Laura Huang (@LauraHuangLA) is a professor at Harvard Business School and the author of Edge: Turning Adversity into Advantage. Laura teaches that success is about gaining an edge: that elusive quality that gives you an upper hand and attracts attention and support. For some, this comes naturally. For everyone else, Huang provides a framework for creating it. In startups, that edge becomes critical in the fundraising process. For all the talk about due diligence, digging into the financials, and “de-risking” investments, investors often make investment decisions based on “gut feel” and certain biases. For founders, the question is how can you gain an edge by knowing these biases and using them to your advantage.
During this #DreamitLive discussion, Huang draws from her award-winning research on entrepreneurial intuition, persuasion, and implicit decision-making to impart lessons that founders can use.
Topics covered in this episode (in order in which they appear in the episode):
Differences between implicit versus explicit bias in fundraising
Why investors make “gut decisions” when investing in startups
Why is it that both male AND female investors tend to discriminate against female founders?
Investors claim to care about founders’ “passion”? What does that even mean?
How to position your professional failures to your advantage and guide to Specific biases versus universal biases
How to read the room to gauge the biases in the room?
Does it help to have founder diversity on the team when pitching?
How do introverts present their startup to VCs?
Finding congruence with your potential investors
Traction and seed funding seems like a chicken or egg problem. How should founders think about this?
Laura Huang is an associate professor of business administration in the Organizational Behavior Unit. Prior to joining HBS, she was an assistant professor of management at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Professor Huang’s research examines early-stage entrepreneurship, and the role of interpersonal relationships and implicit factors in the investment decisions of financiers such as angel investors and VCs. Her work studies the subtle signals and cues that often impact the behavioral perceptions of investors, which can lead to implicit bias in the investing process. Her research has been published in several academic journals including the Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and has also been featured in the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Forbes, and Nature. She has won a number of awards for her research and was named one of the 40 Best Business School Professors Under the Age of 40 by Poets & Quants. Learn more: https://laurahuang.net/
