Graduation Year

2021

Date of Submission

11-2020

Document Type

Campus Only Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Economics-Accounting

Reader 1

Professor Janet K. Smith

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Terms of Use for work posted in Scholarship@Claremont.

Abstract

This paper looks at the spray and pray investment strategy for venture capital funds. Spray and pray is a strategy whereby VC funds make a larger quantity of investments with lower capital committed to each investment. I calculated OLS regressions using a dataset of United States VC funds from 2013-2018 from Pitchbook. I investigated the effect spray and pray strategy had on venture capital returns. This paper finds that, while there is a negative relationship between a fund’s average investment size and returns, there is no relationship between returns and the fund’s strategy. This implies that there is no statistical difference in returns between spray and pray and non-spray and pray funds.

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