Establishing legitimacy with multiple audiences across legitimacy thresholds is critical for the emergence of a new venture. Yet, how entrepreneurs navigate the challenges of building legitimacy with multiple audiences as they navigate venture emergence remains underexplored and under studied. Building on a comparative case study of four entrepreneurs over 34 months, and drawing on the Lean Startup as a context we develop an empirically grounded theorization of venture emergence as a process of legitimacy seeking. We characterize the process of startup emergence into distinct phases: socializing and actualizing each characterized by distinct audiences, resources and activities. Our conceptualization advances new venture legitimacy through an articulation of venture emergence as a legitimacy seeking process while also addressing repeated calls to advance an activity-based understanding of how entrepreneurs create new ventures.