Welcome to my website. I am a PhD candidate at EPFL (Swiss Finance Institute).

I will be on the job market this fall (2025-2026).

My main research interests are venture capital, private equity, and machine learning. 

Broadly, I am interested in studying:

• The functioning of alternative markets and startup financing mechanisms, such as private secondary markets and crowdfunding platforms.

• Machine learning applications to predict investment returns and perform causal inference.

• The sources of skill and performance among venture capital investors.

• Investment strategies in private markets.

Complete CV

luiz.bissoto@epfl.ch

EPFL College of Management of Technology
Extranef Building, Office 129
UNIL - Dorigny 1015
Lausanne, Switzerland

Private Listings and Their Consequences for Startups: Evidence from Private Secondary Markets

• Private secondary markets are increasingly popular venues where startup investors and employees can sell their shares before an acquisition or IPO. Exploiting a recent regulatory change that expanded investor access to these markets, I show that privately listed startups are significantly less likely to fundraise than otherwise similar unlisted peers. Using novel data on startup share prices, I provide supporting evidence that this effect is plausibly causal. I interpret the private listing decision through a risk-return trade-off: compared to unlisted startups, privately listed ones face higher fundraising uncertainty, with their investors being compensated with higher stock returns upon successful fundraising.

Presentations: FMA Annual Meeting (Doctoral Student Consortium and Special PhD Paper Presentation) (2025), UZH Rising Scholar Conference in Finance (2025), Dauphine Finance PhD Workshop (2025), SFI Research Days (2025), EPFL-UNIL PhD Workshop (2024, 2025)

Venture Selection Via Machine Learning

• Standard machine learning algorithms can significantly improve the selection of successful startups. This improvement does not come at the expense of missing out on highly successful startups and is robust to forward-looking and selection bias. I provide evidence that "AI-empowered" firms actively use these technologies, contributing to a decline in predictability and rationalizing the existence of these potential gains.

Presentations: EPFL-UNIL PhD Workshop (2024), SFI Research Days (2024), 9th Annual Cambridge Conference on Alternative Finance (2024), World Finance Conference (2024)

The Role of Institutional Venture Capital Firms in Startup Success

• Institutional Venture Capital (IVC) Firms specifically are responsible for most of the successful outcomes in venture capital, with a distinct (separable) and incremental (positive) effect toward success.

Presentations: EPFL-UNIL PhD Workshop (2023), Junior Academics Research Seminars (JARS) (2024)