Abstract:
Presentation of Paper: When Money Isn’t Everything—Explaining Different Patterns of Entrepreneur Resource Acquisition", with Esther Leibel e Siobhan O’Mahony (Boston U.).
Entrepreneurs use business pitches to persuade investors to provide resources to their firms.
Typically, scholars have defined successful pitches narrowly, focusing on those that result in financial investments.
However, successful pitches also can lead to important new strategic ties.
Drawing from the literature on strategic tie formation, we argue that firms prioritize specific language in their pitches to signal the types of resources sought.
We hypothesize that based on the language they use at various stages of firm development, entrepreneurs attract different resources from investors.
We test our hypotheses on a database of 79 social entrepreneurs conducting live pitches targeting impact investors in an open forum.
We show that early-stage firms benefit from relational language since it signals opportunities for investor influence, whereas late-stage firms benefit from financial language since it reflects their progress and maturation.
Relational language is more likely to attract relational commitment in the form of a broader range of investors, while financial language is more likely to attract financial commitment in the form of higher amounts of money from investors.
These results not only further a more nuanced understanding of entrepreneurs’ pitching as a proactive linguistic strategy for tie formation, but also contribute to a growing understanding of how entrepreneurs’ resource acquisition strategies vary by stage.