Judge Business School, United Kingdom

Values Homophily in Action: Co-founder authentication processes during team formation

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ABSTRACT

Impact-focused entrepreneurs engage in team formation processes where they evaluate the skills and professional experience of co-founders alongside values-based commitments to social and environmental impact. However, increasing resource flows have attracted a wider pool of founders who, while performing interest in impact creation, vary significantly in their personal values. This is a product of institutional complexity that can lead to foundational misalignment between founders and the demise of early-stage ventures. We thus seek to understand this evaluative process by asking, how do entrepreneurs ensure values alignment within co-founding teams? Through an 18-month ethnographic study of a climate technology accelerator, we explore values authentication processes during early-stage venture team formation. Our findings reveal a community-based process where founders’ values are authenticated through social scrutiny across three arenas. These findings and our emergent model contribute to existing research on early-stage entrepreneurial team formation by specifying how values homophily occurs amid institutional complexity. 

BIOGRAPHY

Ariel (Ari) de Fauconberg is a PhD Candidate and Gates-Cambridge Scholar at the University of Cambridge's Judge Business School. As a member of the Organisational Theory & Information Systems (OTIS) subject group, her work explores organizational challenges in innovating towards sustainability, particularly in the context of climate change. Ari's research focuses on using ethnographic and qualitative methods to understand societally transformative technologies in the context of climate change, with her doctoral dissertation investigating barriers to net-zero aligned energy innovations as experienced by established fossil fuel incumbents, emerging climate technology ventures, and investors. Ari is a current member of the University of Cambridge’s Energy Policy Research Group (EPRG) and a former member of the Strategic Partnership Office’s ThinkLab collaboration with Cambridge Zero. Prior to her PhD, Ari worked as a Research Fellow at Babson College conducting studies on clean energy entrepreneurship and female-led, high growth, high-potential firms.