Falling Apart or Coming Together? How High-Risk Start-ups Manage Resiliency Through Communication and Change

• In Event: Startups, Innovation, Technology, and the Entrepreneurship Economy

Abstract

Abstract
In start-ups, members contribute knowledge, time, and talent to build an innovation that requires extensive personal and team investment to achieve. From their expert perspectives, miscommunications may occur, such as between management directives and engineering implementation. Visions diverge. Conflicts arise. People leave or are fired. Survival of the start-up may depend on communication to rebuild resiliency within the start-up and project it outward to stakeholders. How do founders communicate to stakeholders, and particularly reassure investors and potential investors, that the company is on a trajectory of success despite changes in personnel? How do members of a small start-up team understand the meaning of members’ exits before, during, and after their departure? How does the start-up reaffirm its establishment as an entity with a strategic plan under strained resources, especially in the context of a competitive and turbulent market?

The case of a Silicon Valley start-up is examined to understand organizational acculturation, specifically exits, with emerging clarity provided by sensemaking of role embeddedness in the emerging organizational culture (Holingshead). A longitudinal 12-month ethnography was conducted that included onsite observations, interviews with leaders and personnel including contractors, attorneys, consultants, interns, and board members, and Slack and Skype calls with overseas staff and clients. Through the use of the constant comparative method (Glaser & Strauss), three cases of exit emerged that involved dialectic tensions leading to organizational leadership change (Fairhurst). Patterns of thesis-antithesis-synthesis mechanisms emerge in the data and reveal dynamics that propel the start-up forward. Methodologically, the intricacies of collecting and analyzing sensitive data alongside entrepreneurial leaders, as well as the ethics of organizational ethnography in contexts of high risk, will be explored.
 

Author

• Kristen Guth, U of Kentucky