Cultural entrepreneurship theory posits that entrepreneurial narratives help new ventures to mobilize resources when they are culturally resonant—that is, when they align with collectively shared values, beliefs, and aspirations. However, by primarily focusing on narratives’ cultural resonance, existing research on the effectiveness of entrepreneurial narratives tends to study them as independent from the entrepreneurs who craft them. Aiming to address this oversight, we explore how founders’ personal reputations shape the relationship between the narratives and funding likelihood for their newly founded ventures. Our study, which analyses the narratives of 9,714 entrepreneurial ventures at incorporation, particularly focuses on the degree to which ventures claim to be driven by prosocial values and aspirations (prosocial framing). Our Cox proportional hazard models suggest that prosocial framing most strongly enhances the funding likelihood for ventures whose founders have previously developed a reputation for social entrepreneurship. In contrast, we find that prosocial framing lowers the funding likelihood for ventures whose founders have a strong reputation for profit-oriented entrepreneurship. Our findings highlight the importance of alignment between founders’ pre-existing reputations and the identities they claim for their newly founded ventures, thereby outlining an important contingency for the effectiveness of entrepreneurial storytelling and framing efforts.
