No Credit for Success, Penalized for Failure? An Examination of Entrepreneur Race, Gender, and Prior Fundraising Track Records in Crowdfunding

Abstract

While Black entrepreneurs have historically received less startup funding than White entrepreneurs, the nuances of this relationship have been understudied. We employ role and intersectionality theory to fill this gap by examining how race and associated stereotypes of Black entrepreneurs influence the impact of entrepreneurs’ prior fundraising track record on current fundraising efforts. Using 1,164 hand-coded crowdfunding campaigns and a follow-on experiment, we find that Black entrepreneurs receive less credit for prior success, and are penalized more for prior failure, than White entrepreneurs. Gender moderates this relationship in that Black women see even less benefit from prior success and experience a larger decline in support after failure than Black men.