 Hello, my name is Lars Hornoff, I'm a professor for business administration with a particular focus on financial services and financial technology at the University of Bremen. And my name is Elisa Stenzon, I'm a PhD student at Lars Chair. So Lars, we're two of the authors that wrote a paper together, and what have we been analysing in our paper? We have been investigating equity crowdfunding, which is a new phenomenon in entrepreneurial finance, where a large group of investors is funding a firm or a project, and in the end they obtain a financial interest in this firm. So far in the literature we have seen that a lot of papers are investigating whether these firms can actually obtain funding from a platform and from individuals on this platform, but our paper is one of the first investigating whether these firms can build enduring businesses after they run an equity crowdfunding campaign. Can you say something about how we did? So we did an empirical study and we used some of the traditional methods in econometrics, so we run dichotomous dependent variable regressions, we also run survival analyses and our dependent variable rules whether these firms either obtain follow-up funding by an outside business angel or an outside venture capitalist, and on the other hand we looked at whether these firms were dissolved or went into bankruptcy and failed simply. And what can we learn about the determinants of follow-up funding? So what we learned was the following, so first of all we saw a difference between Germany and the UK. So in total we investigated 430 firms on 13 platforms and what we saw was that the firms that got funding in Germany had a higher likelihood later on to obtain follow-up funding, which personally surprised me. And we also found that these firms had a higher likelihood to obtain follow-up funding in the first 18 months after the campaign, and later on it became much less likely to obtain follow-up funding after this period. We also looked at the determinants of follow-up funding and we found that 3 variables were interesting. First was the management team and this was the size of the management team. So the larger the management team was, apparently the higher was their likelihood to get things done and accomplish something, and the higher was also the likelihood that they would take follow-up funding in the end. Second, we looked at the age of the management team because we thought if you're more senior, you might actually be more likely to get follow-up funding by a venture capitalist later on, but that was not true. So apparently outside venture capitalists or business angels like if you're young and more dynamic, and if you run an equity crowdfunding campaign, you're more likely to get funding later on if you're more the young type of person. And third, we also looked at initial venture capitalists and we found that having an initial venture capitalist board is a good signal for outside venture capitalists later on, which is in line with the traditional literature. Interestingly though, we found that a couple of variables that are found in the traditional literature on venture capital that are relevant as a signal for follow-up funding haven't played a role. For instance, we looked at trademarks and patents, but they were that relevant to obtain follow-up funding after you received an equity crowdfunding campaign and looked for money later on. Thank you. So Elisa, we just talked about follow-up funding and what drives investments by outside business angel or venture capital investors after an equity crowdfunding campaign is taking place. My question would now be can you say anything about the determinants of firm failure once such a campaign is taking place? So before running the regression models, we again checked whether there are differences between German and UK firms and what we find is that UK firms have a higher probability of surviving three years after the latest equity crowdfunding campaigns. The regression results show that the number of senior management team members have a negative effect on the probability to fail. The same applies for the total amount that has been raised during the previous equity crowdfunding campaigns because some firms that actually ran several campaigns. Interestingly, firm valuation has a positive effect on the probability for firm to fail and the same applies for the number of initial venture capital investors. Okay, that is very interesting. So my question would be now that we have these results, can we claim that there is a causal relationship or is it just that we run one regression and now we are claiming that there is this result between these variables in our dependent variable or do we have any robustness checks in fact result? Yeah, we performed several robustness checks. So first we ran also accelerated payment time models with an exponential and a viable distribution and our results remain largely consistent. Furthermore, we performed a mediation analysis because you could argue that follow-up funding mediates the effect of the explanatory variables on firm failure but we did not find any effect that mediation is taking place. And lastly, you could argue that since we only focus on the successful equity crowdfunding campaigns that our data set faces a sample selection bias due to incorrect randomization. Luckily, we also have data on the unsuccessful campaigns in Germany. So we were able to run a hack and selection model and we did not find any effect. So the unobservables from the first stage are not correlated with the unobservables from the second stage. Okay, that is very interesting. So the final question that remains is can we say anything about practical implications of the study? What did we find out in terms of what should policymakers now do or can we say anything about holding managers and what they should do? There are two implications. First is that our study helps to differentiate between lemons and dairy businesses so it's actually quite helpful for portal managers and investors because they are still a lack of trust. And secondly, you could say, well, there are these differences between UK and German firms and why is that? Well, in the UK, UK firms typically offer real equity shares that come with the traditional control rights of a limited liability company attached. In Germany, however, you have different contracts such as silent partnerships that have little or no control rights at all and this might have an impact on the performance of the start-ups management team. Thank you very much, Lisa. That was very interesting. And can you say something? Yes, so before running the... Hello, my name. Okay. We have been investigating equity crowdfunding, which is... Can you say anything about our study, what we found out about Tromperia? I can. On the equity crowdfunding platform... Well, again, we first did a comparison between... Outside. This is Asia-Venture Capital investors. And we try to find out about that.