The Influence of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Startup Funding in Silicon Valley

Master's Thesis from the year 2021 in the subject Business economics - Miscellaneous, grade: 7.5, University of Amsterdam, language: English, abstract: Silicon Valley is home to 6 out of the 10 most valuable companies in the world and is considered to be the worldwide leader in venture capital. However, at the same time, the area faces the highest living costs and business expenses in the nation. Reports suggest that people and businesses have been leaving the area due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This study takes a time series analysis approach in order to determine whether there has been a structural change in Silicon Valley’s startup funding activity during the COVID-19 pandemic. A dataset of 13,350 funding rounds in Silicon Valley from 2016 to 2020 has been collected from Crunchbase. The time series analysis is conducted in R using the Strucchange package and Chow tests. Results suggest that no structural change has occurred in the total startup funding activity or in the proportion of early-stage investments during the COVID-19 pandemic.