Exploratory study of words and emotions in tweets of UK startup founders

Every day one can see evidence of intensive activities concerning “startups” and their founders. In particular, EU governments play an active role in investing taxpayers’ money into startups which are, by their very definition, high risk business ventures. To evaluate such market interventions precise methodologies and measures must be developed. However, at present there is a clear lack of definition of startups in terms of their quantitative description. This problem is the main motivation of this research. Instead of trying to answer what a startup is, or emphasise its descriptive attributes, dynamic observation of what startup founders actually do could provide important insights into the whole startup phenomenon.