Journal of Business Venturing最新文献

Although academic interest in organizational scaling is growing, extant research has focused primarily on the antecedents and processes, neglecting how employees experience scaling. Drawing on the scale-up, firm growth, and well-being literature, we take an employee perspective to examine the impact of scaling on employee burnout and job satisfaction. Using a sample of 10,908 new venture employees in Sweden, we show that scaling is positively associated with employee burnout, and negatively with job satisfaction. We also show that the link between scaling, burnout, and job satisfaction depends on whether the employee is in a managerial position or has prior new venture experience.

The growing phenomenon of highly valued startups (e.g., unicorns) poses fundamental questions for entrepreneurship research. We posit that venture scalability and VC funding availability may explain startups' IPO valuations (and timing). Highly scalable ventures may not only capture very large market opportunities, but their scaling strategies may also be constrained by the governance and regulatory burdens faced by public firms. Accordingly, we hypothesize and find that more scalable ventures undertake IPOs at higher valuations, which is positively moderated by VC funding availability. Highly scalable startups also delay their IPOs for longer but only when VC funding availability is high.

We examine whether and when female representation in decision-making groups of venture capital firms affects the firms' decision to fund woman-led businesses. By developing an intra- and inter-group categorization framework for group decision-making, we argue that, in the male-dominated venture capital industry, decision-making groups with higher female representation are less likely to fund woman-led businesses. However, this negative effect is mitigated when the decision-making group has more politically neutral members or when members have more shared prior employment affiliations. Using a longitudinal panel dataset of funding decisions by 151 U.S.-based venture capital firms, the empirical analyses support our theoretical predictions. We also enriched and complemented our empirical findings with qualitative evidence.

Many entrepreneurial opportunities are associated with events, including sports competitions, races and tournaments, concerts and music festivals, and conferences and exhibitions, yet this variant of entrepreneurship has not been specifically accounted for in the literature. We integrate insights from entrepreneurship research with research on temporary organizational forms, stakeholder theory, and platform strategy to define Event-Based Entrepreneurship (EBE) and propose factors that account for the founding and scaling of event-based ventures. In so doing, we lay the conceptual foundations and offer theoretical and practical directions for an expanded research agenda on EBE.

Drawing from expectancy violation theory, we investigate how entrepreneurs' language-based expressions of their political ideology influence the performance of their crowdfunding campaigns. We argue that crowdfunding funders expect campaigns to be apolitical, suggesting that entrepreneurs' expressing their political ideologies – regardless of the specific ideology – create a negative expectancy violation that decreases funding performance. As source credibility is a central boundary condition for expectancy violation theory predictions, we also suggest this relationship is mitigated by three indicators of entrepreneurial credibility: prior successful experience, media usage, and third-party endorsements. Using a sample of 19,898 Kickstarter campaigns and a randomized experiment, we find support for our theoretical predictions.

Leveraging work on role theory and age stereotypes, we deploy a randomized experiment that uses AI to manipulate founder age in fundraising appeals. Broadly, we find that age perceptions matter to investors. Using 949 equity crowdfunding observations, we show that entrepreneurs benefit from appearing older when seeking funding. However, these benefits wane as age perceptions increase, and age perceptions eventually become detrimental to funding efforts, resulting in an inverted-U relationship between age perceptions and funding evaluations. Perceptions of founder intelligence, creativity, energy, and experience mediate this relationship. This study opens new frontiers by introducing founder age perceptions as an important, yet overlooked factor in entrepreneurial fundraising.

This study introduces the novel construct of bridge-economy partners, which can assist Western firms in learning how to collaborate with local partners when entering unfamiliar foreign countries that have substantially different socioeconomic characteristics. We offer initial empirical evidence regarding the relevance of establishing such interorganizational partnership triads among Western, bridge-economy, and local firms for the entries of Western venture capital firms (VCs) into Mainland China between 1997 and 2008. Venture age, regional legal maturity, and the Western VCs' accumulated local experience are identified as relevant contingency factors for the likelihood of adopting this type of collaboration, which involves partners from three different types of economies. We supplement our quantitative analyses with anecdotal qualitative evidence from interviews with VC executives and fund managers.

Executive summary

This study introduces the novel construct of bridge-economy partners and outlines their potentially beneficial roles in the context of foreign-market entry undertaken by Western firms. The established literature suggests that Western firms consider collaboration with a local firm as an accelerator for learning about and adapting to local conditions. However, the substantial socioeconomic differences that may exist between home and host country can create paramount challenges for collaborations between Western firms and their local partners. Adding a third type of partner from a country with substantial socioeconomic overlap to both firms' home countries can help “bridge the socioeconomic gap” between Western and local firms. The bridge-economy partners can assist Western firms in learning how to collaborate with their new local partners.

This study offers initial empirical evidence for the relevance of such interorganizational partnership triads between Western, bridge-economy, and local firms by using the data of Western venture capital firms (VCs) and their entries into Mainland China between 1997 and 2008. Venture age, regional legal maturity, and accumulated local experience of Western VCs are identified as relevant contingency factors for the likelihood of adopting this type of triadic interorganizational partnership. Quantitative hypothesis tests are supplemented with anecdotal qualitative evidence.

Reported findings extend the emerging entrepreneurship literature that focuses on foreign-market entry and globalization. Our focus on triadic partnerships and the role of bridge-economy firms extends the previous research that has instead nearly exclusively focused on dyadic collaborations between Western firms and local partners. A triadic WBL partnership offers an alternative strategy to use when entering foreign markets that have substantially different cultural, economic, and institutional characteristics. Our findings further highlight that even though such triadic WBL partnerships