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Assessment Of Founders In Venture Capital Investment Decisions, Gregory Gerald Hennessy Jan 2023

Assessment Of Founders In Venture Capital Investment Decisions, Gregory Gerald Hennessy

CGU Theses & Dissertations

This manuscript documents a research project that employs grounded theory to determine what criteria contemporary investors in early-stage startups use to assess founders. One of the first questions posed by entrepreneurship researchers - even before entrepreneurship had formalized as a field - was, what criteria do investors consider when making investments in startups? Initially, the central concern was whether it was the founder(s) or the business model, often characterized as the “jockey” or the “horse.” From the start, it was generally accepted that the founder was the primary consideration, especially in early-stage ventures. Nonetheless, while business model considerations were parsed …


Portfolio Company Selection Criteria: Accelerators Vs Venture Capitalists, Cody Chang Jan 2013

Portfolio Company Selection Criteria: Accelerators Vs Venture Capitalists, Cody Chang

CMC Senior Theses

The explosive growth of ‘accelerators’ in the United States has given entrepreneurs and their startups the opportunity to pursue seed-stage financing. While the specific economic role of accelerators remains unclear, a study comparing the selection of portfolio companies between accelerators and venture capitalists was performed. A difference of means was performed on the responses per question between the collected 19 accelerators’ response and the 100 venture capitalists’ response, recorded from a prior study. It is found that venture capitalists place significantly more weight, than accelerators, on the potential of the startup’s product or service to be proprietary, to enter a …