Crafting the Entrepreneurial Persona: Insights From the Narratives Entrepreneurs Tell

Abstract

Entrepreneurship research increasingly recognizes storytelling as a central mechanism through which founders interpret venture experiences, mobilize resources, and construct entrepreneurial identities. Yet little is known about the linguistic patterns that shape these narratives in contemporary media environments such as podcasts. This study addresses that gap by examining how entrepreneurs narrate venture creation, growth, and emotionally salient experiences in long-form podcast interviews. We adopt a mixed-methods design based on a corpus of 81 founder interviews and combine natural language processing with inductive narrative analysis. Quantitatively, we use co-occurrence network analysis to identify relationships among entrepreneurial key terms and dictionary-based sentiment analysis to assess evaluative language surrounding those terms. Qualitatively, we analyze a curated subsample of interviews following the Gioia methodology to interpret the meanings embedded in salient and ambivalent concepts.

The findings reveal a dense semantic core structured around business, company, work, money, need, product, and learning, indicating that founders narrate entrepreneurship primarily through interconnected themes of venture building, economic activity, and personal development. Sentiment analysis shows that entrepreneurial narratives are predominantly positive overall, while terms such as problem and risk are framed more ambivalently, appearing both as sources of strain and as catalysts for opportunity, resilience, and learning. Further qualitative analysis shows that founders present themselves as learning-oriented protagonists, frame money as both a practical resource and a symbolic marker of success, and connect emotions such as love and passion to ventures, products, and social relationships. This study contributes to entrepreneurship research by offering a language-centered perspective on entrepreneurial sensemaking and identity formation in a fast-growing media setting. Methodologically, it demonstrates the value of combining computational text analysis with qualitative narrative interpretation to capture both structural patterns and contextual meaning. Practically, the findings provide implications for entrepreneurship education, mentoring, and founder support by showing how entrepreneurial stories can shape self-understanding, legitimacy, and opportunity perception.