unknown
The Burden of the Nondiversifiable Risk of Entrepreneurship
- Publication date
- Publisher
Abstract
In the standard venture capital contract, entrepreneurs have a large fraction of equity ownership in the companies they found and are paid a sub-market salary by the investors who provide the money to develop the idea. The big rewards come only to those whose companies go public or are acquired on favorable terms, forcing entrepreneurs to bear a substantial burden of idiosyncratic risk. We study this burden in the case of high-tech companies funded by venture capital. Over the past 20 years, the typical venture-backed entrepreneur earned an average of 4.4millionfromcompaniesthatsucceededinattractingventurefunding.Entrepreneurswithacoefficientofrelativeriskaversionoftwoandwithlessthan0.7 million would be better off in a salaried position than in a startup, despite the prospect of an average personal payoff of 4.4millionandthepossibilityofpayoffsover1 billion. We conclude that startups attract entrepreneurs with lower risk aversion, higher initial assets, preferences for entrepreneurship over employment, and optimistic beliefs about the payoffs from their products.