In recent years, entrepreneurship scholars have taken an interest in founders’ identity as a factor explaining variation in the goals and strategies employed in new ventures. The starting point for our study was the question, how does culture influence founders’ identity? What emerged from this in-depth, qualitative inductive study is the concept of identity‒society (mis)alignment. This largely determines whether the entrepreneur adopts a primarily economic logic, therefore reproducing existing social structures in the venture’s operations, or whether she adopts an aim to defy and change existing norms and structures with her product or in the way she runs her venture.
