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We study how firm characteristics evolve from early business plan to initial public offering (IPO) to public company for 50 venture capital (VC)-financed companies. Firm business lines remain remarkably stable while management turnover is substantial. Management turnover is positively related to alienable asset formation. We obtain similar results using all 2004 IPOs, suggesting that our main results are not specific to VC-backed firms or the time period. The results suggest that, at the margin, investors in start-ups should place more weight on the business ("the horse") than on the management team ("the jockey"). The results also inform theories of the firm. SINCE COASE (1937), ECONOMISTS HAVE ATTEMPTED TO UNDERSTAND why firms exist and what constitutes firms. 1 Despite the long history of theory and empirical work, there is little systematic or noncase evidence concerning what constitutes a firm when it is very young and how a young firm evolves to a mature company. In this paper, we provide such evidence by studying 50 venture capital (VC)financed firms from early business plan to initial public offering (IPO) to public company (3 years after the IPO). We explore financial performance, line of business, point(s) of differentiation, nonhuman capital assets, growth strategy, *

Carolina, LBS Symposium on Private Equity Findings, and the Third Canadian Conference on the Economics of Innovation and Entrepreneurship. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

Public and private equity waves move together. Using quarterly cash-flow data for a large sample of venture capital and buyout funds from 1984-2010, we investigate the implications of this co-cyclicality for understanding private equity cash flows and performance. In the cross-section, varying the beta used to assess relative performance has a large effect on inference near a beta of zero, but only a modest effect for more reasonable beta estimates. A similar message comes through in the time series. Though funds raised in hot markets underperform in absolute terms, this underperformance is sharply reduced by a comparison to the S&P 500, and disappears entirely at the levels of beta recently estimated in the literature. These findings imply that high private equity fundraising forecasts both low private equity cash flows and low market returns, suggesting a positive correlation between private equity net cash flows and public equity valuations. Examining cash flows directly, we find that this is indeed the case. While both capital calls and distributions rise with public equity valuations, distributions are more sensitive than calls. Net cash flows are therefore procyclical and private equity funds are liquidity providers (sinks) when market valuations are high (low). Venture cash flows and performance are considerably more procyclical than buyout. Debt market conditions also have a significant impact on private equity cash flows. At the same time, most cash-flow variation is idiosyncratic across funds, and most predictable variation is explained by the age of the fund.