Will the startup succeed in your eyes? Venture evaluation of resource providers during entrepreneurs' informational signaling

Abstract

Experienced founders and investors are arguably the venture community members most likely to possess needed financial and social resources for startups. We present a model of venture evaluation where entrepreneurs solicit these resource providers for needed financial and social resources. Our model addresses how resource providers' venture investment propensity influences their evaluation of entrepreneurs' informational signals and how their venture evaluation predicts their willingness to provide financial and social resources. We test our model using real-time decisions and find resource providers with founding experience (both non-investor founders and investors with founding experience) leverage their investment propensity more than non-founder investors when evaluating new ventures. In addition, our post-hoc analysis reveals that resource providers' founding experience is associated with their willingness to confer social resources. Overall, this paper focuses on the perspective of resource providers and addresses how their investment propensity, types of venturing experience, and venture evaluation influence their willingness to render resource support to new ventures.