Abstract
Hybrid entrepreneurs who retain salaried or academic roles are often viewed as insufficiently committed by investors. Yet, maintaining a hybrid employment status can also be a strategic pathway into high-growth venturing. Drawing on Role Congruity Theory, we examine how Venture Capital funds and angel investors evaluate hybrid founders and how founders adapt over time. Using 17 semi-structured interviews with investors and hybrid entrepreneurs in two European ecosystems and two longitudinal case studies of research-intensive ventures, we inductively theorize hybrid venturing as a congruity alignment trajectory and derive propositions linking investor role expectations, founder adaptation, and ecosystem support structures.
Introduction
Venture Capital (VC) investors play a critical role in determining which types of entrepreneurs gain access to funding. Their evaluations extend beyond the business model itself to encompass assessments of the founder’s identity, motivation, and perceived commitment (Hall & Hofer, 1993; Petty & Gruber, 2011). The archetypical “ideal founder” in VC discourse is imagined as full-time, risk-absorbing, and singularly devoted to venture growth. Against this backdrop, hybrid entrepreneurs (Folta et al., 2010; i.e., individuals who maintain wage employment while developing a new venture) pose an interpretive challenge for investors.
Hybrid founders often violate investors’ implicit expectations of entrepreneurial behavior. In early-stage investing, commitment and risk-taking are heuristics used to infer founder quality and venture potential (Franke et al., 2006; Mason & Harrison, 2004). Maintaining parallel employment can be interpreted as a lack of dedication or focus, potentially biasing evaluations and restricting access to capital. This tension raises the central question guiding this study: Do VC and angel investors shy away from hybrid entrepreneurs, or is the growing prevalence of hybridity reshaping evaluative norms in early-stage funding?
To address this question, the study applies Role Congruity Theory (RCT; Eagly & Karau, 2002; Triana et al., 2024) to the entrepreneurial finance domain. RCT suggests that bias arises when individuals’ behavior conflicts with role expectations, making hybrid entrepreneurs appear initially incongruent. However, as this study shows investors can conditionally accept hybrid entrepreneurs when they transition to full-time entrepreneurship after certain milestones, suggesting that hybrid venturing is not a deviation, but a different entrepreneurial path.
The article employs a multimethod qualitative design, combining semi-structured interviews with VC and angel investors, and case studies of hybrid startups. By linking investor evaluations with founder adaptation, this article contributes to the understanding of hybrid entrepreneurship as a dynamic pathway toward full-time, high-growth venturing. It extends the application of RCT to the field of entrepreneurship and reveals how perceived incongruity can be mitigated through adaptation, milestone achievement, and evolving legitimacy.
Theoretical Background: Hybrid Entrepreneurship and Investor Perceptions of Founder Roles
Hybrid entrepreneurship refers to the practice of individuals keeping “a primary wage job and a secondary job in self-employment” (Folta et al., 2010) and has emerged as a distinctive concept within entrepreneurship literature following the seminal work of Folta et al. (2010). Hybrid entrepreneurship allows individuals to explore venture creation while maintaining financial security (Schulz et al., 2017). This contrasts with traditional full-time entry into entrepreneurship and highlights a broader spectrum of motivation, shaped by individual traits, contextual pressures and macroeconomic realities (Bailey & Lumpkin, 2021; Fini et al., 2022).
The literature acknowledges that hybrid entrepreneurship is often a rational response to uncertainty and financial constraint (Demir et al., 2022; Gänser-Stickler et al., 2022). Individuals may strategically pursue multiple income streams, using their salaried employment as a buffer while exploring venture viability (Detienne & Chirico, 2013; Raffiee & Feng, 2014). However, hybrid status can complicate relationships with external capital providers, particularly VCs, who traditionally emphasize full-time commitment as a proxy for venture seriousness and “investability” (Breznitz et al., 2018; Miraza & Shauki, 2022; Petty & Gruber, 2011). The dual nature of hybrid founders diverges from this norm. Dual roles may reduce founder risk but can be perceived as signaling a lower level of commitment, raising concerns about focus, prioritization, and execution capacity (Folta et al., 2010; Schulz et al., 2017). These concerns become especially salient in high-growth or high-velocity sectors, where rapid responsiveness is viewed as essential to venture success (Petty et al., 2023; Schulz et al., 2016).
Despite the skepticism that hybrid entrepreneurs may face, empirical research highlights their potential strengths (Mbeveri, 2024; Schulz et al., 2017). Many hybrid entrepreneurs exhibit high levels of self-efficacy, persistence, and strategic decision-making, demonstrating an ability to manage complexity and balance competing priorities (Kotsopoulos et al., 2022; Marshall et al., 2018; Raffiee & Feng, 2014). Their multifaceted professional backgrounds can enhance their communication with diverse stakeholders and allow them to navigate both corporate and startup environments effectively (Minola et al., 2020; Packard & Bylund, 2017).
Hence, this work posits that there is an inherent bias to how investors perceive founders, a set of implicit and explicit expectations that shape the “founder role” and to which founders must comply. Thus, RCT (Eagly & Karau, 2002) emerges as a valuable explanatory framework for deciphering such biases. RCT has been mainly used in entrepreneurship to examine gender-based biases (Anglin et al., 2022; Eib & Siegert, 2019). RCT states that individuals are evaluated based on the alignment between their characteristics and societal expectations linked to social roles, leading to biases (Eagly & Karau, 2002). It specifically suggests that when individuals demonstrate traits incongruent with stereotypical role expectations, they are likely to encounter prejudice and discrimination (Balachandra et al., 2017; Triana et al., 2024). This happens when descriptive norms (beliefs what a group typically does; Cialdini & Trost, 1998) and injunctive norms (beliefs what members of that group ought to do; Burgess & Borgida, 1999) misalign across two roles. This leads hybrid entrepreneurs to demonstrate congruity by actively shaping how their commitment is perceived, demonstrating through their behavior, decisions, and affiliations that their venture is both serious and scalable (Lavi & Yaniv, 2023).
