A comparative perspective between investors and businesses regarding success factors of e-ventures at an early-stage

Abstract

Start-ups in the software-intensive field of e-business are key for modern economies. However, those so-called e-ventures tend to face certain problems in terms of financing: Many promising e-ventures seem to fail due to missing seed capital or too few investors. The reasons for this might partially be explained by goal conflicts, different expectations-especially concerning growth of enterprise value and opportunities-, differences in valuation of risks, planning, time horizon and other trade-offs between potential investors and the company's founders. For this reason we examined academic literature to collect data as a basis for two analogously conducted Delphi studies: one for investors and one for e-ventures. Out of 48 most widely researched success factors concerning investors (of technology start-ups) and 24 concerning e-ventures we could derive implications to eight different subtopics for the above-mentioned trade-offs. Our article concludes by naming its major limitations as well as future research directions for the purpose of advancing research in this field. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.