The Faculty of Business invites members of the campus community--students, faculty and staff--to attend a virtual research presentation by Kanwal Bokari for a tenure-track position at the assistant professor level with a focus on entrepreneurship.

Candidate Bio:

Kanwal Bokhari is a doctoral candidate in the business administration program at the Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary. She studies how entrepreneurs acquire resources from early-stage investors, such as business angels and venture capitalists, who rely upon signals (i.e., readily available crude pieces of information) to make investment decisions. Deploying the Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) method, she explores questions to illuminate the complexity of the resource acquisition process and challenges entrepreneurs and investors face amidst entrepreneurial uncertainty and information asymmetry.

She also teaches courses in entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial finance at the graduate and undergraduate levels at the Haskayne School of Business and serves as the academic lead for the Financial Feminism Investing Lab, an investment education program with a gender-informed lens. Prior to pursuing doctoral studies, she worked in investment banking, private equity, and non-profit management.   

Presentation Title:  “Guided by the Constellations: A Configurational Approach to Evaluating New Ventures"

Abstract:

How do early-stage investors, such as business angels and venture capitalists, select unproven new ventures? Whereas existing studies can explain the role of isolated factors, such as a venture's potential or entrepreneur's coachability or third-party endorsements, researchers have not yet fully elaborated on how early-stage investors capture and reconcile multiple factors to arrive at their decisions. Therefore, to illuminate the complexity of decision-making, she employs a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to examine a dataset of 50 high-tech startups. Early-stage investors evaluated these startups in 2019–2020 as a part of a North American startup mentorship program. She examines how early-stage investors focused on four factors to select startups: (a) the strength of the value proposition, (b) the scalability potential of the venture, (c) an entrepreneur's perceived coachability or capacity to take feedback, and (d) third-party endorsements and referrals. Preliminary analysis reveals that no factor alone is a necessity for winning over early-stage investors; rather, the findings support and highlight that there are multiple paths to success. Early-stage investors combine value proposition and coachability with third-party endorsements to evaluate unproven new ventures. By examining how decision-makers combine various factors, the proposed study is likely to produce novel insights for entrepreneurs who seek capital from early-stage investors who strive to make effective decisions in an uncertain context.

The presentation will take place on March 4 from 1:00–2:00pm (Atlantic Time) via the following Zoom link:  

https://upei.zoom.us/j/64259527041?pwd=c0owLzRaNDBwUzFoL0RyQ0Z1bmRHdz09

Meeting ID: 642 5952 7041

Passcode: 809684

For further information, please contact Shelly Kavanagh at businessfac@upei.ca.