FROM FUNDING TO FOUNDING - THE CHANGING ROLE OF INVESTORS: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY IN THE GERMAN INTERNET SECTOR (SUMMARY)

Entrepreneurs discover and execute opportunities while investors specialize in evaluating and funding these opportunities. As those startups funded by investors (venture capitalists or business angels and the like) subsequently perceive higher survival rates and better performance, this task partitioning seems to create a win-win situation for both parties. Nevertheless, investors recently started to change their role by partially substituting their funding role with a founding role: investors recognize business opportunities themselves, exploit them by hiring a selected management team and finance them as seed investors. In this paper we therefore address the following research question: why are some investors capable of playing this new role, while others are not. Based on a qualitative pre-study as well as a database of 216 investors who invested in 841 German Internet Startups between 2005 and 2009, we find a positive relationship between both, depth and breath of prior knowledge and the propensity of...