Is a VC Partnership Greater Than the Sum of its Partners?

Venture capital firms’ ability to repeatedly make top performing investments suggests the importance of organizational or human capital. To what extent are the attributes of performance a part of the firm’s organizational capital or embodied in the human capital of the people inside the firm? We examine the performance at the partner-investment level to estimate the persistence in individual partners’ ability to IPO, achieve outsized exits or fail, and the relative importance of the firm and the partner. This work furthers our understanding of whether a firm is more than the sum of its parts.