Unraveling Entrepreneurial Team Formation: A Qualitative Study Among Funded Ventures

Abstract

Arguably, entrepreneurial team formation constitutes an arduous but fundamental task toward venture establishment. Given the relatively scant attention that has been paid to this research topic, this study focuses on founders’ behaviors in their attempt to narrow the gap between their own skills and the ones required for the materialization of their vision. Semistructured interviews with 14 key members of externally funded entrepreneurial teams in Greece suggested that entrepreneurs themselves account for the lack of legitimacy, knowledge, and financial resources through leveraging their social networks, available information resources, and certain cooperation agreements as well as selecting candidates whose profile is aligned with entrepreneurial challenges and goals. Moreover, they revealed that as these challenges are mitigated, they give rise to a wider spectrum of choices with regard to the team formation process; this evolutionary path seems to be facilitated by certain events, which act as triggers of change. These associations are incorporated in a framework which depicts founders’ behaviors and their temporal variations in the context of entrepreneurial team formation.