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Recognizing that detailed work on social competence in the context of early entrepreneurial processes is still scarce and, at the same time, building further on existing work, we investigated how and to what extent social competence influences social capital among students with latent entrepreneurial ambitions. For this purpose, an empirical study was carried out among 131 Masters students following a university entrepreneurship education programme. Hierarchal regression analysis showed that social competence, as a composite variable, had a significant effect on the social capital of early-stage entrepreneurs. In particular, social competence directly influenced (structural) aspects of social capital, namely the number of people the early-stage entrepreneur had access to via strong and weak links, as well as the range of occupations these people represented. Thus, social competence increased not only the …