So Sad! Entrepreneurs’ Emotions Caused by Crowdfunding Campaign Failures

Failure is commonplace in entrepreneurship, and can impact an entrepreneur’s mental health. We collected a unique individual-level dataset for 33,000 entrepreneurs that combines data from 45,000 crowdfunding campaigns from Kickstarter and approximately 20 million social media posts from Twitter for the period 2009-2021. Applying a machine learning approach for natural language processing, we show that entrepreneurial failure can lead to an increase in expressed negative emotion, namely, sadness. We also theorize and demonstrate that entrepreneurial experience can act as an “emotional buffer,” decreasing both the magnitude and duration of sadness associated with failure. Our study contributes to the theoretical literature on affect and entrepreneurship while also offering a novel non-obtrusive way to measure entrepreneurial emotions using big data.