Business Commons^™

Practical Challenges Of Differentiated, For-Profit Social Ventures, Gabriel M. Blake

Honors Thesis

When social entrepreneurs create a for-profit enterprise focused on addressing a particular public need, there are many specific challenges and barriers that stand in their way of becoming a sustainable, revenue-generating business. Many of these challenges are currently unknown to many nascent social entrepreneurs, and in most cases, these challenges will cause the venture to fail or never reach operational scale (Renko, 1047).

Social entrepreneurs face many unique challenges and barriers that traditional entrepreneurs do not necessarily encounter. Typical challenges include balancing the needs of disparate stakeholders (Smith, 464), maintaining robust cash flows and profits while simultaneously remaining committed to …

The Evolution Of Financing Structure In U.S. Startups, Carmen Cotei, Joseph Farhat

The Journal of Entrepreneurial Finance

In this article we examine how startup businesses finance their operations over time. We employ the Latent growth modeling technique to test the financial growth cycle theory developed by Berger and Udell (1998). The data used in this study is the Kauffman Firm Survey, the largest longitudinal data set comprised of a random sample of U.S. startups launched in 2004 and surveyed annually through 2011. Consistent with the predictions of financial growth cycle theory, in the startup stage, entrepreneurs rely on initial insider capital sources such as personal savings, financing offered by friends and family, quasi-equity, and personal debt. Over …

The Ethics Of Representing Founders, Paul R. Tremblay

William & Mary Business Law Review

Lawyers assisting entrepreneurial startups frequently work with individual founders before any formal organizational client materializes. In advising founders about such legal matters as whether to establish an entity, and if so, which entity best fits the needs of the enterprise, as well as how to arrange the owners’ relationships within the business, the lawyer necessarily has an attorney-client relationship with someone. The prevailing scholarship about startup representation pays surprisingly little attention to the posture of the lawyer and her founder-clients in the pre-organization context. This Article investigates the lawyer’s responsibilities and commitments in depth.

A lawyer working with a solo …

Leveraging Knowledge At Startups, Amruta Anil Ranade

Masters Theses

"Startups contribute to the economy and job creation in the United States. One of the primary assets of startups is tacit knowledge of the employees of the startup. Technical communicators can help startups capture, share, and leverage the tacit knowledge at startups. Technical communicators could benefit from learning how knowledge management initiatives at startups work. The current study is an ethnographic case-study that was conducted at a fast-growing startup in California.

The data for the study was collected through observations, informal and semi-structured formal interviews with participants, and feedback from customers of the startup. The collected data was analyzed based …

Regulatory Entrepreneurship, Elizabeth Pollman, Jordan M. Barry

All Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines what we term “regulatory entrepreneurship” — pursuing a line of business in which changing the law is a significant part of the business plan. Regulatory entrepreneurship is not new, but it has become increasingly salient in recent years as companies from Airbnb to Tesla, and from DraftKings to Uber, have become agents of legal change. We document the tactics that companies have employed, including operating in legal gray areas, growing “too big to ban,” and mobilizing users for political support. Further, we theorize the business and law-related factors that foster regulatory entrepreneurship. Well-funded, scalable, and highly connected …