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This research aims to deal with the interdisciplinary field of teamwork in entrepreneurial ventures. Its purpose is to advance the knowledge of investors' perspective with regard to high technology entrepreneurial teams. Prior studies suggest that teamwork affects new venture performance. However, only little evidence with conflicting conclusions was found in prior research regarding the importance investors lend to founders' teamwork as part of their evaluation criteria of founders' human capital.

The importance of the teamwork factor on new venture performance was measured by meta‐analysis of 27 previous studies which shows that founders' teamwork takes the fourth place among the 11 measured founders' human capital factors. Are investors' views coherent with these findings? The author interviewed five venture capitalists (VCs) and five business angels with investment experience in early stage high technology ventures.

Findings unexpectedly show that most interviewees did not prefer team‐starts to single‐starts new ventures and did not highly consider the teamwork factor in their investment evaluation criteria. There were no major differences between VCs and business angel investors interviewed.

The findings of this qualitative study need validation. Also investors' espoused criteria may differ from their actual in‐use criteria. Avenues for further research are suggested.

Practitioners may reconsider their evaluation criteria regarding new ventures while lending more weight to the team factor.

The paper contributes to the knowledge of investors' perspective on team‐starts and teamwork in new ventures. This evaluation criterion has been under‐explored, though it affects new venture performance.

The purpose of this paper is to provide insights into how nascent entrepreneurs persist despite outward appearances of little progress by using participant observations, and autobiographical and interview data.

Utilizing a multi-year case study, the authors use participant observation, autobiographical, and interview data to build the arguments.

The authors demonstrate that persistence involves overcoming stage-gate issues, and overcoming stage gates requires a flurry of activity and opportunity variation. Once stage gates are overcome, entrepreneurs experience an emergence-like event with a new flurry of activity that propels them toward the next stage gate. Doing so, the authors extend theories of entrepreneurial persistence and entrepreneurial action by suggesting that nascent entrepreneurs who are slowly making progress toward start-up may be persisting by taking small but important steps toward start-up.

This study offers detailed observations and analysis about the behaviors and activities that a nascent entrepreneur undertook during an extremely long gestation/persistence period, which ultimately ended with the successful completion of the goal.

This paper is a rejoinder to the work of Blohm, Antretter, and colleagues recently published in both Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice and Harvard Business Review titled “It's a Peoples Game, Isn't It?! A Comparison Between the Investment Returns of Business Angels and Machine Learning Algorithms” and “Do Algorithms Make Better – and Fairer – Investments than Angel Investors?”, respectively.

While we agree with authors of prior scholarship on the importance of counteracting human biases, honing expert intuition and optimizing the odds of success in investment decision-making contexts, in the spirit of open academic discourse, this paper respectfully challenges some of the underlying assumptions concerning algorithmic bias on which prior work is based.

Investing remains part art and part science, and while algorithms may begin to play a more significant role in investment decision-making, human intuition remains hard to imitate. In both people and in algorithms, sources of bias remain both implicit and explicit and often have systemic roots, so more research continues to be needed to fully understand why algorithms produce potentially biased outcomes across a wide array of contexts.

This paper contributes to our collective understanding on the use of algorithms in making investment decisions, highlighting the fact that bias exists in humans and algorithms alike, even when the best of intentions are present.

We consider start-up companies that have been established for rapid growth and are active in the international market. In this study, we examine the conditions required for starting a start-up. We analyze how it is possible to add value to an idea that makes a business unique. First, we’ll show you when to talk about start-up. The starting point is that a start-up company is organized on a community basis. This much greater knowledge is coupled with high-level technological competences. In addition, there is a need for some “big idea,” innovation, which investors see as fantasy. A new niche market must be found where hundreds of thousands of customers worldwide can be served without any geographical constraints. The founder must have a high-risk appetite, and even naughtiness, because the novelty he invented will narrow the market of others and harm the interests of others. Here’s a look at the financing options for start-ups. At the end of this chapter you will find case studies on different start-ups.

The purpose of this paper is to shed some new light on the entrepreneurial finance of green start-ups, for which there has been little quantitative empirical evidence thus far. It explores what challenges green start-ups might experience when it comes to financial access.

The paper includes a survey of start-ups in Finland, Germany and Sweden and the separate evaluation of the “greenness” of participating companies’ product/service portfolios based on Eurostat’s Environmental Goods and Service Sector classification. A logistic regression is carried out for different company phases for two measures of challenges (“difficulty accessing finance” and “rejection by investor/funder”).

