Our data collection process involved three consecutive stages, from defining the
interviewee criteria, over-identifying appropriate interviewee candidates through applying different sample strategies, to conducting the interviews through the use of qualitative interview methods.
3.3.1 Interviewee Criteria
In the first step, we established specific criteria that qualify the interviewees’ eligibility.
Our criterion consists of two factors that needed to be fulfilled. The first focuses on the research object, being HGFs according to the definition defined by Barringer et al.
(2005). Within these firms, we needed to access the knowledge and experiences that were present and involved in the decision making process during the high growth stage
of that firm, for which we have focused on founding members of the firm and first employees.
In order to create sample groups that are sizable enough to create proper research findings we relied on publicly available listings of pre-assessed HGFs (Flick, 2016). In total, we engaged in two rounds of sampling, beginning with a list provided by the danish national newsagency Borsen, consisting of 100 firms with the Gazelle status. This first sampling round followed the guidelines of purposeful sampling (Flick, 2016). According to Sandelowski (1995), purposeful sampling can take the form of a diverse set of
approaches, such as phenomenal, theoretical, and maximum variation (Flick, 2016). Our sampling criteria followed the description of high-growth startups according to Barringer et al.’s research, which consists of a set of different variables. Before Covid-19, our intention was to include danish firms only, but the pandemic forced us to adjust the sampling criteria along the process. We have applied our sampling criteria on the danish market first, followed by expanding towards the European market. For this it made sense to us to apply purposeful sampling with a clearly defined maximum variation strategy, which allows us to sample through a diverse set of criteria (Flick, 2016), enabling us to reach out to a large set of matching startup-founders. Among these lists and awards, we applied random sampling to select the firms that we were going to reach out to. In total, we have contacted 234 (Attachment 1), as further specified below.
3.3.2 Identifying Interview Candidates
The next step involves identifying relevant interviewees among the 234 new firms identified in the first step. To gain access to interview candidates, we used the
professional social network Linkedin, inquiring whether potential interviewees would be interested in participating in the study. We have structured the reaching out process systematically and have tested various messages for the first and second contact, always continuing and improving with the versions that have received the highest
response rate. The process of reaching out to the firms is documented in detail and can be seen in our Appendix 3.
Ultimately, our sample consists of the firms that answered our emails and LinkedIn messages and were available to us. Unfortunately, a global pandemic (Covid-19)
Table 4 Overview of Interview Partners and their high-growth firm
Company Description Date Interviewees
Position MicroSecond MicroSecond was founded in Denmark in 2014 and
evolves in the semiconductor industry. According to the Borsen Gazelles Awards 2019, it is the 28th fastest growing firm of Denmark with a recorded growth over 66% for 2019 (virk) and an absolute growth of 15 492%
19th February 2020 Founder
Poweray's founder Poweray is an industrial power plant manufacturer that was founded in Denmark in 2008. With a recorded growth of 60.71% in 2019, it is the 32th fastest growing firm of Denmark (Borsen Gazelles Awards 2019) and, on the Financial Times 1000 list of Europe’s Fastest Growing Companies 2020, it is ranked 68th fastest growing firm in Europe with an absolute growth of 7 132%
21st February 2020 Founder
Marketic's founder Marketic is an i-Gaming Danish Firm established in 2014. According to the Borsen Gazelles Awards 2019, it is the 375th fastest growing firm of Denmark with a recorded growth of over 29% for 2019 (virk) and absolute growth of 2 820%.
27th February 2020 Founder
Spector's founder Spector is a Romanian IT consultancy established in 2006. It is ranked 509th fastest growing firm on the Financial Times 1000 list of Europe’s Fastest Growing Companies 2020 with an absolute growth of 335%.
10th April 2020 Founder
Snackable's founder
Snackable is a U.K. film distributor established in 2016 and part of Seedtable’s 111 London Startups to Watch in 2020.
9th April 2020 Founder
AdviceLab's founder
AdviceLab is a French consulting firm established in 2013. With an absolute growth of 1 716%, it is ranked 69th fastest growing firm on the Financial Times 1000 list of Europe’s Fastest Growing Companies 2020.
