Launching startups with legitimacy and knowledge

Starting a new venture is an important social and economic phenomenon with around 12 million people involved in starting a new venture. They invested around 7 billion hours a year, almost 3% of total US wage and salary work, and around 50 billion dollars a year of informal funding, which exceeds funding provided by venture capitalists by several times. Most of the start-ups do not end up in a new firm and entrepreneurs and their families are left with carrying the burden of the financial loss. In this dissertation I explore the reasons behind why some businesses become established while others never reach completion. However, I go about this task indirectly, through better understanding of the factors that contribute to successful founding rather than actual founding rates.