Better Together? Signaling Interactions in New Venture Pursuit of Initial External Capital
研究新创企业如何通过第三方联盟信号增强创始人特征和行动信号的价值，从而提高获得初始外部资本的可能性，对创业者和投资者有参考意义。
After new ventures have exhausted the limited financial resources of founders, family, and friends, they often pursue initial external capital. To secure investment, entrepreneurs can signal about their venture’s latent potential by aligning themselves with reliable third parties. Such affiliations affirm the new venture’s legitimacy and provide substantive benefits in the form of mentoring, access to resources, and ongoing monitoring. However, early stage financing is an especially “noisy” signaling environment owing to the large number of startups seeking funding, many of which will not survive. The real value of third-party affiliations in this context resides in their ability to unlock the potential of other more pedestrian signals, such as the entrepreneur’s characteristics and actions that might otherwise go unnoticed. We borrow from the sensemaking literature to explain how third-party affiliation signals disambiguate signals with multiple possible interpretations so that potential investors interpret them positively. Findings support our theory that a startup’s characteristics and actions are signals that remain relatively unnoticed unless a startup combines them with a third-party affiliation that enhances the signal’s value, thus increasing the likelihood of receiving external capital.