Research Design and Methodology: A Multimethod Qualitative Approach
Given the limited academic research on VC investors’ attitude and preferences toward hybrid entrepreneurship (Demir et al., 2022), this study adopts a qualitative research design aimed at understanding the broader landscape and generating hypotheses for further research (Robson, 2002). To enhance the richness and robustness of its findings, the study follows a multimethod approach (Anguera et al., 2018), structured around two distinct qualitative strands (a) semi-structured interview and (b) purposefully selected case studies. These strands are connected through a parallel cross-strand analysis, enabling the synthesis of insights and the formulation of interim inferences. This design allows the phenomenon to be examined from different angles: investor perceptions, real-world venture trajectories, and founder experiences, thereby strengthening both empirical validity and conceptual understanding. Rather than treating the strands as isolated or sequential, the research design enables iterative interaction, where insights emerging from one strand inform, refine, and enrich the other. This iterative logic emphasizes the dynamic interplay and feedback between parallel components. A multimethod design was used to capture investor perceptions and venture evolution, enabling triangulation across interviews and case evidence. The research design is summarized in Figure 1.
Research design.
Context of the Study
The study is primarily situated within the Greek Entrepreneurial Ecosystem and complemented by data from Germany, and one transnational case, BioLattice Industries (BLI), which originated in United States and later expanded its research and commercialization activities to Greece. Almost all the interviewed VC Funds operate and invest across Europe even though Greece and Germany are their primary countries of operations. This combined approach uncovers commonalities in investors’ perceptions of hybrid entrepreneurship beyond local idiosyncrasies. Greece represents an emerging Entrepreneurial Ecosystem characterized by increasing private investments and evolving institutional support structures. To broaden the comparative perspective, investors and entrepreneurs from Germany were included as a secondary ecosystem, providing a contrast with a mature and well-financed innovation landscape that hosts some of Europe’s most established startup and investment hubs.
Across the interviews, no significant differences were observed between investors based in Greece and those based in Germany. The concerns raised, particularly around founder commitment, transition readiness, and perceived role congruity, were remarkably consistent across both contexts. The language and semantics used by investors reflected strikingly similar evaluative logics, suggesting that these perceptions are more closely tied to the maturity stage of the entrepreneurial ventures addressed rather than geographic location.
Theoretical Foundation: RCT
The overarching theoretical perspective guiding our methodological choices is RCT (Eagly & Karau, 2002). Triana et al. (2024) distinguished three domains through which role congruity operates: target evaluations, outcomes, and adaptations. Our research design mirrors these domains. The semi-structured interviews capture target evaluations: how investors perceive, interpret, and judge hybrid entrepreneurs. The case studies examine outcomes and adaptation: how hybrid ventures evolve, adapt, and ultimately achieve legitimacy and funding despite initial bias. This integration allows us to trace the full cycle of role congruity: from evaluative bias to behavioral adaptation and eventual congruity restoration.
Strand I: Semi-Structured Interviews with Investors and Hybrid Founders
A total of 17 semi-structured interviews were conducted with VC partners, angel investors, and hybrid founders. Through RCT, this strand captures the target evaluation stage: how investors form expectations on role norms and judge founders according to a perceived alignment with the “founder” role. Using open-ended questions, the interviews encouraged participants to elaborate on their investment philosophy, perceived risk, founder evaluation criteria, and trust dynamics. Through these discussions, investors revealed the cues they use to assess hybrid founders, time allocation, parallel professional commitments, and transition intentions, which serve as indicators of perceived dedication, scalability potential, and risk.
The semi-structured interviews were conducted between October 2024 and May 2025 with a diverse group of VC partners, angel investors, and hybrid founders. Interviewees were identified through a combination of theoretical and network-based sampling, aiming to ensure broad coverage of early-stage investors. All investors in our sample were familiar with university-affiliated and hybrid startups, albeit to a varying degree, although most of them rarely invest in such ventures. Two of the participating VCs explicitly focus on university- and research-born ventures, providing more experienced perspectives. This variation allowed us to capture a range of views, from selective exposure to more specialized engagement with university entrepreneurship. Table 1 demonstrates the level of investor exposure through their usual deal flow (i.e., the volume of opportunities that an investor receives and evaluates) based on their own assessment. In the Greek context, the sample includes all active VCs operating at the pre-seed and seed stages (excluding two that did not respond). Two angel investors, who were active in these stages in the previous year, were chosen from the Hellenic Business Angel Network. To complement the research, we also included investors from Germany that were also active in the same stages. Contacts in Germany were chosen from our collaboration network to give insights into a more mature entrepreneurial ecosystem. Participants were initially informed that they will participate in a study about investors’ priorities and goals to avoid introducing bias. They were notified about confidentiality and gave informed consent before participation. Interviews were conducted in English, German, or Greek (depending on participant preference), online via Google Meet or Microsoft Teams, recorded, and later transcribed by a researcher. Interviews lasted 45 to 60 min. Data collection proceeded iteratively and continued until theoretical saturation was reached (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). Continuous coding and memo-writing allowed for a real-time assessment of the data’s “richness” and “thickness.” Already by the sixth interview discussed themes started to repeat and by the 11th interview with investors, we noted a redundancy in responses and a stabilization of the thematic codebook, suggesting that the phenomenon had been sufficiently explored (Saunders et al., 2018). This volume of interviews before reaching saturation is common in focused studies such as this one (Guest et al., 2006; Hennik & Kaiser, 2022). The remaining interviews with investors reinforced and refined the identified patterns. In parallel, interviews with hybrid entrepreneurs were introduced to provide a more nuanced understanding of the identified themes and support the analysis of case studies, following an iterative, cross-strand logic.
Interviewee Profile.
Note. VC: venture capital.
Two separate interview guides were created, one tailored to investors and one to hybrid entrepreneurs, to reflect their specific concerns of each stakeholder category. The interview guides focused on thematic areas such as investment philosophy, risk perception, founder evaluation, commitment signaling, and trust dynamics.
Both guides were revised twice during the data collection process, following a cross
The insights from Strand I directly informed the second strand of the research (case studies). Recurrent themes such as perceived commitment, role clarity, and transition readiness guided the selection of ventures that could exemplify how hybrid founders navigate and adapt to these evaluative pressures in practice. In this way, Strand I provides the foundation for understanding how role incongruity emerges at the evaluative level, setting the stage for examining how congruity may later be restored through adaptation and positive outcomes.
Strand II: Case Studies of Ventures Led by Hybrid Entrepreneurs
Building on the interview findings, the second strand examines two purposefully selected cases of ventures founded by hybrid entrepreneurs, the startups TEKMON and BLI. The cases were chosen because they reflect the core evaluative themes identified in Strand I, particularly perceived commitment, role clarity, and transition readiness. Tracing these ventures over time makes it possible to examine how initial role incongruity is managed in practice and how adaptive responses reshape founder legitimacy.
