enture capital can not only provide fund support for start-ups, but also can provide non-financial support such as business resource and management experience. However, due to high threshold and uncertainty of high-tech start-ups, venture capital face huge challenge in investment decision-making. Investors can apply founder’s reputation as a signal when selecting target to invest. This article combines reputation theory and characteristics of start-ups, redefines founder’s reputation as a combination of academic reputation, business reputation, political reputation and social reputation, and then evaluates founder’s reputation from each of the four aspects. This article uses the 319 companies that were listed on China GEM between 2009—2015 as sample base, and applies Logit model to study the correlations between founder’s reputation and the odds of acquiring venture capital. Study results show that founder’s reputation is positively correlated to the odds of acquiring venture capital, among which academic reputation and social reputation are the most significant. Study results also show that interaction effect exists between the four aspects, for example founder’s social reputation can substitute the positive effect of academic reputation.