This paper explores and explains how, why and with what consequences business angels' trust in the entrepreneur affects their decisions to invest, reinvest or withdraw funding in the Valley of Death (VoD). Drawing on the VoD literature and on business angel research, we retrospectively study two contrastive cases of success and failure of French start-ups operating in the IT sector over a period of two and nine years, respectively, by taking the dyadic relationship between business angels and entrepreneurs as unit of analysis. We document the business angels' trust evolution over time and we show how trust shifts facilitate or damage the entrepreneurs' journey through the VoD. We offer a process-model of sustaining business angels’ trust in entrepreneur-business angel relationships to cross the VoD, thus addressing recent calls for more in-depth examinations of social aspects in investment and post-investment business angel research.

本文探讨并解释了商业天使对企业家的信任如何、为什么以及会产生什么后果，影响他们在死亡之谷 (VoD) 中投资、再投资或撤回资金的决定。借鉴 VoD 文献和商业天使研究，我们通过商业天使之间的二元关系，回顾性研究了法国初创企业在两年和九年内在 IT 领域运营的成功和失败的两个对比案例和企业家作为分析单位。我们记录了商业天使的信任随时间的演变，并展示了信任转变如何促进或损害企业家通过 VoD 的旅程。我们提供了一个流程模型来维持商业天使对企业家-商业天使关系的信任以跨越 VoD，