Synthesis: Cross-Strand Insights and Interim Inferences
Throughout the research process, insights from one strand informed and refined the other though an iterative logic, generating continuous feedback between evaluative perceptions and adaptive practices. This integration enabled the cross-fertilization of insights and the development of interim theoretical inferences, interpreted through the RCT lens (Table 2).
Interim Theoretical Inferences from Multimethod Qualitative Research.
By embedding these cross-strand linkages, the design demonstrates how each empirical phase builds upon the previous one in a cumulative process. The interviews expose initial biases and stereotypes (target evaluations), while the case studies illustrate how these perceptions evolve into real-world outcomes and adaptive responses. This iterative movement between perception and action enables a richer understanding of the hybrid entrepreneurial path: a process of incongruity, adaptation, and eventual congruity restoration.
Strand I: Semi-Structured Interviews with Investors and Hybrid Founders
This section presents the first empirical strand of the study, namely 17 semi-structured interviews with VC and angel investors as well as hybrid founders to unpack how hybrid entrepreneurship is evaluated in early-stage funding contexts.
Results: General Investor Attitudes Toward Early-Stage Ventures
The interviews reveal a multifaceted picture of how investors form expectations about founders and evaluate early-stage ventures and how founders in turn address these expectations. At a broad level, investors’ narratives converge around an archetypical image of the “proper” entrepreneur: full-time, singularly focused, and willing to incur significant personal risk. This prototype functions as the injunctive norm of the founder role in RCT terms, against which individual founders are assessed. Hybrid entrepreneurs, and generally any founder perceived as “part-time,” are evaluated against this benchmark and are found either more, or less role-congruent depending on how closely their behavior matches this ideal.
Some partners lean toward a very strict, “all-in founder” prototype, while others are more willing to tolerate a hybrid spectrum if other signals (e.g., traction, team, deep tech) compensate. Despite the general negative perception of hybrid entrepreneurs, this nuanced variation is evident even within the same fund depending on what each partner sees as a “prototypical” entrepreneurial trajectory. One VC partner for example when asked about their partner’s stance on hybrid entrepreneurs stated that it depends a lot on “which partner is in the room” and that “[…] some of us are naturally more conservative, we tend to bring in more ‘traditional’ deals, others are more willing to back raw but promising research teams.” Interpreted through RCT, evaluations are not only shaped by shared role expectations but also by intra-organizational negotiations over which prototype should dominate. Essentially, hybrid ventures are evaluated against a norm that, while prevailing, is itself being contested.
Team Quality and Commitment as a Primary Role-Congruent Criterion
Across interviews, the founding team is framed as the primary investment criterion, an element quite in line with the academic literature (Hoenig & Henkel, 2015; Kollmann & Kuckertz, 2010). Investors repeatedly state that technology, market size, or institutional affiliation are secondary to perceived team quality, cohesion, and commitment. What is striking through the RCT lens is that “team quality” is implicitly defined in role-normative terms: a “good” team is one whose core members visibly conform to the prototype of the fully committed entrepreneur. One VC partner summarized this logic bluntly: “We’ve never invested in a company where the founder had a second job at the time of pitching. The founders we work with come to us already fully committed.” Another investor noted that the problem is particularly acute when hybridism concerns leadership roles: “The CEO or the head of product must be full-time. Period. If not from day one, then very soon after launch.”
Such statements illustrate the target evaluation component of RCT: founders are judged not only on competencies but on the degree to which their time allocation and occupational choices align with norms attached to the founder role. Dual employment is interpreted as a deviation from these norms, an incongruency, signaling lower suitability for high-growth entrepreneurship even before more objective indicators of performance are available.
Commitment is also framed not only in terms of time allocation but also as a function of the risk taken. Several investors interpret commitment as sharing the same level of risk as the investor and the rest of the team, and they read socioeconomic cues through that lens. This frames commitment as fairness-based norm: founders are expected to expose themselves to comparable downside risk. One investor describes this as follows: “[The founders] have to have the same risk otherwise it’s not a fair game. […] If someone has a safety net […] it’s not a fair balance, you know? […] And of course, it will affect the team.” Another investor frames this risk in a more “class-related” way addressing extensive visible wealth versus skin-in-the-game and using the example of a founder who “came in with a 40.000 Rolex” and could not commit the same sum to their endeavor. In RCT terms, socioeconomic markers (“safety net,”“visible wealth”) operate as peripheral cues that either reinforce or undermine perceived congruity with the high-risk, self-sacrificing founder role. This also demonstrates occasions where descriptive norms (“founders expose themselves to similar financial risk”) and injunctive norms (“they ought to share the pain”) get fused.
Enthusiasm for Research-Driven Spin-Offs, Skepticism About Academic Founders
Investors generally express enthusiasm for the scientific depth and technological rigor in university spin-offs, particularly due to the uniqueness and defensibility of their IP, often embodied in patents, publications, and lab-based prototypes. They voice concern about the role congruity of academic founders whose primary identity remains anchored in the university. Several investors describe a recurring pattern where professors or senior researchers wish to retain their tenured positions while also occupying central executive roles in the venture.
One interviewee captured this tension: “If someone isn’t willing to let go of a €1,000–1,500 salary, that signals they might not be cut out for entrepreneurship… If the professor wants to stay, then they should be an advisor, not the CEO or CTO. That’s non-negotiable.”
From an RCT perspective, academic founders are evaluated as occupying conflicting roles, “professor” and “entrepreneur,” with incompatible descriptive and injunctive norms. The academic role emphasizes stability, incremental progress, and institutional affiliation, while the entrepreneurial role assumes risk-taking, rapid decision-making, and full-time engagement. Where these elements are insufficiently reconciled, investors interpret the professor-founder as role-incongruent and seek to restore congruity by demanding the appointment of a business-oriented, full-time executive team. These de-risking mechanisms act as positive signals of congruent behavior signifying that the venture can succeed beyond its academic origins.
Cultural Fit, Values, and Normative Expectations of the Founder Role
Beyond formal evaluation metrics, many investors rely on more relational and culturally embedded signals such as “alignment of values,”“ethical stance,” and “cultural compatibility.” These elements are not simply idiosyncratic preferences; they are part of the normative template of what a “good” entrepreneur should be like. Several respondents described looking for founders whose attitudes toward work, collaboration, and responsibility reflect their own implicit model of entrepreneurial seriousness.
