This article is the first known study assessing the relationship between the experiences of the philanthropic venture capital firm's founding team, and their venture firm's economic, social, and total performance. Results indicate that commercial and social experience help economic and social performance respectively. However, when pursuing the maximization of both social and economic performance, philanthropic venture capital firms perform best when the founding team has high levels of commercial experience and low levels of social experience.

While venture capital has received a tremendous amount of attention, prior research has predominantly looked at venture capital firms (VCFs) post raising their first fund. In this paper, we move the point of analysis back further and ask what type of founding team experience best predicts VCF success, controlling for firm strategy, firm size, and the environment upon which the firm was born. Empirical results show that venture capital, senior management, and consulting experience aids VCF success, while entrepreneurial experience impedes it. None of the control variables affect a VCF's ability to raise subsequent funds.

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Philanthropic venture capital (PhVC), like traditional venture capital (TVC), provides funding and value added services to a portfolio of entrepreneurial firms. However, TVC differs from PhVC, as the primary goal of TVC is to maximize the economic return of its investments. In contrast, PhVC firms expect their portfolio companies to perform well in terms of both social and economic returns. Using both American and European firms, this paper explores and compares the human capital in PhVC and TVC firm founders. Our results show that there are key differences in both general and specific human capital between these firm types. While both TVC and PhVC firm founders have high levels of commercial experience, TVC firm founders tend to hold degrees in science, engineering, business, and law more frequently than PhVC firm founders. PhVC founders also differ from TVC founders by having greater work experience in the social sector.

This article summarizes four contributions that were presented in a professional development workshop at the 2013 Academy of Management conference. The goal of the workshop was to discuss impediments to the theoretical advancement of social entrepreneurship. This paper's first two contributors discuss assumptions and boundaries of social entrepreneurship, exhibiting contrasting views of whether theory should be aggregated or disaggregated. The other two scholars focus on specific topics that advance social entrepreneurship research, specifically, studying the implicit normative underpinning of social entrepreneurship and social innovation processes. This is part three of a three-part series dealing with the future of social entrepreneurship research and theory.