The prevailing myth of the successful entrepreneur is often draped in bravado. From Steve Jobs to Elon Musk, the prototype of startup founders is typically a bold, hyper-confident, and self-assured individual. In the high-stakes context of a funding pitch, an entrepreneur’s expressed humility—defined as a willingness to view oneself accurately, appreciate others’ contributions, and remain open to learning—might therefore seem like a liability.
In a recently published article in the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, we challenge this “arrogance-as-excellence” view by investigating how entrepreneur-expressed humility influences investors’ perceptions and decisions during funding pitches. Our findings reveal a nuanced reality: while humility does involve certain perceptual trade-offs, it serves as a powerful catalyst for securing early-stage funding.
We began by developing a conceptual model suggesting that expressed humility acts as a double edged-sword during pitches. On one hand, humility can increase an investor’s willingness to fund by enhancing perceptions of interpersonal warmth and trust, as well as the entrepreneur’s team-building capacity. On the other hand, based on implicit leadership theories, we argue that humility can simultaneously trigger negative perceptions about the entrepreneur’s ability to make rapid and risky decisions. Finally, because perceived similarity fosters interpersonal attraction and trust, we propose that an investor’s own level of humility amplifies the positive effects of the entrepreneur’s expressed humility.
To empirically test this model, we conducted two complementary studies. First, we performed a videometric analysis of 140 entrepreneurs pitching on the French version of the Shark Tank television show. Across four seasons (2020-2024), we used trained coders to assess entrepreneurs’ expressed humility and related traits from pitch videos and examined how these traits predicted actual investment offers.
Second, we conducted a controlled experiment with 66 professional French venture capital investors. Using a within-subjects design, these investors evaluated two aspiring entrepreneurs who presented comparable investment opportunities but displayed different levels of expressed humility (high vs. low). Each entrepreneur was presented through excerpts from a simulated pitch Q&A session, allowing participating investors to assess interpersonal effect and trust, team-building qualities, and ability to make rapid and risky decisions.
Our findings indicate that entrepreneurs who express more humility are significantly more likely to obtain early-stage funding. In the first study, a one-unit increase in expressed humility was associated with a nearly 39-percentage-point increase in the probability of receiving a funding offer, even after controlling for other entrepreneur characteristics such as sociodemographic factors, passion, preparedness, and charisma.
The experimental results from our second study explain why. Higher levels of expressed humility substantially increased investors’ perceptions of interpersonal affect and trust (a 1.28-point increase on a five-point scale) and team-building qualities (a 1.71-point increase). At the same time, humility reduced perceptions of the entrepreneur’s capacity to make rapid and risky decisions (a 1.11-point decrease). Furthermore, we found a “similarity” effect: the positive relational effects of humility were strongest when the investors themselves scored high on humility.
Our research sends a clear but nuanced message to both sides of the funding table. For entrepreneurs, we demonstrate that early-stage investors do not expect them to have all the answers or to claim certainty at all times. On the contrary, acknowledging limits and valuing others’ input can enhance entrepreneurs’ appeal. For investors, our findings highlight a fundamental tension in pitch evaluations: the challenge of identifying entrepreneurs who are both good protégés and decisive leaders. Making this ambivalence explicit—and showing that reactions to humble entrepreneurs depend in part on their own level of humility—may help investors become more aware of the implicit trade-offs shaping their funding decisions.
Laurent Vilanova is a Professor of Finance at Université Lumière Lyon 2 (Coactis) and Ivana Vitanova an Associate Professor of Finance at Emlyon Business School. Their work investigates how the cognition and personality of managers, entrepreneurs, and investors affect corporate decisions and performance.