As one investor observed, “If they don’t really want to succeed, if they don’t have the willingness, there is no reason to invest in this person.” This statement reveals how dispositional attributions (e.g., willingness, motivation, and “mindset”) are interpreted through the founder role lens. Founders who treat the venture as an experiment or side project are seen as violating the injunctive norm of total commitment, even where their behavior may be economically rational from a hybrid entrepreneurship perspective.
This is particularly evident in funds with impact-driven or research-oriented missions, where founders’ motivations and commitment levels are often examined through an ethical lens. For example, some investors explicitly prioritize teams that demonstrate a passion for solving problems in socially or environmentally relevant domains. Others look for alignment in values or interpersonal chemistry, viewing these attributes as predictors of future potential and conflict resolution capacity. In such cases, investment decisions often go beyond quantitative criteria and are shaped by affective and normative considerations that are difficult to standardize.
We want to look at companies who have a positive societal impact. So yes, they have to make a financial return for them to be long-term sustainable as well. But impact goes alongside that. And when there’s no positive impact, we don’t want to invest.
Structured Risk Management and Exit Planning
Investors also differ in how they structure risk management and exit planning, but even these more “technical” practices are infused with role expectations. Funds with highly structured approaches favor startups that already exhibit “mature” signals: clear governance, legal formalization, and early traction. In these settings, the presence of hybrid founders is seen as an additional risk factor that must be explicitly mitigated through vesting schedules, governance provisions, or role reallocation.
Investors operating with more relational or trust-based logic may be somewhat more flexible, relying on reputational signals and personal rapport. Yet even here, the expectation of a plausible exit within a 5- to 7-year horizon reinforces the assumption that founders must ultimately align their behavior with high-commitment entrepreneurial norms. The hybrid founder who remains structurally “in between” is perceived as misaligned with the temporal and behavioral requirements of VC-backed growth.
Market Orientation and Viability as a Prerequisite
Across the sample, market readiness and commercial orientation constitute consistent themes. Investors, regardless of whether they are technically inclined or impact-focused, seek evidence that the startup addresses a real, well-defined market need and possesses a credible pathway to revenue generation. In this sense, hybridism becomes problematic not only because of time allocation but also because it is associated with two descriptive stereotypes: the academic founder who overestimates the marketability of research outputs and underinvests in customer development and the “life-style” entrepreneur who likes the label “entrepreneur” but is not willing to gully commit to the risks this path entails. As two investors describe these stereotypes: “They come up with an idea where they say like, ‘Look, actually the market doesn’t have a solution for this yet, so it would be great if we could do this. But most of the time, […], all of the team members are really deep-tech researchers or scientists and sometimes lack the quality to really make the product fly.”
Going the VC road is a very specific and difficult road, […] it has a lot of commitments, hardships, and monitoring. […] Being in it for the lifestyle is fine but it is not the VC path.
Several interviewees emphasized that the absence of early traction, pilots, or paying clients is interpreted as both a strategic and a normative failure. Conversely, hybrid founders who secure pilots, generate early revenue, or formalize IP protection are seen as acting “like real entrepreneurs,” even if they have not yet fully transitioned out of their wage employment. Behavioral evidence of execution thus partially compensates for formal role incongruity, which is consistent with Triana et al.’s (2024) emphasis on how outcomes and adaptations can gradually reshape target evaluations in RCT.
Results: Perspectives on Hybrid Entrepreneurship
Focusing more explicitly on hybrid entrepreneurs, the interviews reveal that investors’ attitudes are characterized by a mix of skepticism, conditional acceptance, and context-dependent tolerance. In high-risk entrepreneurial contexts, maintaining a dual role can signal a limited intention from the entrepreneurs’ side to take on the necessary risk and take the proverbial “leap of faith.” From an RCT standpoint, hybrid founders are initially perceived as role-incongruent: they deviate from the injunctive norm of total dedication and thereby invite more critical scrutiny. However, this incongruity is not interpreted in a purely categorical way. Rather, investors’ implicit narratives show how they differentiate among hybrid founders based on role position, temporal horizon, and behavioral adaptations.
Hybrid Founders’ Anticipatory Congruity Efforts
Hybrid founders in the sample are not passive “targets” of investor expectations, but engage in anticipatory efforts to demonstrate congruity and align their dual roles with the image of the committed entrepreneur. Aware that parallel employment is viewed as a violation of injunctive norms of full-time dedication, they seek to pre-empt negative inferences by foregrounding transparency about availability, articulating clear temporal horizons for transition, and formalizing their dual engagement through institutional and contractual arrangements.
Hybrid academic founders, in particular, emphasize “flexibility and transparency with both teams” and describe how formal agreements with their universities, for example, regarding time allocation, IP ownership, and recognition of entrepreneurial activity, are “essential enablers” that legitimize their position as both tenured academics and startup leaders. These practices can be interpreted as deliberate strategies of congruity restoration: by clarifying boundaries and demonstrating that their hybrid status is structured and purpose-driven rather than opportunistic, founders attempt to narrow the perceived gap between their actual role and the investor-endorsed prototype of the fully committed, high-risk entrepreneur.
Hybrid Entrepreneurship as a Visible Site of Role Incongruity
Many investors describe hybrid status in strongly negative terms, especially when it concerns core leadership positions. One interviewee noted: “Let me be clear: we would never invest in a company where a founder or any executive is not full-time. We wouldn’t even take a second meeting.” Another investor drew on previous experience: “We had a founder with a side consulting business—it didn’t go well. That made me even more cautious about such setups.”
These judgments illustrate common role-incongruity dynamics. The hybrid founder violates both descriptive norms (what founders are assumed to typically do—devote themselves full-time) and injunctive norms (what they ought to do—signal commitment through sacrifice). The resulting mismatch is interpreted as evidence of limited ambition, lower resilience, or inadequate leadership capacity. Most importantly, this mismatch forces a negative outcome long before performance data are available.
