This paper examines the interactions between venture capitals’ (VCs) backgrounds, their investment preference and venture success. By examining VC’s ownership structure, we divide VCs in China into the Government-backed VC (GVC), Private VC (PVC) and Foreign VC (FVC). We first examine different types of VCs’ preference on early-stage investment, location parity between VC and portfolio firm, and preference on high-tech industries. We then test whether a certain background increases the likelihood that a VC can successfully exit from a portfolio company. With a sample of more than 1900 VC-backed companies in China, we find that FVC is most likely to promote technology innovations because they tend to finance early-stage and high-tech companies. GVCs in China only partly realize their social mission by financing companies within the provinces where they are incorporated, while they fail to facilitate young and high-tech companies, which are expected to be innovative. As for venture success, we find GVCs are more likely to achieve successful exits, especially IPO exits. However, GVCs usually need to wait for longer time to achieve a successful exit. In contrast, a presence of PVC accelerates the process of successful exits. FVCs do not achieve above-average success in exits due to their disadvantages in political connections and domestic industrial connection.