An Entrepreneurial Journey: Resource Acquisition and Team Formation Processes in the face of Mass Customization Submitted by: ARZU BALKAN

Organizational resource acquisition including finance and people in a dynamic environment affects the venture’s business activities and even its establishment. This paper aims to examine the concept mass customization and the process of obtaining resource commitments for the creation of a new venture called D.B.M. in the face of liabilities of newness. To this end, a case study based on the first-hand experiences of the researcher as the entrepreneur of D.B.M is designed in the form of analytical autoethnography and analysed in a qualitative manner by using a simple game-theoric model. The questions raised in this paper are “How do the team formation and resource acquisition process during new venture creation look like in the face of liabilities of newness? To what extent does mass customization as a business model influence this process? ” This paper argues that organizational resource acquisition including finance and people becomes harder for new ventures in the face of liabilities of newness, which also constitute a challenge for mass customization and unless there is a competent team and access to required resources, the business execution cannot be easily realized. The efficient combination of resources becomes even less likely to be reached when the owners delay commitment of their resources to venture creation for a long time. To this end, this paper suggests that individual wealth of the entrepreneur is valuable during seed-stage to establish the business concept fully while at the same time generating better credibility, which eventually attract partners (including team members or investors) to the venture