Challenges of Early Stage Entrepreneurs : the Roles of Vision Communication and Team Membership Change

We increasingly expect start-ups to tackle the great systemic problems of the world, with a rising demand for game-changing innovations that are both sustainable, responsible and economically viable. However, most of these ventures fail to realize their envisioned growth, or do not even survive their first four years of existence. This is because entrepreneurs face three hard-to-overcome: acquisition of financial resources, the attraction of talent and the organization of this talent into an effective team. In this dissertation, I espouse the roles of vision communication and the management of team dynamics in facing these three challenges. First, the dissertation investigates how entrepreneurs’ vision communication affects the way investors and potential recruits view the venture. Results point out that disruptive and social vision communication strongly affect their perception about the venture. Specifically, both types of visions may have unfo

Do disruptive visions pay off?

Entrepreneurs often articulate a vision for their venture that purports to fundamentally change, disturb, or re-order the ways in which organizations, markets, and ecosystems operate. We call these visions disruptive visions. Neglected in both the disruption and the impression management literature, disruptive visions are widespread in business practice. We integrate real options and impression management theories to hypothesize that articulating a disruptive vision raises expectations of extraordinary returns, which in turn increases the likelihood of receiving funding, but reduces the amount of funding obtained. A novel dataset of Israeli start-ups shows that a standard deviation increase in disruptive vision communication increases the odds of receiving a first round of funding by 22 percent, but reduces amounts of funds received by 24 percent. A randomized online experiment corroborates these findings and further shows expectation of extraordinary returns as the key mechanism driving investors’ sensemaking