How Entrepreneurs Identify and Acquire Venture Capital Financing in Moroccan and French New Ventures?

Abstract

This paper underlines the new venture’s ability to access to Venture Capital (i.e., VC) financing for understanding entrepreneurs who operate in a higher-technology industry; the principal background premise is that the three crucial capital affecting the entrepreneur when he is creating a new venture are his prior entrepreneurial and functional diversity experience (cultural capital), his reputation accumulated (strategic capital) and his stronger ties to the Venture Capitalists (social capital). Previous works on social capital have failed to study the interrelationships between new venture’s other specific capitals or have proposed models with direct relationships with external (financial) resources acquisition. The core objective of this paper is to specify, therefore, a conceptual proposal, based on entrepreneurial networks model, evidencing that signaling intangible resources as social capital and cultural entrepreneurial capital are the critical levers for the new venture’s ability in accessing VC financing in the Moroccan and French contexts. A variance-based structural equation modeling (Partial Least Squares) has been applied to a sample made up of 100 investment propositions. Moreover, mediation hypotheses posit how the social capital and strategic capital play a critical mediating role in the cultural capital – economic capital (VC funding) relationship. Our findings provide a useful example of how these critical capitals of entrepreneurs affect directly and indirectly the venture finance decisions. These findings have notable theoretical and practical implications, and provide directions for future research.

Keywords: Venture Capitalists decision; Cultural/human capital; Social capital; Strategic capital.