All new ventures face the liability of newness, and even more so in nascent entrepreneurial fields. This pressure is attenuated by the acquisition of legitimacy, which is consistently highlighted as beneficial in the literature. Yet, little attention has been given to the downsides of acquiring legitimacy or the benefits of failing to do so. Conceptualizing entrepreneurship as a distributed and collective process, this paper examines how prior successes and failures shape future legitimation efforts. We first argue that legitimation efforts are contingent on the ability of entrepreneurs to attract new audiences. Considering both successes and failures, we distinguish legitimation efforts that generate “legitimacy spillovers” from those that do not and argue that these spillovers enable entrepreneurs to “piggyback” off the legitimation efforts of others. We test our hypotheses by examining more than 180,000 crowdfunding campaigns launched on Kickstarter, one of the most important crowdfunding platforms. In...