Delaware’s Familiarity

This Article builds on our prior empirical research showing that, everything else equal, start-up firms financed by out-of-state investors are more likely to incorporate in Delaware. We argue that this finding is due to out-of-state investors’ familiarity with Delaware corporate law, and relative lack of familiarity with the corporate law of the start-up’s home state. In the current project, we extend our prior research by (i) developing an informal model distinguishing investor familiarity from related economic theories of network effects and learning effects, (ii) showing that our data are more consistent with familiarity than with these alternative explanations, and (iii) discussing normative implications of the familiarity effect for corporate choice of domicile. Since our prior work was written primarily for economists, this Article publicizes our empirical findings to legal scholars and practitioners. In addition, the normative implications of our findings should be of great interest to scholars following the corporate federalism debate. The remainder of the Article proceeds as follows. In Part II, the Article provides a theory for how investor familiarity impacts a private firm’s choice of domicile and uses a numeric example to distinguish familiarity from related economic theories of network effects and learning effects. Part III discusses the results of our prior study testing for a familiarity effect and recaps those findings, including new regression results showing familiarity’s role as a dominant explanation for Delaware’s dominance, contrasting familiarity’s effect with that of substantive law quality and network effects. Part IV explores normatively what our familiarity findings might mean for state competition and the overall quality of Delaware law. Part V offers a brief conclusion

Delaware’s Familiarity

This Article builds on our prior empirical research showing that, everything else equal, start-up firms financed by out-of-state investors are more likely to incorporate in Delaware. We argue that this finding is due to out-of-state investors’ familiarity with Delaware corporate law, and relative lack of familiarity with the corporate law of the start-up’s home state. In the current project, we extend our prior research by (i) developing an informal model distinguishing investor familiarity from related economic theories of network effects and learning effects, (ii) showing that our data are more consistent with familiarity than with these alternative explanations, and (iii) discussing normative implications of the familiarity effect for corporate choice of domicile. Since our prior work was written primarily for economists, this Article publicizes our empirical findings to legal scholars and practitioners. In addition, the normative implications of our findings should be of great interest to scholars following the corporate federalism debate. The remainder of the Article proceeds as follows. In Part II, the Article provides a theory for how investor familiarity impacts a private firm’s choice of domicile and uses a numeric example to distinguish familiarity from related economic theories of network effects and learning effects. Part III discusses the results of our prior study testing for a familiarity effect and recaps those findings, including new regression results showing familiarity’s role as a dominant explanation for Delaware’s dominance, contrasting familiarity’s effect with that of substantive law quality and network effects. Part IV explores normatively what our familiarity findings might mean for state competition and the overall quality of Delaware law. Part V offers a brief conclusion

Delaware\u27s Familiarity

Why do corporations choose to incorporate in Delaware over other states? The existing literature primarily falls into two camps — the “race-to-the-top” and the “race-to-the-bottom” — both of which credit Delaware’s success to the quality of its corporate law and the expertise of its judges. We consider an alternative explanation for Delaware’s continued success: familiarity. After decades of dominance, business parties have become increasingly familiar with Delaware law. Using data from a sample of startups financed by venture capital, we find that firms domicile in Delaware as much for familiarity reasons as for its substantive features. The Article finishes by tackling the normative implications of our findings — which are both positive and negative — for the overall quality of U.S. corporate law

Risk-Seeking Governance

Venture capitalists (“VCs”) are increasingly abandoning their traditional role as monitors of their portfolio companies. They are giving startup founders more equity and control and promising not to replace them with outside executives. At the same time, startups are taking unprecedented risks—defying regulators, scaling in unsustainable ways, and racking up billion-dollar losses. These trends raise doubts about the dominant model of VC behavior, which claims that VCs actively monitor startups to reduce the risk of moral hazard and adverse selection. We propose a new theory in which VCs use their role in corporate governance to persuade risk-averse founders to pursue high-risk strategies. VCs are motivated to take risks because most of the gains in venture funds come from the exponential growth of one or two outlier companies. By contrast, founders are reluctant to gamble because they bear firm-specific risk that cannot be diversified. To compensate founders for their risk exposure, VCs offer an implicit bargain in which the founders agree to pursue high-risk strategies and, in exchange, the VCs provide them private benefits. VCs can promise to give founders early liquidity when their startup grows, job security when it struggles, and a soft landing if it fails. In our model, VCs who develop a founder-friendly reputation have a competitive advantage in ex ante pricing but are more exposed to poor performance ex post due to suboptimal monitoring. Stakeholders who are not party to the VC-founder bargain—and society at large—are forced to bear uncompensated risk

