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The purpose of this paper is to explore the antecedents of media attention in the context of early-stage startups. While many studies have examined the implications of media attention on firm outcomes, few have investigated the antecedents especially in the context of early-stage startups who significantly lack organizational legitimacy. This study attempts to answer an important and yet unanswered question: What type of startups are more likely to be covered by the media?

Using Poisson regression, the authors analyze all media articles written about 315 early-stage ventures in the USA.

The authors found that startups with a prestigious investor or a patent have more media attention and startups with a female founder or prior entrepreneurial experience have less. The results suggest that entrepreneurial signals do play a role in media attention, but that the signal–signaler relationship may be more complicated than that in the investment literature.

Entrepreneurs may benefit from signaling less noisy and unambiguous signals that the media pays more attention to, such as getting an endorsement from reputable third parties early on, which might activate noisy signals.

The contribution of this paper is to extend the current literature on media attention and entrepreneurship by shedding light on attributes of startups that may help or hurt the volume of media attention in an uncertain and noisy environment.

This study aims to show what type of directors founders (or entrepreneurs) first appoint to the board and how these appointments differ across experienced and novice entrepreneurs.

The sample consists of the human capital of board members in 443 new ventures in the computer software and information technology industries between 2000 and 2014. The hypotheses were tested using tobit regression.

The findings in this study reveal that compared to novice entrepreneurs, experienced entrepreneurs tend to appoint early boards with greater human capital (entrepreneurial, technical/scientific and industry-specific) and with greater functional diversity. In contrast, novice entrepreneurs tend to appoint early boards with greater finance and director experience.

The value of this research lies in filling the gap in the current literature by comparing the board appointment/selection behavior of novice and experienced entrepreneurs, which is relatively underexplored.