Do Single Family Offices Invest Differently? Extending the Socioemotional Wealth Perspective to Entrepreneurial Investment Practices

Drawing on the socioemotional wealth (SEW) perspective and its dimensions captured in the FIRE framework, we theorize that single-family offices (SFOs) make unique tradeoffs between socioemotional and financial wealth in their entrepreneurial investment practices. Using coarsened exact matching (CEM) followed by a difference-in-differences-style matched observational comparison around the 2010 Dodd–Frank change, we find that SFOs collaborate with fewer syndicate partners, maintain narrower industry portfolios, and have longer investment horizons than institutional venture capitalists (IVCs). Among eponymous SFOs, the corresponding comparisons with IVCs show the same predicted directions. Our study contributes to the family business literature by theorizing how distinct SEW dimensions may be reflected in observable entrepreneurial investment practices by SFOs.