Following the Crowd—Does Crowdfunding Affect Venture Capitalists’ Selection of Entrepreneurial Ventures?

Given the increasing popularity of crowdfunding as a new means to finance entrepreneurial ventures, we assess whether and how crowdfunding campaign-specific signals that affect campaign success influence venture capitalists’ selection decisions in ventures’ follow-up funding process. Our study relies on cross-referencing a proprietary data set of 56,000 crowdfunding campaigns that ran on Kickstarter between 2009 and 2016 with 100,000 investments...