Supervisors: Franziska Günzel-Jensen & Oana Vuculescu
Discussants: Irene Pollach & Carsten Bergenholtz

Abstract
There are multiple temporal dilemmas within entrepreneurship, such as balancing short-term vs. long-term, present vs. future, and daily grind vs. future work, which is evident in the recent temporal shift in the entrepreneurship research. Increasing number of articles have called for further research into the role of time in the entrepreneurial journey and how entrepreneurs understand and leverage time to their advantage. This PhD research will respond to these calls by looking into the role of time in investor pitches through the time-as-process temporal lens.

In the entrepreneurial journey, founders must leverage the past and present of the venture to enact their desired futures, which requires them to persuade stakeholders to support them in the process. Here is where the investor pitches enter the picture. When pitching for funding, entrepreneurs are selling their future vision to the investors, who hold the keys to turn it into reality.

Besides explaining the past and present trajectory of the business, the entrepreneurs also employ various rhetoric devices and storytelling techniques in the pitch narratives to construct the future story. Yet, the pitches sometimes fail to convince the audience about the future vision(s) that the entrepreneur has and may come across unrealistic. Currently it is unclear how entrepreneurs make sense of and leverage time in their pitch narratives to convince investors of their future visions.

In this context, this PhD research takes a deeper look at the pitches that entrepreneurs of early-stage ventures use to seek funding to answers the research question how do entrepreneurs use temporal narratives to pitch their future story to investors? The aim is to identify how entrepreneurs narrate the venture’s past, present and future when using pitches as a vehicle for future making.

Everyone is welcome!