The room where it happened: Conversation analysis of entrepreneur meetups

Entrepreneurs interact with their environment and other people to consider new possibilities that develop into opportunities to be exploited. Yet the interactions that contribute to the emergence of an opportunity have been underexplored due to their complex, dynamic, and idiosyncratic nature. The empirical limitations mask potential aspects of the entrepreneurial process that might explain why some are able to successfully build new ventures and others are not. I use conversation analysis of an entrepreneur meetup to identify specific patterns of utterances that convey meaning during the negotiation of a shared understanding of potential opportunities. I pinpoint that a key level of analysis is the “episode of value explanation” (EVE), defined as units of talk in which an account is shared of what is valued and by whom and/or how to produce and deliver that value in a unique, profitable way. There are at least three types of EVE: (a) legitimacy associations, defined as accounts of or references to specific terminology, concepts, or reasoning that imply an appropriate explanation; (b) experiential actualities, defined as accounts of personal experience or of a trusted testimony that lend credibility to the information shared because of its source; and (c) engagement hypotheticals, defined as proposed future scenarios or scripts of how interactions or outcomes could play out. I conclude with implications of this approach and findings for empirical research and theory development within entrepreneurship.