Entrepreneur’s Experience as Business angels’ and Venture Capitalists’ Decision criteria

Department of Information Management, Faculty of Business Management, University of Economics in Bratislava, 852 35, Dolnozemská cesta 1, Slovakia

^* Corresponding author: robert.hanak@euba.sk

Abstract

There are many business angels’ and venture capitalists’ decision criteria they apply when they are assessing business proposals of entrepreneurs asking for investment. Entrepreneur’s experience and experience of his/her team are considered as the most important of all criteria related to the entrepreneur. Using theoretical literature analysis we investigated experience as decision criteria used by business angels and venture capitalists and some limitation of their usage. We found that there are many types of experience available and identified several limitations for applying them in the decision process. In the empirical literature, there are discussed various types of experience such as professional experience, industry experience, managerial experience, leadership experience, domain-specific experience, entrepreneurial experience, start-up experience, international experience, work experience, track record and functional experience (production, marketing, financial etc.).