Area: Strategy & Innovation

Committee Members: Dr. Peter Thompson (co-chair), Dr. Alex Oettl (co-chair), Dr. Astrid Marinoni

Title: Navigating New Frontiers: Corporate Venture Capital, Legal Dynamics, and the GenAI Revolution in Startups

Abstract: This dissertation explores the impacts of corporate venture capital (CVC) and the emerging influence of Generative AI on both the financial and human capital of startup ventures. In the first chapter, I investigate the performance implications of CVC-backed ventures. Specifically, I focus on the competitive interplay between the investee ventures and their parent corporations in both the product and the technology markets. I find that as the technological similarity between the parent corporation and the invested venture increases, the latter experiences a decrease in funding and its innovation outcome. However, such a negative effect is mitigated if the venture’s product represents a new use case for the parent firm’s proprietary technology. The second chapter asks whether litigation initiated by startups against their CVC investors affects the defendant CVCs’ subsequent investments. The results suggest, quite counterintuitively, that such lawsuits lead to increased CVC investments in the litigated domains. This response is characterized by a dual shift from recurrent investments to completely new investments, as well as an increase in syndicating with other investors. Finally, in the third chapter, I argue that GenAI leads to fundamental changes in the way entrepreneurs seek and collaborate with co-founders. To do so, I build a novel dataset containing all online posts submitted by entrepreneurs looking for cofounders to an online forum within a year of the launch of ChatGPT. Overall, these three chapters aim to shed light on the interdependencies among technological advancements, corporate strategies, and human capital in the startup landscape, and are expected to be useful for many stakeholders concerned with stimulating economic growth through entrepreneurship.