During a springboard session, the entrepreneur meets an expert panel which gives himor her strategic advice. How these meetings transpire is of great importance when itcomes to the support of regional, as well as national entrepreneurship and economicgrowth. The purpose of this paper is to investigate what is verbally expressed duringthese meetings and how this can assist entrepreneurship. Eleven different springboardsare investigated via the method of content analysis. These springboards concernedentrepreneurs who merely sought strategic business advice or those who applied forventure capital. The results indicate that the entrepreneurs who applied for venturecapital had less use for the advice than the other group. This can partly be explainedby panel members’ focus on risk and the institutionalized conditions which build on arational discourse.