Founder Evaluation from VCs’ Perspective: Emphasizing Grit and Moderate Optimism and Gauging Them Scientifically

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6463-052-7_132How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Venture capital; founders; grit; passion; optimism; venture success

Abstract

The element “people” has become increasingly essential among the criteria VCs evaluate before making an investment decision. Nevertheless, aside from the readily available information such as educational background and prior entrepreneurial or professional experience, some characteristics of founders are challenging to observe in the short term but can be equally or even more critical to the success of ventures. Through a review of the relevant literature, this paper highlights grit and moderate optimism as crucial qualities for VCs to consider when evaluating founders and examines evidence that these traits make founders more likely to succeed in their ventures. Additionally, it seeks to advise novice or less experienced VCs to employ scientifically validated approaches to gain insight into the attributes of founders that are not readily observable before making a funding decision. Instruments such as the Short Grit (Grit-S) Scale constructed by Duckworth and Quinn and the Revised Life Orientation Test (LOT-R) developed by Scheier et al. to gauge founders’ level of grittiness and optimism are suggested to be incorporated into the founder evaluation process.

Copyright

© 2022 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

Download article (PDF)

TY  - CONF
AU  - Shimeng Wang
PY  - 2022
DA  - 2022/12/27
TI  - Founder Evaluation from VCs’ Perspective: Emphasizing Grit and Moderate Optimism and Gauging Them Scientifically
BT  - Proceedings of the 2022 International Conference on Economics, Smart Finance and Contemporary Trade (ESFCT 2022)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 1179
EP  - 1186
SN  - 2352-5428
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6463-052-7_132
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6463-052-7_132
ID  - Wang2022
ER  -