Financing companies before they are legible to public markets.
11 topics · 11 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
How to Raise Money
Paul Graham · 2013
Fundraising should be run as a fast, parallel process that manufactures scarcity and momentum, because a slow sequential pitch to investors one at a…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
The Venture Capital Revolution
Paul A. Gompers & Josh Lerner · 2001
Surveys how venture capital solves the financing problem of young, opaque, high-risk firms through staged investment, contracts and active…
+1 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
The Structure and Governance of Venture-Capital Organizations
William A. Sahlman · 1990
Describes the standard architecture of a venture fund — limited partnership, staged capital, contractual covenants and active board involvement — as…
+7 more at this level
11 works
Paul Graham
Fundraising should be run as a fast, parallel process that manufactures scarcity and momentum, because a slow sequential pitch to investors one at a time gives each one room to say no.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Paul A. Gompers & Josh Lerner
Surveys how venture capital solves the financing problem of young, opaque, high-risk firms through staged investment, contracts and active governance, and traces how the 1990s boom stretched that model to its limits.
John F. Coyle & Joseph M. Green
Traces how convertible notes and SAFEs emerged to defer the valuation and cap-table decisions of a priced round, arguing the innovation reallocated risk between founders and early investors rather than merely simplifying paperwork.
William A. Sahlman
Describes the standard architecture of a venture fund — limited partnership, staged capital, contractual covenants and active board involvement — as a coherent institutional response to extreme information asymmetry between investors and entrepreneurs.
John H. Cochrane
Corrects for selection bias in venture-backed company data to estimate true venture returns, finding extreme volatility and a highly skewed distribution in which a small number of investments generate most of the gains.
Steven N. Kaplan & Per Strömberg
Analysing several hundred actual venture capital contracts, shows cash-flow, control, board and liquidation rights are allocated separately and contingently on performance, matching financial contracting theory more closely than standard corporate-finance models predict.
Steven N. Kaplan & Per Strömberg
Surveys the evidence on buyout returns and mechanisms and argues LBOs create value mainly through governance and incentive changes rather than financial engineering alone.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Andrew Metrick & Ayako Yasuda
Models the fee and carried-interest economics of a typical private equity fund and estimates that roughly two-thirds of a fund manager's revenue comes from fixed fees rather than performance-based carry.
Taylor D. Nadauld, Berk A. Sensoy, Keith Vorkink & Michael S. Weisbach
Using actual secondary-market transaction prices for private equity fund stakes, estimates investors selling before a fund's natural end pay a substantial and previously unmeasured liquidity discount.
Paul Gompers, Steven N. Kaplan & Vladimir Mukharlyamov
Surveying 79 private equity firms directly, finds they create value primarily through operational and governance changes rather than financial engineering, and that their due diligence weighs management quality and growth potential most heavily.
Michael Ewens & Joan Farre-Mensa
Argues that deregulation of private securities markets, not merely changing founder preferences, let start-ups raise large late-stage growth-equity rounds and stay private for years longer, explaining much of the decline in US IPOs.