The Optimal Portfolio Size of Venture Capital under Staged Financing

Abstract Traditional theory thinks that portfolio is not a fundamental characteristic of venture capital (VC), the literatures research on venture enterprise portfolio is relatively rare at home and abroad. Venture capital tends to hold a certain number of start-up firms to form a portfolio and at the same time to provide funds and value-added services for more than one start-up firm. Under the scarcity of resources such as attention, venture capitalists should consider how to determine the optimal portfolio size of start-up firms in venture capital finance. The previous studies generally neglected the characteristic that staged financing is the common method used by venture capitalists in most cases. Under the staged financing mechanism, based on double-size moral hazard, using optimization theory we get the expression about the optimal portfolio size of venture capital, and then we find that the optimal portfolio size decreases in start-up capital and following capital, and increases in earlier stage output and total output.