Venture Capital Pre-Investment Decision Making Process: An Exploratory Study In Malaysia

Venture capital is an alternative source of funding for SMEs in Malaysia. Recognizing the importance of this industry toward economic growth, the Malaysian government has initiated various strategic plans. Despite promising growth of the venture capital market, past empirical findings reveal that the performance of venture capital backed companies (investee companies) over long run has been relatively poor, especially after venture capitalist exit. Thus, there is a need to understand the decision-making process practiced by Malaysian venture capitalists. Most decision making processes evolve from classical decision-making models. The current study purports to find disparity between the current practice and the classical venture capital decision-making model. The current study incorporates an exploratory research survey of 16 venture capitalists. Findings reveal significant similarities in the decision making procedure and investment criteria used to select investment with the classical model. As for investment criteria, greater importance is given to management integrity and exit opportunity rather than to the business idea. Findings also reveal that VCs experience does not correspond to expertise in decision -making.