Faculty & Research
Research
Research
11
Results
- May 2024
- Case
MStudio and Djoli: Accelerating Startup Growth in Francophone Africa
By: Paul A. Gompers, Pippa Tubman Armerding and Temitayo Lawal
| Djoli, a procurement platform, was one of the startups launched and supported by MStudio, a startup studio in Côte d'Ivoire, in 2023. After a year of operations, Djoli must look beyond MStudio, which had supported them financially and in kind in exchange for equity,... |
- March 2022
- Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis
Gender Gaps in Venture Capital Performance
By: Paul A. Gompers, Vladimir Muhkarlyamov, Emily Weisburst and Yuhai Xuan
| We explore gender differences in performance in a comprehensive sample of venture capital investments in the United States. Investments by female venture capital investors have significantly lower success rates than investments by their male colleagues when controlling... |
- October 2021
- Journal of Financial Economics
And the Children Shall Lead: Gender Diversity and Performance in Venture Capital
By: Paul A. Gompers and Sophie Calder-Wang
| With an overall lack of gender and ethnic diversity in the innovation sector documented in Gompers and Wang (2017), we ask the natural next question: Does increased diversity lead to better firm performances? In this paper, we attempt to answer this question using a... |
- July–August 2018
- Harvard Business Review
The Other Diversity Dividend
By: Paul Gompers and Silpa Kovvali
| Researchers have struggled to establish a causal relationship between diversity and financial performance—especially at large companies, where decision rights and incentives can be murky, and the effects of any given choice can be tough to pin down. So the authors... |
- February 2018 (Revised August 2023)
- Case
Nykaa.com: A Passion for Beauty
By: Paul Gompers, Anjali Raina and Rachna Chawla
| Being an entrepreneur was a childhood dream for Falguni Nayar. The opportunity to build Nykaa.com, a woman-centered business, with a multi-brand retail format in the beauty and wellness space, and the fact that she was doing it with her daughter Adwaita (HBS MBA 2013)... |
- December 2017 (Revised December 2018)
- Teaching Material
The Entrepreneurial Manager: Course Overview, 2018 Spring Term
By: Paul Gompers
| This note serves as an overview of the Entrepreneurial Management Unit’s required curriculum course, "The Entrepreneurial Manager (TEM)." General management has been a core educational organizing framework at the Harvard Business School (HBS) since its inception. Today... |
- September 2017
- Case
Blackstone’s Julia Kahr at the Summit
By: Paul A. Gompers, John D. Dionne and Amram Migdal
| In 2009, Blackstone, the New York-based alternative asset and financial services firm, committed to invest up to $750 million into Summit Materials, a new company in the aggregates sector (i.e., construction materials, such as crushed stone, sand, gravel, cement,... |
- 2017
- Working Paper
Homophily in Entrepreneurial Team Formation
By: Paul A. Gompers, Kevin Huang and Sophie Q. Wang
| We study the role of homophily in group formation. Using a unique dataset of MBA students, we observe homophily in ethnicity and gender increases the probability of forming teams by 25%. Homophily in education and past working experience increases the probability of... |
- 2017
- Working Paper
And the Children Shall Lead: Gender Diversity and Performance in Venture Capital
By: Paul A. Gompers and Sophie Q. Wang
| With an overall lack of gender and ethnic diversity in the innovation sector documented in Gompers and Wang (2017), we ask the natural next question: Does increased diversity lead to better firm performances? In this paper, we attempt to answer this question using a... |
- 2017
- Working Paper
Diversity in Innovation
By: Paul A. Gompers and Sophie Q. Wang
| In this paper we document the patterns of labor market participation by women and ethnic minorities in venture capital firms and as founders of venture capital-backed startups. We show that from 1990-2016 women have been less than 10% of the entrepreneurial and venture... |
- Working Paper
How Do Venture Capitalists Make Decisions?
By: Paul A. Gompers, William Gornall, Steven N. Kaplan and Ilya A. Strebulaev
| We survey 885 institutional venture capitalists (VCs) at 681 firms to learn how they make decisions across eight areas: deal sourcing, investment selection, valuation, deal structure, post-investment value-added, exits, internal firm organization, and relationships... |