Conditional Acceptance Based on Role and Stage
Despite this skepticism, investors do not treat all hybrid arrangements as equally problematic. A significant portion of investors adopts a position of conditional acceptance toward hybrid entrepreneurship, emphasizing the importance of timing and the specific functional role of the hybrid founder. Many respondents expressed that, it is often a pragmatic necessity for early-stage founders to maintain alternative sources of income or institutional affiliations. One investor described hybridism as “a bell” whose urgency rises over time: initially tolerable, but increasingly unacceptable as the venture matures and requires full-time leadership. Hence, dual roles are not inherently disqualifying, if they are clearly framed as temporary arrangements to be resolved upon securing initial funding or reaching critical development milestones.
However, the tolerance for such dual commitments is largely contingent on whether the individual holds a core operational position within the startup (e.g., CEO or CTO). Investors consistently emphasize that founders in strategic leadership positions must be fully dedicated to the venture by the time of investment. In contrast, those in secondary or non-executive roles, such as scientific advisors or board members, are typically granted more leeway. The same investor who was adamant about full-time executives later accepted that “if they are not on the executive team, no problem […] If the professor is an advisor or consultant, that’s fine. But they cannot be CEO or CTO.” RCT helps interpret this nuance: investors are willing to tolerate role incongruity in non-core positions that do not symbolically and practically embody the entrepreneurial role. In contrast, they demand strong role congruity from those in positions that personify the venture to external stakeholders.
Emphasis on Clarity, Transparency, and Role Differentiation
Role clarity emerged as an important concern across all interviewees. Investors repeatedly underscore the importance of transparent governance structures, clearly defined roles, and well-defined expectations regarding the level of commitment. Investors repeatedly stress that undisclosed or vaguely defined dual roles are “red flags,” suggesting misalignment and potential governance problems. By contrast, hybrid founders who openly communicate their current status and articulate a concrete transition plan are perceived more positively.
One investor linked this to team motivation and fairness: “You cannot build a team and have the key people be out. You ask employees to be committed and dedicated, but you haven’t left your own job.” Here, the founder’s hybrid status is interpreted as a violation of the injunctive norm of exemplary commitment, undermining their legitimacy as a leader. Formal governance tools like shareholder agreements and board resolutions are used to differentiate symbolic and operational roles and to ensure that those in the latter exhibit role-congruent behavior. Ultimately, role differentiation serves as a key risk mitigation strategy, enabling investors to accommodate structural hybridity without compromising the startup’s operational integrity.
Commitment as a Diagnostic Signal of Trustworthiness and Long-Term Intent
Among the most consistent discursive patterns across the interviews was the portrayal of commitment as both a signal and a proxy, or in other words, an index of the founder’s seriousness, resilience, and suitability for VC-level entrepreneurship. Full-time dedication is not merely seen as a functional requirement but as a normative expectation, a moral and psychological indicator that reflects the founder’s willingness to incur personal risk and prioritize the venture above other professional opportunities.
Several investors explicitly contrast founders who have prior experience in salaried employment with those who have not. One angel investor remarked that inexperienced founders, especially younger ones without prior work experience, often abandon the startup when the “first corporate salary offer” appears, whereas those who already know what “9-to-5” employment entails are more likely to remain committed. Under the RCT lens, these narratives show how investors infer deeper traits (e.g., maturity, reliability, and realism) from the way founders navigate the boundary between employment and entrepreneurship.
Hybrid entrepreneurship thus becomes a diagnostic process where underlying concerns about governance, self-selection, and resilience are projected and examined. Founders who maintain dual roles without clear transition plans, or who seek high equity stakes while remaining institutionally sheltered, are seen as particularly role incongruent. As one interviewee offered an analogy where professors seeking large equity stakes while remaining in academia are “like someone bringing sugar to a coffee shop and then asking to own the café.”
Summary: Hybrid Entrepreneurship as a Site of Role Congruity Negotiation
Collectively, the interviews portray a nuanced evaluative landscape. From the vantage point of RCT, hybrid founders are initially perceived as mismatched with the prototypical entrepreneurial role. This incongruity shapes target evaluations, leading to skepticism and, in some cases, categorical exclusion from consideration. Yet the findings also show that evaluative judgments are not entirely fixed. Contextual factors (sector, funding stage, and institutional setting) and behavioral adaptations (clear transition plans, role delegation, and milestone achievement) can partly restore congruity in investors’ eyes.
Hybrid entrepreneurship thus operates as a site of ongoing role negotiation rather than a simple deviation from entrepreneurial norms. Investors differentiate within a spectrum of acceptable and unacceptable hybrid behaviors according to how credibly founders signal that dual roles are temporary, bounded, and subordinate to the venture’s long-term growth. These insights set the stage for the case studies in the next section, which trace how hybrid founders’ adaptive behaviors, narrative strategies, and structural choices gradually transform initial incongruity into congruity alignment over time.
Strand II: Case Studies of Ventures Led by Hybrid Entrepreneurs
To examine how role incongruity is managed over time, this strand analyzes two cases: TEKMON, a digital venture launched within a university incubator, and BLI, a deep-tech spinoff rooted in long-term scientific research. Although they differ in sector, tempo, and institutional setting, both cases began with founders whose hybrid status initially appeared misaligned with conventional expectations of entrepreneurial commitment. Comparing them makes it possible to identify recurring mechanisms through which early role misfit is gradually transformed into entrepreneurial legitimacy.
Empirical Overview: The TEKMON and BLI Cases
This study draws on two longitudinal case studies: TEKMON, a digital operations platform, and BLI, a deep-tech biofabrication venture, to examine how hybrid entrepreneurs navigate the tension between their ongoing professional or academic roles and the behavioral expectations associated with entrepreneurship. Although situated in different technological and market environments, both ventures began as side projects pursued alongside other obligations and evolved into credible, investable companies.
TEKMON emerged from a university incubator where two hybrid founders—one a geomatics PhD researcher, and the other a civil engineer involved in postgraduate business studies—adapted a research prototype for crisis management into a B2B operational digitization tool. Through pilots with Athens International Airport and AB Vassilopoulos (Ahold Delhaize Group), the team gradually uncovered a broader opportunity to build a no-code workflow platform for non-desk workers. After achieving early enterprise traction and recurring revenues, the founders transitioned from part-time engagement to full-time entrepreneurial roles and secured institutional investment. TEKMON scaled internationally to the United Kingdom and Italy, institutionalizing a partner-led delivery model and raising follow-on funding.
