The purpose of this study is to investigate the proclivity of family businesses to engage in external corporate venturing, specifically investments targeted at exploratory searches in ventures in their early stages of development. From a behavioural perspective, we investigated whether family control influences the likelihood of engaging in such risky initiatives and to what extent key organizational contingencies, i.e. financial slack and risk-taking endeavours, shift socioemotional wealth preservation as a reference point. We tested our hypotheses on a sample of 12,320 firm-year observations gathered from 2,548 European listed firms in the period 2011-2018. We found that despite family firms engaging less than nonfamily firms in external corporate venturing, their risk attitudes change under both extremely favourable and uncertain organizational contingencies.