The content analysis of venture capitalists’ and business angels’ questions
Abstract
An essential element of the investor pitch as a communication event is the question-and-answer
session after the presentation. The answers to the investors’ questions can have a significant
impact on their willingness to finance a project. While the rhetorical structure of the pitch has
been the subject of several studies, the content analysis of investor questions has received little
attention in the literature. This research aims to shed light on the questions that venture
capitalists are typically interested in after having listened to the pitch. The corpus of the study
consists of 50 English-language investor pitches in which a total of 268 questions were asked.
The questions have been categorised in database management software according to the main
and sub-topics and the concepts and terms associated with them. The results of the investigation
show that investors most frequently ask about the competitive environment, company
scalability, pricing, financial performance, distribution strategy and target market. The results
of this research are of direct use in teaching business English, as students may often find
themselves in a situation where they need to convince investors to finance a project.
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