BLI originated from over a decade of academic research in stem-cell mechanobiology and advanced 3D-printing. The founder maintained academic responsibilities at leading research institutions -a U.S. PhD program and a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) postdoctoral appointment- while gradually establishing a commercialization pathway. After incorporating BLI in 2021, he pivoted from clinically regulated markets to research and industrial applications, developing two core technologies: the BioLoom high-resolution bioprinter and the AI-enabled Loominus Studio software. During this period, he remained in a hybrid academic–entrepreneurial role, advancing the venture through IP protection, grant funding, strategic partnerships with MIT and NCSR Demokritos (NCSRD), early customer pilots, and initial international sales. The full transition to entrepreneurship occurred only after BLI secured its $1.8 M pre-seed round in 2024, which provided the financial runway and external validation necessary allowing the founder to commit entirely to the venture by the end of that year.
Across both cases, hybrid engagement served as the starting point of a broader alignment process. As founders accumulated milestones, secured external validation, and redefined the meaning of their dual roles, initial role incongruity became progressively more manageable. The next section identifies five mechanisms through which this shift occurred.
Mechanisms of Congruity Alignment Across Digital and Deep-Tech Hybrid Entrepreneurs
The analysis of TEKMON and BLI reveals five mechanisms through which hybrid entrepreneurs transform initial role incongruity into entrepreneurial legitimacy. Rather than progressing through a linear sequence of events, founders engage in a dynamic process of learning, signaling, reframing, and embedding alignment. Each mechanism operates across both cases, though at different speeds and with different institutional pressures, reflecting distinctions between digital and deep-tech commercialization.
Mechanism 1—Protected Experimentation: Hybrid Roles as a Learning Space
Across both ventures, the hybrid phase served as a protected space that enabled founders to explore opportunities with low personal and professional risk. Rather than signaling hesitation, hybridity provided time, legitimacy, and cognitive flexibility for early experimentation. In TEKMON, the founders remained in their research and engineering roles while adapting an academic prototype into a pilot for Athens International Airport using their dual-role status to buffer financial exposure and iterate based on real operational feedback. In BLI, the founder continued his postdoctoral work at MIT while refining melt electrowriting technology and exploring commercialization options, leveraging academic resources, laboratories, and credibility. In both settings, hybrid engagement created a high-learning, low-commitment window in which founders could test assumptions, understand user needs, and shape the venture concept before aligning publicly with the entrepreneurial identity.
Mechanism 2—Borrowed Legitimacy: Ecosystem Partners as Validators of Hybrid Entrepreneurs
Because hybrid entrepreneurs initially lack the symbolic signal of full-time commitment, both ventures leaned heavily on external partners to construct early legitimacy. TEKMON’s collaborations with Athens International Airport and AB Vassilopoulos lent the venture credibility and positioned the founders as capable problem-solvers long before they approached investors. Similarly, in BLI, affiliations with MIT, the MIT e14 Fund, and NCSRD functioned as authoritative endorsements that reassured stakeholders. These ecosystem actors effectively substituted for entrepreneurial commitment signals and recast hybrid engagement as appropriate to the domain, particularly in settings where research-based or institutionally anchored innovation is normative. Through these partnerships, both ventures leveraged external authority to compensate for internal role ambiguity and reduce perceived incongruity.
Mechanism 3—Behavioral Alignment: Milestones as Evidence of Intent and Competence
As both ventures progressed, founders demonstrated entrepreneurial commitment not through declarations but through measurable achievements. TEKMON secured enterprise clients, generated recurring revenue, and established a scalable platform logic before seeking external capital. BLI advanced through patent filings, prototype development, EU grant awards, early customer adoption, and international sales, tangible accomplishments that signaled increasing agency and venture readiness. Across cases, milestones acted as behavioral evidence that helped investors reinterpret hybrid founders as disciplined, competent, and capable of executing at entrepreneurial pace. These concrete accomplishments narrowed the gap between founders’ evolving behavior and the expectations associated with the entrepreneurial role, gradually transforming perceptions of hybridism from ambiguity into demonstrated capability.
Mechanism 4—Narrative Reframing: Performing Commitment and Redefining Hybridity
At a later stage, founders in both ventures learned to actively shape the interpretation of their hybrid identity. TEKMON’s founders reframed their prolonged hybrid period as deliberate “strategic discipline,” emphasizing their need to validate product-market fit before committing full-time, an explanation that resonated strongly with investors and cast their caution as professionalism rather than reluctance. Meanwhile, BLI’s founder positioned his continued academic role as essential to maintaining scientific credibility and ensuring the technological superiority required in deep-tech commercialization. Through these narrative strategies, founders converted “incongruent” behaviors into signals of foresight, rigor, and long-term commitment. In both cases, narrative reframing allowed hybrid entrepreneurs to perform commitment in ways that satisfied stakeholder expectations despite incomplete role transition.
Mechanism 5—Institutional Embedding: Transforming Individual Alignment Into Organizational Capability
As hybridity transitioned into full entrepreneurial commitment, both ventures encoded the balance they had achieved into enduring organizational structures. TEKMON institutionalized this logic by developing a partner-led implementation model while keeping core R&D in-house, allowing the company to scale without compromising product control. BLI embedded dual scientific–commercial logics through ongoing research collaborations, modular product architectures, and a funding strategy that blended grants with equity. Across cases, the organizational structures that emerged mirrored the alignment work performed earlier: what began as a temporary response to role incongruity evolved into a stable capability that sustained flexibility, credibility, and strategic focus. Once embedded structurally, congruity became self-reinforcing, not merely an individual psychological outcome, but an organizational asset.
Together, the five mechanisms show how hybrid founders move from initial role incongruity toward entrepreneurial legitimacy over time. The propositions that follow formalize this congruity-alignment process and specify the conditions under which hybrid status is penalized, tolerated, or reframed as credible (Table 3).
Mechanisms of Congruity Alignment Across Cases.
Note. BLI: bioLattice industries; NCSRD: NCSR demokritos.
Discussion
The findings show that hybrid entrepreneurship is evaluated through a role-congruity lens rather than through founder status alone. Investors initially interpret dual-role founders against a full-time founder prototype, often reading continued employment as evidence of misaligned priorities or insufficient commitment. Yet these judgments are not fixed. Across both empirical strands, founder behavior, milestone achievement, and ecosystem validation repeatedly altered how hybrid status was interpreted, suggesting that investor assessments evolve as founders accumulate credible signals of entrepreneurial alignment.
