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We survey 79 private equity (PE) investors with combined assets under management of more than $750 billion about their practices in firm valuation, capital structure, governance, and value creation. Investors rely primarily on internal rates of return and multiples to evaluate investments. Their limited partners focus more on absolute performance as opposed to risk-adjusted returns. Capital structure choice is based equally on optimal trade-off and market timing considerations. PE investors anticipate adding value to portfolio companies, with a greater focus on increasing growth than on reducing costs. We also explore how the actions that PE managers say they take group into specific firm strategies and how those strategies are related to firm founder characteristics.

We explore gender differences in performance in a comprehensive sample of venture capital investments in the United States. We find that female venture capitalists significantly underperform their male colleagues controlling for personal characteristics including employment and educational history as well as the characteristics of the portfolio companies in which they invest. When we examine their performance differences, we find that the difference results from a lack of contribution by the male colleagues within their firms. We explore the mechanism for this lack of contribution from male colleagues in a large sample survey of female venture capitalists and in detailed one-on-one interviews. We find support for the notion that formal feedback mechanisms and hierarchies are useful in ameliorating the female performance gap. Female venture capitalists find gender bias in informal mentoring systems as well as in the attitude of entrepreneurs.

We investigate how personal characteristics affect people's desire to collaborate and whether this attraction enhances or detracts from performance in venture capital. We find that venture capitalists who share the same ethnic, educational, or career background are more likely to syndicate with each other. This homophily reduces the probability of investment success, and the detrimental effect is most prominent for early-stage investments. A variety of tests show that the cost of affinity is most likely attributable to poor decision-making by high-affinity syndicates after the investment is made. These results suggest that “birds-of-a-feather-flock-together” effects in collaboration can be costly.