Carrots and Sticks: How VCs Induce Entrepreneurial Teams to Sell Startups

Venture capitalists (VCs) usually exit their investments in a startup via a trade sale. But the entrepreneurial team – the startup’s founder, other executives, and common shareholders – may resist a trade sale. Such resistance is likely to be particularly intense when the sale price is low relative to VCs’ liquidation preferences. Using a hand-collected dataset of Silicon Valley firms, we investigate how VCs overcome such resistance. We find, in our sample, that VCs give bribes (carrots) to the entrepreneurial team in 45% of trade sales; in these sales, carrots total an average of 9% of deal value. The overt use of coercive tools (sticks) occurs, but only rarely. Our study sheds light on important but underexplored aspects of corporate governance in VC-backed startups and the venture capital ecosystem

Delaware\u27s Familiarity

Why do corporations choose to incorporate in Delaware over other states? The existing literature primarily falls into two camps — the “race-to-the-top” and the “race-to-the-bottom” — both of which credit Delaware’s success to the quality of its corporate law and the expertise of its judges. We consider an alternative explanation for Delaware’s continued success: familiarity. After decades of dominance, business parties have become increasingly familiar with Delaware law. Using data from a sample of startups financed by venture capital, we find that firms domicile in Delaware as much for familiarity reasons as for its substantive features. The Article finishes by tackling the normative implications of our findings — which are both positive and negative — for the overall quality of U.S. corporate law

Fiduciary Law and the Preservation of Trust in Business Relationships

This chapter explores the role of mandatory fiduciary obligations in preserving trust between business parties. Because contracts are inevitably incomplete, after investment there is always a risk of opportunism. While the parties could try to draft a more detailed agreement prohibiting various forms of opportunism, the very act of haggling over such protections may signal distrust, eliciting costly reactions (defensive measures/hedging/lack of intrinsic motivation) in the counterparty. In the absence of fiduciary protections, a vulnerable party may decide to forgo important protections against opportunism, not because such protections are suboptimal or hard to specify ex ante but because bargaining for them would signal distrust. By contrast, state-imposed fiduciary obligations remove the invocation of distrust by either party to the agreement. We further observe that while fiduciary protections can help prevent distrust among a small number of contracting parties, fiduciary protections may prove inadequate in some settings, especially in addressing horizontal conflicts between beneficiaries. The chapter concludes by observing that the limits of contract and fiduciary law leave a residual zone of vulnerability in which trust and other mechanisms of risk reduction play a significant role

Fiduciary Law and the Preservation of Trust in Business Relationships

This chapter explores the role of mandatory fiduciary obligations in preserving trust between business parties. Because contracts are inevitably incomplete, after investment there is always a risk of opportunism. While the parties could try to draft a more detailed agreement prohibiting various forms of opportunism, the very act of haggling over such protections may signal distrust, eliciting costly reactions (defensive measures/hedging/lack of intrinsic motivation) in the counterparty. In the absence of fiduciary protections, a vulnerable party may decide to forgo important protections against opportunism, not because such protections are suboptimal or hard to specify ex ante but because bargaining for them would signal distrust. By contrast, state-imposed fiduciary obligations remove the invocation of distrust by either party to the agreement. We further observe that while fiduciary protections can help prevent distrust among a small number of contracting parties, fiduciary protections may prove inadequate in some settings, especially in addressing horizontal conflicts between beneficiaries. The chapter concludes by observing that the limits of contract and fiduciary law leave a residual zone of vulnerability in which trust and other mechanisms of risk reduction play a significant role