At the core of this process lies the fundamental misalignment between the descriptive and injunctive norms associated with the roles of “employee” and “founder.” RCT suggests that negative evaluations arise when “what individuals typically do” in a given role conflicts with “what they are expected to do” in another. For hybrid entrepreneurs, salaried employment conveys stability, institutional loyalty, and risk aversion, whereas the entrepreneurial role prescribes decisiveness, full-time dedication, and personal exposure to downside risk. Many investors read hybridity through this incongruity, interpreting continued employment as evidence of misaligned priorities or insufficient commitment to growth. As one VC put it, “If a founder isn’t willing to quit their job, that tells me they’re not serious about building a scalable business.” Yet the empirical findings show that this initial bias is not static. As hybrid founders enact behaviors that align with entrepreneurial expectations, through coherent signals, milestone achievement, transparent transition plans, and increasing ownership of venture decisions, investors progressively update their assessments.
However, this apparent shift is not always explicitly recognized by investors themselves. This can be understood as a temporal and cognitive misalignment: investors evaluate hybrid entrepreneurs ex ante, under conditions of uncertainty, relying on role-based heuristics that emphasize commitment and risk exposure, while the case studies capture the process ex post, where alignment has already been demonstrated.
Importantly, investors do not engage in retrospective sensemaking of hybrid trajectories. Instead, they assess hybrid ventures as part of a broader deal flow, focusing on observable performance indicators rather than reconstructing the developmental paths that led to successful outcomes. As a result, successful hybrid journeys may be absorbed into the general pipeline without being explicitly recognized as such. Combined with pre-existing negative perceptions of hybridity, this can reinforce confirmation bias, whereby hybrid status continues to be interpreted as a negative signal despite evidence of successful trajectories. We hypothesize that this is also the reason why, regardless of the almost universal initial negative investor reaction toward hybridism, when prompted and probed most interviewees would adopt a more nuanced stance, admitting that there are benefits and that hybrid venture could be conditionally successful.
Hence, hybrid entrepreneurship is best understood as a dynamic path through which founders and investors steadily build alignment, with support from the broader ecosystem.
The interviews show that hybrid entrepreneurs are therefore evaluated against a prototypical, full-time founder ideal. Hybrids are often perceived as slower, more deliberate, and more consensus-seeking behaviors that align with the employee role but conflict with expectations that entrepreneurs should move fast and embrace risk. One VC contrasted an academic founding team with a serial entrepreneur: “In some university spinoffs I think the discussion goes back and forth for over a month. While a serial entrepreneur, as soon as he received the term sheet, said ‘Wow, it’s a little tough, but sign it immediately’.” These comparisons crystallize a systematic evaluative gap between hybrids and direct entrants.
Individual-Level Evaluations: Bias and Role Incongruity
The interview data and case narratives together indicate that early-stage investors use hybridity as a diagnostic lens for reading deeper traits such as maturity, resilience, and long-term intent. The hybrid status is seen as an alarm whose urgency increases as the venture matures: initially tolerable, but progressively unacceptable once a startup requires full-time leadership. What matters is not only whether founders hold multiple roles, but also whether those roles appear compatible with the expectations attached to their position in the startup.
This selectivity becomes particularly visible around core leadership roles. Founders in symbolic and operational positions such as CEO or CTO are expected to embody entrepreneurial commitment in an exemplary way. In RCT terms, investors demand a high degree of role congruity where the role carries strong representational and decision-making weight, while tolerating greater incongruity in advisory or peripheral roles.
Sectoral/Institutional Contexts: When Hybrid Status Is More (or Less) Congruent
RCT also underscores that role congruity is context-dependent. The previous sections show that investor tolerance for hybrid roles markedly varies across sectors and institutional settings. In research-based ventures, part-time engagement is not only common but often structurally necessary. One investor observed that “many times academics … set up companies with the goal of supplementing their income. It might be very good for our economy […] Simply, these companies are not VC investable.” Here, the hybrid academic founder is congruent with an “academic spin-off” role yet incongruent with the “VC-backed scale-up” role.
The TEKMON and BLI cases illustrate how these sectoral logics shape congruity alignment trajectories. In B2B SaaS (TEKMON), fast iteration cycles and competitive pressure make prolonged hybridity less acceptable; investors expect earlier transitions into full-time entrepreneurship. In deep-tech (BLI), long R&D timelines and grant-based funding make hybrid engagement both rational and institutionally supported. Across both cases, ecosystem actors (incubators, corporate partners, and research centers) act as mediators who “translate” academic or professional roles into entrepreneurial legitimacy, allowing hybrids to borrow credibility before they fully embody the founder role.
Behavioral and Relational Adaptation: Performing Congruity
The empirical material further shows that hybrid entrepreneurs are not passive recipients of evaluative bias. They actively adapt their behavior and narratives to restore congruity with investor expectations. Interviews with investors repeatedly highlight that what matters is not only founders’ current employment status, but whether they act “as if” they are fully committed. Hence, hybrid entrepreneurs need to learn to perform “full commitment” in investor interactions and thus commitment becomes a narrative tool.
In this sense, commitment is performed through a constellation of signals rather than a single act such as quitting a job. As detailed in the case studies, hybrid founders demonstrate congruity by achieving commercial milestones (e.g., enterprise clients and recurring revenue), securing IP protection, participating in selective programs, and communicating transition plans. These behavioral signals substitute for the canonical marker of commitment (full-time presence) and gradually transform skepticism into trust. As one investor bluntly put it, “You cannot build a team and have the key people be out. You ask employees to be committed and dedicated, but you haven’t left your own job.” Hybrids who ignore this injunction, seeking, for example, large equity stakes while remaining institutionally sheltered, are seen as especially role incongruent.
At the same time, investors are sensitive to how founders embody or contradict employee stereotypes in their everyday conduct. Several described academic spinoffs as “never polished […] people may not even know their numbers […] these founders are not business-oriented, they are not polished.” In line with prior RCT applications, this suggests that founders are penalized less for their categorical status as hybrids and more for behavior that reinforces the employee stereotype (cautiousness, lack of commercial orientation, and poor preparation). By contrast, decisive action, ownership of investor conversations, and willingness to reconfigure roles post-feedback are read as signals of entrepreneurial agency.
