The Startup Funding Process: Best Practices Analysed Through the Lens of LinkedIn’s Top Voices

Access to financing is one of the main challenges that early-stage ventures typically have to overcome in order to survive. Startups usually have limited collateral and untested business models, and they operate in unstable conditions. In this context, LinkedIn is considered a publicly observable arena where professional identity, incentives and knowledge intersect. Rather than replacing academic literature, practitioner manuals, and mentoring programmes, LinkedIn can serve as a complementary source of practical knowledge suitable for the creation of an exploratory content map and for hypothesis generation about best practices in startup funding. The study collects a verifiable archive of over 400 LinkedIn documents and uses a double-layered analytical approach combining descriptive content mapping with qualitative content analysis. It examines whether LinkedIn can serve as a timely and practice-oriented source on startup financing, capable of revealing emerging practices and the conditions in which they seem to apply, while recognising the limitations arising from selection and engagement biases, uneven geographical contextualisation, reliance on self-reported evidence, and the partial coverage of topics embedded in social platforms.