The effect of entrepreneurial passion on funding at crowdfunding platforms

Abstract: Passion is seen as one of the most influential drivers of entrepreneurs. It was firstly described in order to explain entrepreneurial behaviour which was different from non-entrepreneurs due to the unconvential risk taking, motivational energy, courage, unflagging pursuit of challenging goals, persistence in the face of goals, uncommonly intensity of focus and unwavering belief in a dream of the entrepreneur. Passion is experienced when the entrepreneur performs activities that are associated with his/her entrepreneurial role. One of the vital entrepreneurial tasks that is required for an entrepreneur to perform is to acquire the needed funding. Funding enables an entrepreneur to pursue opportunities and facilitates the firm’s ability to survive, grow and generate a profit. Scholars have researched a vast amount of factors that would increase the possibility of getting funded. Passion is one of these and has been found to enhance getting funded in the traditional setting. Yet, little is known about its effect in a crowdfunding context. Therefore, this study takes a closer look at the relationship between passion and funding at crowdfunding sites. It is investigated how an entrepreneur’s passion affects the level of funding received by analysing the texts in videopitches at crowdfunding sites. This study draws upon a vast collection of data collected from the well-known crowdfunding site FundedByMe. Coding was used in order to identify the occurrence of passion in the videopitches. To empirically investigate the research question, a content analysis was carried out by the software NVivo, which enabled the researcher to test the relationship between the use of passion expressed in words and funding. This was followed by multiple statistical tests (nonparametric and logistic). The results could not support the hypotheses that the sole use of passion increases the amount of funding received, neither could it be supported that an increase of expressed passion by the entrepreneur positively influences the chances of getting successfully funded. Future research should examine all the different expressions of passion (e.g. body language, facial expression, tone of voice), instead of only looking at passionate words, in order to find support for the relationship between passion and funding.