Actors on occasion, creators all along. Pitching as a sensemaking/sensegiving process in the entrepreneurial becoming.

When it comes to studying the entrepreneurial pitch, research efforts have so far focused on the pitching performance, the five to ten minutes interlude, overlooking how founder’s craft understandings of their new venture’s identity within its becoming process. By doing so, we have remained blind to both the mechanisms needed to give sense to and, even more pointedly, to the ones concurring to making sense of a nascent entrepreneurial identity. With a longitudinal study of thirteen start-ups’ pitching journeys, we dig into the interaction between sensegiving and sensemaking, as they occur in the reiterated pitch’s designing and delivering processes, which punctuate a new venture’s early life. We show how the uncertainty surrounding the design of a convincing pitch spurs a sensemaking process, meant to then trigger the sensegiving embodied in the pitch artifact. Furthermore, we make apparent the interplay between founders’ sensegiving process by delivering the pitch and the contextual sensemaking triggered by unexpected instances such as the articulation of the narratives addressing audiences’ expectations and the emergence of challenging feedbacks. Overall, new venturers iteratively craft and revise their pitch facing and, hopefully, coping with simultaneous sensemaking and sensegiving demands, that affect not merely their short performance, but rather their very own entrepreneurial identity construction