Dynamic, Cross-Level Alignment: From Individual Bias to Organizational Capability
Finally, the integration of interviews and case studies suggests that role congruity in hybrid entrepreneurship is not a static condition but a dynamic, cross-level alignment process. At the individual level, investors begin with a biased archetype of the “ideal founder,” against which hybrids are found wanting. At the relational level, iterative interactions, behavioral signals, and narrative reframing enable gradual re-evaluation. At the institutional and organizational level, hybridity can evolve from a source of suspicion into a distinctive capability.
The TEKMON and BLI trajectories show that congruity alignment unfolds in stages: protected experimentation, borrowed legitimacy, behavioral signaling, narrative reframing, and institutional embedding of balanced roles. Over time, hybrid ventures can transform the initial incongruity between scientific and commercial logics into an asset. When this occurs, congruity is no longer an attribute of individual founders, but of the venture as a whole.
Implications and Future Research
Theoretical Implications
This study contributes to a more refined understanding of entrepreneurial commitment by proposing a signal perspective, wherein investors evaluate founders not solely on full-time availability but on a combination of behavioral, structural, and relational signals. Through the lens of RCT, these signals are mechanisms through which evaluators infer the degree of alignment between a founder’s behavior and the norms attached to the entrepreneurial role.
By utilizing RCT in this context, this work helps explain why certain hybrid founders are “investable” while others are not, despite similar levels of human capital or technological quality. It also advances RCT beyond its traditional focus on gender to a broader class of “role deviance” generated by hybrid entrepreneurial careers, where the tension lies between the employee/academic role and the high-commitment founder prototype.
Furthermore, our analysis positions hybrid entrepreneurship as a structured and strategic process rather than a temporary workaround. The notion of calculated hybridism, as exemplified by TEKMON and BLI, offers a new conceptual category that captures how hybrid founders systematically build credibility through milestone achievement, ecosystem integration, and transparent role management. In RCT terms, this process illustrates how actors can actively construct congruity over time, moving from initial role mismatch to alignment through behavioral adaptation, narrative work, and institutional embedding.
This research contributes to RCT in three main ways. First, it extends RCT beyond its dominant focus on gender to a different form of role deviance, namely founders who simultaneously occupy employment or academic roles and entrepreneurial leadership roles, showing how hybrid status becomes a noticeable case of (in)congruity. Second, it develops a processual account of role congruity by theorizing hybrid entrepreneurship as a congruity alignment trajectory, in which initially incongruent role expectations are progressively negotiated and recalibrated through founders’ behavioral, narrative, and structural work over time. Third, it advances a cross-level perspective on RCT by linking investors’ target evaluations of hybrid founders to founders’ adaptive responses and to the gradual embedding of hybrid logics in organizational structures and ecosystems, thereby connecting micro-level role perceptions with meso-level venture development and ecosystem dynamics.
Limitations and Future Research
This research is exploratory and qualitative, relying on a limited number of semi-structured interviews and case studies within the European early-stage ecosystem. While the multi-method, cross-strand design enhances theoretical generalizability, it constrains statistical generalizability and limits strong claims about the prevalence of specific evaluative patterns across geographies, sectors, or funding stages. Most data were gathered from investors already exposed to hybrid teams, potentially underrepresenting more negative or risk-averse attitudes. The use of network-based sampling may introduce selection bias, as access to interviewees was partly facilitated through existing professional connections. Although most participating investors were already exposed to hybrid teams, we mitigated the risk of an overly “pro-hybrid” sample by including funds with different mandates and sectoral focuses, combining investor and founder perspectives, and triangulating these with longitudinal case evidence. These findings primarily reflect early-stage, non-celebrity, mostly first-time founders rather than highly visible, serial, or star academics whose reputational capital can compensate for ongoing hybridity. Furthermore, the case studies focus on investor and founder perspectives in two knowledge-intensive contexts, leaving other stakeholder groups (e.g., corporate venture units and public funds) and domains underexplored. The case study component relies on two purposefully selected cases, enabling in-depth, longitudinal insight, but limiting the breadth of observable variation across hybrid entrepreneurial trajectories. While the context and timeframe of this work did not allow it, a larger set of cases could reveal additional nuances across contexts, sectors, and stages, and thus the findings should be interpreted with caution. Finally, the interview strand captures evaluations at a particular point in time rather than longitudinally; thus, the dynamics of congruity alignment are inferred ex post, complemented by the longitudinal case studies, but cannot be observed directly across all participants.
Building on these limitations, Table 4 outlines a focused agenda for future research. Work on role incongruity and evaluation bias could employ experimental and survey designs to identify how hybrid founders are framed relative to full-time founders, which cues trigger perceived incongruity, and how these perceptions change over time. Comparative ecosystem studies can examine how universities, corporate accelerators, and public agencies normalize or problematize hybrid entrepreneurship, and under what conditions institutional affiliation amplifies or dampens founder credibility across sectors and countries. Further research could investigate how behavioral adaptation, milestone achievement, and commitment narratives jointly shape investor judgments, including when “performing commitment” is interpreted as inauthentic. At the organizational level, longitudinal, multi-level designs are needed to trace how early hybrid engagement becomes institutionalized in governance, role structures, and dual scientific–commercial logics, and whether calculated hybridism leaves a durable imprint that gradually transforms initial role incongruity into an organizational asset.
Future Research Agenda on Role Congruity and Hybrid Entrepreneurship.
Note. VC: venture capital.
Conclusion
This research examined whether early-stage investors avoid hybrid entrepreneurs or evaluate them conditionally. Drawing on semi-structured interviews and two case studies, it shows that hybrid status is initially read as role-incongruent because it departs from the prototypical “all-in” founder ideal. At the same time, skepticism is not uniform: investor judgments vary by role, venture stage, sector, and the extent to which commitment is made visible through credible signals. Conceptually, the study reframes entrepreneurial commitment as an evolving and context-dependent construct and uses RCT to theorize hybrid entrepreneurship as a process of congruity alignment. In doing so, it advances the notion of calculated hybridism as a pathway through which founders manage risk, build credibility, and progressively move from initial misfit toward entrepreneurial legitimacy.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge the invaluable assistance of Angeletou Fereniki, Tsakiroglou Thodoris, and Xanthos Andreas who undertook the transcription and translation of the interview material. Their meticulous work and professionalism substantially contributed to the accuracy, completeness, and reliability of the empirical data on which this study is based. Their contribution is sincerely appreciated.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.