American venture capital in a post-American world: The role of firm resources and capabilities in U.S. cross-border venture capital investment

In both the strategy and international business literatures internationalization has been explored in great detail for multinational and transnational firms, conglomerates, internationalizing small to medium-size enterprises, large professional services firms, and "born global" high-technology start-ups. The venture capital industry began the process of internationalization less than a decade ago, and very little is known about the internationalization strategies that these firms employ.;The objective of this dissertation is to understand how the resources and capabilities of a venture capital firm influence its strategies for internationalization, investment, and portfolio firm oversight.;Why is this question important? A cursory examination of the patterns of venture capital investment suggests that the venture capital industry is in the early stages of a profound transformation. While the sources of venture capital have globalized along with the capital markets, the allocation of venture capital investment has remained trenchantly local until extremely recently. In the past decade, and increasingly so over the past three years, venture capital allocations are heading across borders. This change has important implications for the financing of young firms, the speed of innovation and technological transformation, and the locus of long-term economic growth.;While there is a growing realization that significant changes are afoot in the venture capital industry, our scholarly conception of venture capital investment remains relatively unchanged. The new context demands a reconsideration of the theoretical perspectives employed and the research questions asked in venture capital scholarship. This study joins this emerging conversation.;The contributions of this study are as follows. First, I advance a framework for understanding cross-border venture capital investment that integrates the theoretically isolated venture capital literature with the broader strategic management and international business literatures. A second contribution is that I build from these literatures to propose a model for understanding cross-border venture capital investment, testing a series of hypotheses derived from that model. The empirical portion of this dissertation examines the relationship between venture capital firm resources and capabilities, the cross-border investment decision, and the oversight of portfolio firms using panel data over a twenty-eight year period using a sample of 24,326 rounds of venture capital financing. The results showcase the importance of venture capital firm capabilities in the global market for the financing of technology-driven new ventures.