Rene Andres

René is a PhD candidate at the University of Trier, who studied business administration and statistics at the University of Trier. While finishing his master degree majoring in entrepreneurship & finance, René started to focus on decision making behavior of venture capital investors investing into startups.

 For his dissertation, he investigates the decision making criteria that equity investors apply when evaluating so called “expansion-/growth-stage” companies. These “expansion-/growth-stage” companies are young companies that are already selling their product or service on the market, but need capital to grow their business. To receive this capital, these companies often apply for equity at a venture capital or private equity fund. The application is then reviewed by decision makers within those investors and a decision is taken to start a negation phase or not. In his research, René tries to understand the criteria that are applied in this decision and the relative importance of each criteria.

After reviewing the existing literature and identifying the exact research gap, René has conducted several interviews with equity investors around the world in order to gather a first set of decision criteria that are applied for this specific type of company. In total, he has identified 9 criteria considered by key decision makers of equity investors. Moreover, René is interested in other factors that might have an influence on the decision criteria and their relative weight. These factors include socio demographic factors as well as experience of the investor. Next to that, he tries to link the decision making criteria and their relative weight to the actual performance of an investor to identify if there is a real “pattern of success”.

To allow the measurement of the decision making, René is employing Sawtooth conjoint analysis (ACBC) in order confronts investor with decisions to make. René tries to contribute to the literature on decision making of investors into young firms and also give practical advice to investors, founders and policy makers.