Return to Venture Capital in the Aggregate

We measure the aggregate lifetime return to equity investments in venture companies. We consider the aggregate portfolio of all equity investments made in the various funding rounds of 17,242 ventures that had their first funding round during 1980 and 2006. We track these ventures till their exit or till 2018 to get a complete picture of their lifetime return. The Kaplan and Schoar (2005) Public Market Equivalent (PME) measure of performance is 1.42, i.e., each dollar invested returned 1.42 dollars after adjusting for risk and time value. We use an imputation model following Hall and Woodward (2010) for addressing missing data issues.