Does Reputation Facilitate Startups' Access to Venture Capital Funding?

Corporate reputation has been widely considered an important intangible asset that firms can use for improving their levels of performance. Previous works mainly focused their attention on large established firms and on the relationship between reputation and consumers’ behavior. Based on a sample of 200 UK startups operating in the micro and nanotechnology sector since 1995, we analyze the importance of different types of reputation for startups in their search for venture capital (VC) funding. Our results show that (a) not only attribute-specific reputational signals, based on startup characteristics (i.e., human capital and technological capabilities), are an important driver of VC investment decisions, but also general reputation measured by media coverage (both in terms of visibility and favorableness); (b) general media favorableness has a greater impact than general media visibility on VC funding and (c) general media reputation weakly moderates the relationship between attribute-specific reputational signals and the likelihood of receiving VC funding.