Maik Kleinschmidt
Venture Capital, Corporate Governance, and Firm Value

Foreword
Venture capital has become an important driver of economic growth in Europe during
the last decades. Corporate governance is a key success factor for the development of
private growth companies and thereby for the achievement of the venture capitalists'
financial objectives. Despite the high relevance of corporate governance for venture
capital-financed companies the topic has so far not been extensively researched. Traditional
research on corporate governance focussed almost entirely on public companies.
Maik Kleinschmidt aims in his dissertation at narrowing the knowledge gap by analysing
the relationship between venture capital, corporate governance and firm value for
the first time in a systematic way. He researches how venture capitalists influence the
corporate governance of their portfolio companies. Factors that determine the influence
and the impact are analysed in detail. In a second step, the impact of good
corporate governance on the firm value of the portfolio companies is researched.
The underlying research design is developed to ensure that the particularities of corporate
governance of growth companies are captured. It incorporates both, a theoretical
and an empirical analysis. The comprehensive research concept and the corresponding
hypotheses are derived from an economic and a managerial theory. Thereby, the
control as well as the value-adding role of corporate governance is taken into account.
Empirical testing of the theoretical findings is done with qualtiative and quantitative
analyses. State-of-the-art methods are used to allow for the characteristic development
of growth companies.
With its sophisticated and novel research design, the dissertation contributes
extensively to the emerging international theoretical and empirical literature on
venture capital and corporate governance. It equally provides significant insight for
venture capitalists and managers of portfolio companies. This will, without doubt,
become widely accepted by researchers and practitioners and should give impetus to
further research on this topic.

Prof. Dr. Alexander Bassen