Scoring with Differentiation: How Founders, Competitors, and Audiences Shape the Legitimation of New Ventures

New ventures often depend on external investment to survive and grow, but evaluating these ventures is inherently uncertain for investors. To attract funding, ventures must therefore establish legitimacy while simultaneously positioning themselves in relation to competing opportunities. The three essays collected in this dissertation examine how this tension shapes funding outcomes and under what conditions new ventures’ nonconforming positioning is rewarded or penalized.
The first essay examines how founder experience can act as a legitimacy buffer, enabling ventures to pursue more distinctive narrative positioning without undermining funding success. The second essay explores how blockbusters, such as the release of ChatGPT-3.5, reshape the evaluation of categorically atypical ventures by generating spillovers. The third essay investigates how angel investors’ openness to categorical atypicality evolves through their own investment experiences and co-investment networks.
Together, these studies show that new ventures’ funding success is not determined by positioning alone, but by how that positioning is interpreted within the evaluative context shaped by founders, competitors, and audiences. In doing so, this dissertation offers new insights into how ventures can “score with differentiation” when securing investor support.