The Role of Entrepreneurs’ Perceived Competence and Cooperativeness in Early-Stage Financing
基于社会心理学和创业文献，研究早期股权投资者如何通过能力与合作性两个维度评估寻求融资的企业家，发现投资者更看重能力，且能力与可指导性结合时更具吸引力。
Building on social-psychological insights into social perception and judgment and empirical findings from the entrepreneurship literature, we propose that early-stage equity investors look at two main dimensions to assess entrepreneurs seeking early-stage financing: competence and cooperativeness. In all, 84 angel investors and venture capitalists active in Europe participated in a conjoint experiment. The results show that investors prioritize entrepreneurs’ competence over their cooperativeness. Entrepreneurs’ competence is even more appealing to investors when combined with coachability. We find that entrepreneurs can compensate for a lack of experience by demonstrating solid market knowledge and appearing to be coachable. Furthermore, the results suggest that investors differ in their consideration of entrepreneurs’ cooperativeness, but not competence, when making investment decisions—a finding that is conditional on investors’ usual level of involvement in their portfolio ventures. We discuss these findings from a theoretical and practical perspective.