Green start-ups as an overall group cannot be said to have more challenges in access to finance. Particularly, a lack in business education and a high level of innovativeness, however, seem to be lead to more challenges for green start-ups in accessing finance compared to other start-ups.

Further research might seek to identify which exact characteristics of innovative green start-ups lead to challenges in financial access, i.e. is it individual factors such as high risk levels, high investment sums, long development periods or a low return prospect – or is it rather a combination? It might, furthermore, be rewarding to investigate whether “interventions” of business-related training might reduce challenges.

Suggestions are made for improved policy support to sustainable entrepreneurship in the case of green start-ups.

This research paper provides quantitative empirical analysis in a new research area, which has previously been predominantly theory based with some anecdotal observations as well as some early qualitative research.

The purpose of this paper is to uncover the strategic nature of formal seed capital in Norway as opposed to equally sized venture capital firms.

As the population of Norwegian seed capital firms is embedded in this study, a differential approach is taken when contrasting these seed capital firms with venture capital firms of approximately the same size.

The findings indicate that seed capital firms take higher market risk than their counterparts, and that they diversify to a larger extent than comparable venture capital firms. The latter appears to be a function of the former.

This study reviews previous categorizations of seed capital providers, henceforth building towards an overall taxonomy of seed capital.

Innovation in financing processes, enabled by the advent of new technologies, has supported the development of alternative finance funding tools. In this context, the study analyses the growing importance of alternative finance instruments (such as equity crowdfunding, peer-to-peer (P2P) lending, venture capital, and others) in addressing the small and medioum enterprises' (SMEs) financing needs beyond traditional bank and market-based funding channels. By providing more flexible terms and faster approval times, these instruments are gradually reshaping the traditional bank-firm relationship.

To comprehensively understand this innovation shift in funding processes, the study employs a novel approach that merges three MCDA methods: Spherical Fuzzy Entropy, ARAS and TOPSIS. These methodologies allow for handling ambiguity and subjectivity in financial decision-making processes, examining the effects of multiple criteria, including interest rate, flexibility, accessibility, support, riskiness, and approval time, on the appeal of various financial alternatives.

The study’s results have significant theoretical and practical implications, supporting SMEs in carefully evaluate financing alternatives and enables banks to better identify the main “competitors” according to the “financial need” of the firm. Moreover, the rise of alternative finance, notably P2P lending, indicates a shift towards more efficient capital access, suggesting banks must innovate their funding channels to remain competitive, especially in offering flexible solutions for restructuring and high-risk scenarios.

The study advises top management that SMEs prefer traditional loans for their reliability and accessibility, necessitating banks to enhance transparency, innovate, and adopt digital solutions to meet evolving financing needs and improve customer satisfaction.

The study introduces a novel integration of Spherical Fuzzy TOPSIS, Entropy, and ARAS methodologies to face the complexities of financial decision-making for SME financing, addressing ambiguity and multiple criteria like interest rates, flexibility, and riskiness. It emphasizes the importance of traditional loans, the rising significance of alternative financing such as P2P lending, and the necessity for banks to innovate, thereby enriching the literature on bank-firm relationships and SME funding strategies.

The purpose of this paper aims to understand whether gender disparity has an impact on the likelihood of obtaining equity crowdfunding financing in Latin America.

The paper uses a unique database of 492 projects from different equity crowdfunding platforms in Latin America over a period of 2013–2017.

Results indicate that the involvement of at least one woman in the board of firms seeking equity financing increases campaigns' success significantly. Team gender has no impact on the project's likelihood to experience overfunding.

The paper sheds light on women's access to crowdfunding financing in Latin America, not yet considered so far.

The purpose of this study is to showcase that the valuation of startups is still considered to be more “art than science”. Moreover, such non-rigorous approaches often lead to valuations, which turn out to be too high, which in turn has become a well-known phenomenon to a broader audience due to shining examples such as We Work. This is reason enough to revisit the important topic of where we stand today with startup valuation procedures and methodologies.

Literature synthesis and exploratory analysis.

While some studies describe sound results about how to assess startups, what the authors found was that many questions remain open or have not been covered at all. This is the reason why the authors needed to apply a substantial amount of reasoning in the analysis of studies, which do not exactly deal with startup companies. The authors provided some interesting impulses for future research.

Based on an original overview of the current state of research about the valuation of startup companies, this paper makes the following principal contribution to both the literature and practice: on the one hand, the authors assess four impact factors on startup values critically; on the other, the authors provide an outlook on promising future research avenues.