Investor Personality and Success in Venture Capital

Abstract

Our study introduces venture capital (VC) investors' personality as a new perspective on investment performance. We assemble a sample of 911 VC investors with 8,258 investments and apply novel text analysis methods to assess investors' personality traits based on their Tweets. Drawing on interactionist perspectives of the personality– performance relationship, we develop and empirically test theory on the impact of VC investors' personality traits on investment success. We find that extraversion relates positively, while agreeableness and conscientiousness relate negatively, to the likelihood of a successful exit. By disentangling treatment and selection effects, we find that personality is primarily related to investors' ability to create more value for the venture post-investment rather than select higher quality ventures ex-ante.