Organization and Strategy Seminar（2020-06）

Topic: Stepping-Stone Strategies to Leverage Institutional Intermediaries: Entrepreneurial Strategies to Contact Investors on a Fundraising Platform

Speaker: You (Willow) Wu,Stanford University

Time: Friday, 4 September, 10:00-11:30 am

Location: Room 217, Guanghua Building 2

Abstract:

How do entrepreneurs build initial connections with investors on platforms? Previous research examines entrepreneurs’ fundraising strategies and investors’ deal seeking behaviors offline, but few studies analyze the entrepreneur-investor interactions in initial tie formation online. We tackle this question by analyzing 780,904 business plan submissions from entrepreneurs and 49,145 replies from investors on a platform. We conceptualize platforms as online institutional intermediaries and propose stepping-stone strategies to leverage institutional intermediaries. The process of building stepping-stones starts with contacting high-ranking investors, gets accelerated by receiving constructive replies, and is accomplished through revising business plans. Our empirical analyses support the stepping-stone mechanism. First, high-ranking investors are more likely to provide constructive replies. Second, receiving constructive replies increases the likelihood of revising business plans and receiving positive replies in subsequent submissions. Finally, contacting high-ranking investors early in the sequence increases the total number of positive replies. Overall, this paper contributes to prior literature on entrepreneurial finance, institutional intermediaries, and social networks by analyzing the sequential interactions between entrepreneurs and investors in the initial tie formation process on platforms.

Introduction:

You (Willow) Wu is a Ph.D. candidate at the Stanford Technology Ventures Program in the Department of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University, where she received the Stanford Graduate Fellowship and the King Center Graduate Student Fellowship on Global Development. Willow holds a bachelor’s degree in environmental sciences and a bachelor’s degree in economics from Peking University in China, where she received National Scholarship and China Economic Research Scholarship.

Willow’s research examines entrepreneurial strategy from an organizational theory perspective. In particular, her dissertation focuses on how entrepreneurs resolve institutional contradictions in the setting of marketization, digitization, and tokenization. Her dissertation papers won the Academy of Management Best Paper Award and has beennominated for the Strategic Management Society PhD Paper Prize.More broadly, she studies technology entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial strategies in dynamic environments. She uses econometric models and natural language processing models to quantitatively analyze entrepreneurial strategy and performance. She has three papers revised and resubmitted to the Strategic Management Journal, the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, and Regional Studies.

Your participation is warmly welcomed!