7th April 2020 Founder
MyFish's founder MyFish is a Swedish firm evolving in the application software industry which was founded in 2013. From 2016 to 2018, it had an average growth of about 860%
and an absolute growth of 4 471 899 900%
(https://www.allabolag.se/5567965370/bokslut).
9th April 2020 Growth Manager (Member of the founding team)
Table 4 – Overview of Interview Partners and their HGF
disrupted all industries, making it harder for our interview-partners to engage in non-essential activities, ultimately resulting in a loss of many interview-partners for our study.
Over the course of 2 months of reaching out to firms, we have contacted 253
(Attachment 1). Due to Covid-19, many founders cancelled the interviews or have not shown up to the promised date. Because of these circumstances, we agreed with our interview candidates that the interview will not take longer than 30 minutes.
In total, we performed 7 semi-structured interviews on founders of HGFs across Denmark, the U.K., France, Romania, and Sweden. Below we will elaborate on the collection of primary data.
3.3.1 Primary Data
We interviewed 7 founding members from different firms, out of which 6 hold the founding position and the remaining is one of the first employees who is in charge of enabling and increasing the firm’s growth. The aim of the interviews is to provide us with a phenomenological understanding of firm-growth before and during the period of
exponential growth, as it was enabled by the founding members of their firm. Prior to the interviews, we built a semi-structured interview guide (Appendix 1), based on the
theoretical concept of Barringer et al. (2005) and the strategic concept of Blitzscaling (Hoffman & Yeh, 2018).
We chose the semi-structured approach to create a conversation in which the
interviewee can construct their own meaning behind the processes their organization went, rather than to get information about specific topics.
This interview set-up created an interplay between the theoretical groundwork and the interviewee’s perception. In order to build an interview guideline without leading
questions, we have decided against creating a quantitative survey regarding the interviewee’s opinion of the relevant attributes (Flick, 2018). Instead, we utilized
Barringer et al. (2005) and the Blitzscaling concept (Hoffman & Yeh, 2018) to abduct the central challenges in which these attributes played the differentiating role, and structured the interview guide around these challenges. This interview approach invites the
interviewee to provide their unbiased understanding of the key aspects of these challenges (Flick, 2018).
The interviews were held and recorded online through the video-communication platform Zoom. James and Busher (2009) position face-to-face interviews as the most powerful tool to understand how people construct their social reality. In comparison to static data or phone-interviews, offer face-to-face a higher variety of levels of understanding. The interviewer does not just rely on the voice and content of what the interviewee states, furthermore can the interviewer draw from the information they receive through the observation of physical gestures and social cues. Opdenakker (2006) argues that the interviewer and interviewee need to share time and space to obtain these benefits, but a more recent argument made by Hanna (2012) sheds light on the benefits of video-online interviews as a feasible substitution for face-to-face interviews. Conducting these
interviews highlighted a few disadvantages towards an in-person face-to-face interview.
The central disadvantage is the effect that a slow internet connection has, on the quality and flow of the conversation. Sharing video and voice simultaneously is quite impactful on the internet connection. Since many of our interview partners held their interviews from home with moderate internet speed, did we experience occasional delays in our conversation flow, as well as incomprehensible sentences. Nevertheless, technical difficulties made up only an insignificant portion of the interview, and almost all interviews have been conducted without any major issues.
3.3.2 Secondary Data
To triangulate and augment the data collected in the interviews, we collected publicly available data on the firm’s background, firm growth, and professional background of the founder, prior to the interviews. The founders' professional experiences were sourced from their individual profiles on the social network LinkedIn.com. The firm information was sourced from governmental databases that list all financial reports from these firms, such as Virk.dk, etc.. When information has not been able to be accessed, we have asked our interview partners after the interview to provide us with the information that we have been missing. These data sets were used primarily to triangulate our findings and make sure that what the interviewees were saying matched the information we could find about them.