Browsing by Subject "Startup communication"

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Essays on investor communication in the context of startups
(2023) Kaiser, Manuel Tobias; Kuckertz, Andreas
With their creativity and innovative business models, entrepreneurs make an important contribution to global innovation, thus promoting economic growth and the labor market with startup jobs. However, the growth ambitions of entrepreneurs also require investments. Against this backdrop, previous research has already extensively discussed the importance of external investors and highlighted different facets of the entrepreneur-investor relationship. Central concept, to explain this relationship, is investor relations, which mainly refers to the communication of entrepreneur and investor. However, research on investor communication faces the challenge that a variety of new players, hence new forms of financing, have recently emerged in the market, further fragmenting the research field. In addition, technological advances are also changing the way entrepreneurs and investors communicate with each other. Against this background, previous research on investor relations in the startup context leaves open research questions that will be answered in this dissertation. This results in the following overarching research question for the structure of this dissertation: How do entrepreneurs shape communication with their investors? The first study was co-authored with Andreas Kuckertz and captures the research landscape on entrepreneurial communication using bibliometric analyses with algorithmic historiography and thematic map for science mapping. Thus, the structures of previous communication research from an entrepreneurship perspective are examined in more detail. The basis of this analysis is 383 articles from peer-reviewed journals. The results of these analyses show that communication in the context of resourcing is a relevant field of research, especially in investor relations. Overall, this study thus opens the research field of this dissertation by embedding investor communication as an element of entrepreneurial communication research. The second study was conducted with Elisabeth S.C. Berger and is a structured literature review that reviews the current state of research on trust between entrepreneurs and different types of investors. It identified and analyzed 32 articles dealing with trust in the context of venture capital, business angels, crowdfunding, or bank financing. This study builds on the results from the first study by revealing that communication is a trust-building factor. Thus, the second study shows how different concepts are interrelated and influence trust in the entrepreneur-investor relationship. The third study is co-authored with Andreas Kuckertz and examines the communication of entrepreneurs before and during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. It also considers the extent to which entrepreneurs financed by a venture capital investor differ in their communication from those entrepreneurs working without an investor. For this purpose, a novel method of text analysis was used to examine 110,283 tweets from 760 entrepreneurs. The results indicate that working with a venture capital investor also changes the professionalism of founder communication. This group shows a more professional expression of their emotions. In the fourth study, which was conducted in collaboration with Andreas Kuckertz, the emotions of investors expressed in communication are examined. This study focuses on venture capitalists and business angels. Although these two investors have a longer history in entrepreneurship research, their emotions have so far been largely ignored. However, since emotions are also relevant within relationships and therefore also in communication, this study broadens the view of the big picture in the entrepreneur-investor relationship by adding an emotional perspective. For this study, 994,969 tweets from 822 investors were analyzed and statistically compared regarding their emotions. Overall, the four studies in this dissertation address different relationship concepts that arise in the context of entrepreneur-investor relationships. Thus, this dissertation also provides impulses for entrepreneurs and investors in practice, for research and also for politics.