Sustaining trust to cross the Valley of Death: A retrospective study of business angels’ investment and reinvestment decisions

Vincent Lefebvre, Gilles Certhoux and Miruna Radu-Lefebvre

Technovation, 2022, vol. 109, issue C

Abstract: This paper explores and explains how, why and with what consequences business angels' trust in the entrepreneur affects their decisions to invest, reinvest or withdraw funding in the Valley of Death (VoD). Drawing on the VoD literature and on business angel research, we retrospectively study two contrastive cases of success and failure of French start-ups operating in the IT sector over a period of two and nine years, respectively, by taking the dyadic relationship between business angels and entrepreneurs as unit of analysis. We document the business angels' trust evolution over time and we show how trust shifts facilitate or damage the entrepreneurs' journey through the VoD. We offer a process-model of sustaining business angels’ trust in entrepreneur-business angel relationships to cross the VoD, thus addressing recent calls for more in-depth examinations of social aspects in investment and post-investment business angel research.

Keywords: Valley of death; Financial resources; Business angel; Trust; Investment; Reinvestment; Exit (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:techno:v:109:y:2022:i:c:s0166497218306199

DOI: 10.1016/j.technovation.2020.102159

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