Venture capital (VC) and startups are a natural duo. While startups create disruptive and incremental innovations with their technical and creative expertise, many lack the financial resources to grow their company. VC funds provide this needed finance – in addition to business acumen – in exchange for an equity share of their company, with the hope that this risky investment will produce a significant return. Though the importance of adequate VC stimulation in the startup community is well discussed and agreed upon by many studies, as a theoretical concept, ecosystems of VC remain underdeveloped, making it difficult to comprehend how a VC ecosystem works, and more importantly, how to improve one. Nations hope to improve their VC activity and therefore their global competitiveness, by consulting the current VC literature and other comparative VC publications (scoreboards, case studies and regional benchmarks), but these do not approach VC from an ecosystem perspective, which might explain the discrepancy in their results and conclusions. The absence of an ecosystem perspective in VC literature, results in a lack of a holistic understanding of the mechanisms of a venture capital ecosystem (VCE). Consequently, this shortage of comprehension might explain why current studies do not provide the reasons for the shortcoming of the Dutch VCE. This is the first study to take the ecosystem perspective of the entrepreneurial ecosystem (EE) theory in the field of VC and seeks to answer the following main research question: How can the Dutch venture capital be improved through a conceptual model, which explains the determinants influencing the development of a venture capital ecosystem?