Self-enclosure in digital ventures · Katie Apker
Based on 61 qualitative interviews with digital-era entrepreneurs, this paper identifies a novel founder type I call the Individualist, who organizes the venture around the founder's own idealized self rather than an external market opportunity. Where much of entrepreneurship starts from a gap in the market, these founders start from who they want to be and build the venture outward from that.
The paper develops a process model of entrepreneurial self-enclosure. Digital tools, cultural scripts of self-actualization, and post-organizational precarity together make it possible, and even encouraged, to found a venture without first verifying that anyone will pay, so that weak market signals get read as the price of freedom rather than a warning. The paper is under review at Administrative Science Quarterly.