What Does Your Audience Expect from You? How Entrepreneurs Acquire Resources through Storytelling

This paper explores how entrepreneurs successfully shape their story in terms of content and structure when pitching for resources. Analyzing the pitching stories of 28 social entrepreneurs, our study contributes to previous research on entrepreneurial storytelling by showing two important aspects: The degree of narrativity of the pitching stories and the intertextual reproduction of the audience’s main discourses. Narrativity, produced by incorporating different actors (hero, opponent, sender, object, helper, receiver) into the story and setting those actors into relationship through different forms of modality, helped the startup to tell a convincing story. Furthermore, our analysis of the audience’s and startups’ main discourses showed how discourse alignment plays a central role to acquiring resources. Surprisingly, social entrepreneurs who made more use of the discourses their audience favored, namely, “market” and “entrepreneurship”, and less use of the social welfare discourse, tended to be more su...