Gui applies Kaplan, Sensoy, and Stromberg's jockey-horse-meadow framework to organize what determines VC investment success into three categories. The jockey, the entrepreneurial team, matters through board composition and complementary skills, visionary leadership, and dynamic collaboration that lets founding teams adapt under pressure. The horse, strategy and business model, requires a clear path to revenue and scalability, noting that Freemium and Subscription models correlate with higher survival rates while Cross Selling, Hidden Revenue, Layer Player, and No Frills models correlate with lower survival, plus a defensible value proposition and real barriers to entry. The meadow, market context, covers macroeconomic conditions, legal and regulatory environment, including how cross-country legal variation shapes governance structures, and cultural influences on syndication patterns and cross-border investment success.

This paper is a compact literature synthesis rather than new empirical research, which makes it a useful starting map for a founder or student trying to quickly understand what academic work says drives VC success without reading dozens of separate studies across the field itself. The specific citation of which business model archetypes correlate with survival, Freemium and Subscription faring better than Cross Selling or No Frills, gives founders a concrete claim to weigh when choosing a monetization approach rather than generic advice to find product market fit alone. The market context section is also a useful reminder that even a strong team and business model operate within legal, macroeconomic, and cultural conditions a founder cannot control but should still weigh.