Abstract
Venture capital is an important funding source for sustainable entrepreneurship and, thus, drives sustainable development. However, sustainable startups have trouble acquiring venture capital. Hence, existing literature focuses on dedicated impact investors or aims to understand why traditional venture capitalists (tVCs) avoid sustainable investment opportunities. In contrast, this study investigates investment decisions from venture capitalists without a dedicated “green” focus on sustainable startups. We investigate about 80 cases containing business plans and decision documents of sustainable and non-sustainable new ventures. Thereby, we explore whether investors react differently to sustainable business models. Using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and topic modeling, we find that tVCs do not integrate sustainability into their decision justification. However, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) reveals that tVCs argue more emotionally when writing about a sustainable business case. However, this is not only the result of a stronger emotional connection to sustainability, as it might also be influenced by emotional contagion from entrepreneurs' business plans.
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