Team Entrepreneurship How do Entrepreneurial Founding Teams form? An Exploration of the Role of Intuition in Entrepreneurial Founding Team Formation Master’s Thesis

Entrepreneurial Teams are at the heart of the new venture and are credited behind the success of many new companies. However, there is little consensus as to what constitutes an Entrepreneurial Team and even less research on Entrepreneurial Founding Teams. The benefits of Entrepreneurial Teams range from attracting more funding to providing a supportive and trustworthy atmosphere in which team members can engage in innovative behaviors. Understanding how teams assemble and successfully stay together is paramount as they will imprint the company with its culture, structure and processes. Given the emotional nature of Entrepreneurship and the importance of carefully selecting co-founders, this thesis strived to get an answer to the following research questions: How do Entrepreneurial Founding Teams form? And what is the role of Intuition in the Founding Team formation process? The main theoretical frameworks used in this research were provided by Kamm et al. (1993) and Cooney (2005). However, their views failed to offer an in-depth perspective of how Entrepreneurial Founding Teams form. Results indicate that the Founding Team formation process is a highly complex, lengthy, dynamic, random and sequential one. A Lead Entrepreneur will look for at least one co-founder after he/she has developed his/her idea. In addition, the Lead Entrepreneur won’t know where or how he will meet his/her co-founder. He/she will, nonetheless, intuitively know who is the one, but will most likely go through several iterations until successfully assembling the team. Therefore, the search for the first co-founder is a highly intuitive process, where both participants will mutually gauge each other’s commitment, passion, goals and aspirations for the firm, as well as similar working styles, compatibility in terms of personality and ability to communicate. The process will become more pragmatic as this Founding Dyad will expand, as, the additional members should complete the skills that the dyad lacks. However, intuitive thinking will always permeate the whole process. In this context, intuition serves as measure of trust, similarity and potential for successfully working together. The decision is made in a relatively fast pace and will provide participants with feelings of confidence and reassurance. Research offered empirical evidence supporting the view that intuition is a highly complex process occurring in the brain. People quickly internalize massive amounts of parallel information in a subconscious manner, for later on reaching a conscious decision. In this case, whether to partner or not. However, research also uncovered an important element for engaging intuition in Entrepreneurial Founding Team formation, which was not presented in the theory: the importance of the right context and timing. In fact, if people are not consciously ready to engage in new venture formation, the intuitive thinking process will be “turned off”. Research results highlight the importance of being in tune with one’s intuition and the importance of following it when looking for a potential co-founder.