In the literature, a number of factors such as high risk, high expected return, the lack of alternate traditional sources of capital and other non-financial factors (e.g., management) have been identified as being important in the evaluation of venture capital proposals. The major objective of this paper was to determine primarily through a questionnaire survey how Canadian and U.S. venture capitalists implement these criteria in the evaluation of proposals (asset selection), Interesting results were obtained on the diversification and composition of portfolios held, on the selection criteria employed and on the riskiness, underlying physical security and duration of the investments evaluated.
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