På teknikens yttersta framkant; Hur olika typer av legitimitet påverkar riskkapitalisters bedömningar av nystartade teknikbolag

Sammanfattning: With 3 of the 5 billion-dollar unicorn startups in Europe being Swedish, Stockholm has been praised as the continent's Startup Capital. The prolific technology hub is surpassed only by Silicon Valley. With large capital flows pouring into venture capital funds the challenge is well-defined: to find the Spotify, Skype or Klarna of tomorrow. Despite the startup community's confidence most companies fail to deliver on their promises. Venture capital has been described as an outlier business because a single funding decision has the potential to immensely impact the entire fund, the startup, and society at large. New venture legitimacy is a key element in acquiring financial resources and the literature has recently begun elaborating on venture capitalists' funding of new technology ventures. However, mainly synthesizing prior, disparate research, this literature demonstrates a focus merely on legitimacy mechanisms. This study aims at contributing to the understanding of legitimacy in venture capitalists' decision making, by problematizing the assumption that the actions of new technology ventures' control the outcome independently of the audience's assessment. Through qualitative interviews with venture capitalists in Stockholm, this study examines how legitimacy judgments of new technology ventures are socially constructed in the venture capital context. By connecting the literature on new venture legitimacy mechanisms to a traditional framework of legitimacy types, this study shed light on separate behavioral dynamics affecting the audience' assessment and specifically identifies how different legitimacy mechanisms result in different legitimacy types and therefore affect how new technology ventures are judged by venture capitalists.