Strategizing at Leading Venture Capital Firms: of Planning, Opportunism and Deliberate Emergence

Venture capitalists are often lauded, as well as sought after, for their expertise as strategists. How they influence the direction of the firms they invest in is well understood, but how they develop strategy for their own firms has received limited attention in the literature. This study adopts a strategy as practice perspective and examines decision making processes at leading venture capital firms in Boston and Silicon Valley. Three main ideas are advanced. First, that venture capitalists are ‘bifurcated strategists’, using planning for their portfolio companies, while using emergent strategies on their own behalf. Second, that some leading firms use deliberately emergent strategies, a finding that is consistent with other empirical studies of strategizing in turbulent environments. Finally, a dynamic model is proposed showing how these strategies are put into practice.