Early-stage resource acquisition processes in a digital healthcare venture

While prior research has made significant progress in understanding how new ventures acquire resources from key external resource providers, it provides few insights into the resource acquisition decisions during a new venture's earliest stages. Thus, our study explores how resource acquisition unfolds in nascent stages through an inductive and in-depth single case study of a digital healthcare venture and presents implications for software development. Using digital trace data from founders' digital calendars tracking 1,133 meetings with resource providers, we delve deeper into resource acquisition in the crucial first two and a half years. Founders engage in an expansive and simultaneous search for multiple resources, which ebbs and flows based on founders' exit expectations, periods of resource scarcity, and access to less commonly studied peripheral resources. We present propositions for future empirical research on software development and digital entrepreneurship.