The Evolution Of Entrepreneurs' Fund-raising Intentions: A Multiple Case Study Of Financing Processes In New Ventures (entrepreneurship)

Marc Grünhagen examines the evolution of fund-raising struggles in eleven in-depth case studies of seed and early stage ventures. The findings suggest two core recommendations for supporting growth-oriented fund-raising processes: a) to build legitimizing potential and b) to ensure sufficient financial scope for flexible adaptations throughout the financing struggle. Recent entrepreneurship research discusses numerous potential obstacles on the path towards business formation. The acquisition of resources, especially external finance, constitutesaformidablechallengefoundershavetomeet.Substantialrejectionratesof potential investors create external selection pressures on new ventures in that they contributetofailuresorinfluencethegrowthofsurvivingyoungcompanies.However, the founders themselves take an active role in the search for financial resources by addressing various potential financiers and taking decisions on the direction and continuation of their search for investors. Similarly, the results of the large US Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics point at the importance of adjustments in founders'fund-raising intentions in the course of early stage financial development of new ventures. The work at hand focuses on this process of solving problems during the search for external funding in emerging new ventures. The author explicitly does not analyze which factors of success will allow to convince potential investors with certainty. Regarding the search for funding as an open-ended process for epistemological reasons,heratheraimsatthereconstructionofsearchprocessesandthederivationof explanatorypatternsfortheactionsofventurefoundersinsearchofexternalfunding. Annotation Marc Grünhagen examines the evolution of fund-raising struggles in eleven in-depth case studies of seed and early stage ventures. The findings suggest two core recommendations for supporting growth-oriented fund-raising processes: a) to build legitimizing potential and b) to ensure sufficient financial scope for flexible adaptations throughout the financing struggle Marc Grunhagen examines the evolution of fund-raising struggles in eleven in-depth case studies of seed and early stage ventures.