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Reference

Kanze, D. (2025). Seeing Both Sides: How Shared Experience Can Improve Entrepreneur Evaluations of Investors Through Perceived Empathy. Organization Science. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.18429

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Welcome to “Revise and Resubmit” 🎙️✨—the show where dense journal articles loosen their ties, step out of the ivory tower, and sit down for a real conversation.

Today, we’re diving into a paper with a title that does exactly what good research should do: it makes you stop, think, and lean in a little closer. 🧐
It’s called:
“Seeing Both Sides: How Shared Experience Can Improve Entrepreneur Evaluations of Investors Through Perceived Empathy”
by Dana Kanze, published in Organization Science—yes, that Organization Science, a prestigious FT50 journal, brought to you by INFORMS. 🌍📊

Most of the venture funding story you hear sounds like this:
Investor judges entrepreneur.
Investor grills entrepreneur.
Investor chooses entrepreneur.
Full stop. 💼🔥

But this paper flips the camera. 🎥
It asks: What if the entrepreneur is also evaluating the investor?
Not just the term sheet, not just the valuation, but the human across the table.

In two powerful mixed-methods studies—one archival, one experimental—Kanze tracks hundreds of entrepreneurs and hundreds of investors and finds something simple, but profound:
When investors have shared entrepreneurial experience, founders are more likely to see them as empathetic.
And when founders feel that empathy—
not as a buzzword,
not as a branding line,
but as “this person actually gets how I think and how I feel”—
they rate those investors more favorably. 💡🤝

Under the hood, the paper teases apart two engines of empathy:
🧠 Cognitive perspective taking – understanding how the entrepreneur thinks.
💓 Affective perspective taking – understanding how the entrepreneur feels.

Kanze shows how these two forms of perspective taking help explain why shared entrepreneurial experience improves how founders evaluate investors. Add to that an important gender lens: women are less likely to move from entrepreneurship into investing, which means they may have fewer chances to benefit from these “relational upsides” that shared experience brings. 🚻⚖️

So tonight, as you listen, think about every pitch meeting you have ever seen or been part of.
Think about the biographies quietly shaping the conversation.
Think about how different the funding landscape might look if more investors had stood where founders stand,
felt what founders feel,
and carried those scars into the boardroom.

Because if empathy can be measured, modeled, and mediated…
💭 what might happen to the future of venture funding when founders start saying,
not just “Is this investor good for my cap table?”
but “Is this investor good for my nervous system?”

A huge thank you 🙏 to Dana Kanze, and to the publisher INFORMS, for this remarkable article in the prestigious FT50 journal Organization Science.

If you enjoy unpacking top-tier research like this, don’t forget to subscribe to “Revise and Resubmit” on Spotify, Amazon Prime Music, and Apple Podcast 🎧, and hit that subscribe button on the YouTube channel “Weekend Researcher” 📺.

So as we turn the page and dive into the details, here’s the question to keep in mind:
🤔 If empathy is the bridge, how much shared experience does it really take for an investor to stand on the same side as the entrepreneur?