Do Disruptive Visions Pay Off? The Impact of Disruptive Entrepreneurial Visions on Venture Funding

Abstract

Entrepreneurs often articulate a vision for their venture that purports to fundamentally change, disturb, or re-order the ways in which organizations, markets, and ecosystems operate. We call these visions disruptivevisions. Neglected in both the disruption and the impression management literature, disruptive visions are widespread in business practice. We integrate real options and impression management theories to hypothesize that articulating a disruptive vision increases the likelihood of the venture receiving funding but reduces the amount of funding obtained. A novel dataset of Israeli start-ups shows that a standard deviation increase in disruptive vision communication increases the odds of receiving a first round of funding by 22 per cent, but reduces amounts of funds received by 24 per cent. A randomized online experiment corroborates these findings and further demonstrates that the expectation of extraordinary returns is the key mechanism driving investors’ sensemaking.