  Venture capital (VC) is a relatively newly emergent industry that is still
subject to large uncertainties in China. Therefore, building a robust social
network with other VC institutions is a good way to share information, various
resources, and benefit from skill and knowledge complementarity to against
risks. Strong evidences indicate that better networked VC institutions are of a
better financial performance, however, most of previous works overlook the
evolution of VC institutions and only focus on some simple topology indicators
of the static syndication network, which also neglects higher-order network
structure and cannot give a comprehensive evaluation. In this paper, based on
VC investment records in the Chinese market, we construct temporal syndication
networks between VC institutions year by year. As k-shell decomposition
considers higher-order connection patterns, we employ k-shell as an evaluation
of the influence of VC institutions in syndication networks. By clustering time
series of k-shell values, the VC institutions in China fall into five groups
that are quite different from each other on financial performances and
investment behaviors. This, in turn, proves the power of our method that only
based on proper sequential network properties, we can reveal their financial
investment performance. Compared to other network centrality measurements,
k-shell is a better indicator that is indicated by a smaller intra-group
distance and a larger inter-group distance.
