School’s New Venture Competition (NVC) between 2000 and 2015, we find that exposure to more VC judges increases male participants’ chances of founding a VC-backed startup after HBS much more than this exposure increases female participants’ chances. A survey suggests this is in part because male participants more often proactively reach out to VC judges after the NVC. Our results suggest that networking frictions are an important reason men benefit more than women from exposure to VCs. Such frictions can help explain part of the gender gap in entrepreneurship, and also have implications for how to design networking opportunities to facilitate financing of the best (rather than just the best networked) ideas.

Pages: 50 pages
Date: 2019-04, Revised 2019-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ent and nep-gen
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

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http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/pages/download.aspx?name=19-105.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Networking Frictions in Venture Capital, and the Gender Gap in Entrepreneurship (2024)
Working Paper: Networking Frictions in Venture Capital, and the Gender Gap in Entrepreneurship (2019)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hbs:wpaper:19-105

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