Linked founder–startup data

Strategy research treats performance heterogeneity as a central puzzle, but most evidence on its sources is assembled only after outcomes have already diverged. This paper asks whether founders’ entry decisions reveal, before outcomes materialize, how widely those outcomes will later spread. Building on occupational-choice models and the options logic of entrepreneurial entry, I recover the payoff-dispersion threshold at which a founder is just indifferent between continued paid employment and founding, given the founder’s forgone wage, wealth, and the scale of the opportunity. I call this revealed-preference threshold entry-implied dispersion. Using Finnish linked employer–employee and business-registry data for 2001–2022 on the founders of limited-liability firms, I aggregate founder-level thresholds to three-digit industry-years and validate them against realized revenue-growth dispersion for two non-overlapping groups: the entering cohort of new firms and incumbent firms fixed before entry. Entry-implied dispersion predicts entrant-cohort dispersion immediately and incumbent dispersion with delay. A serial-founder test that removes each founder’s own prior entry hurdle attenuates the cohort-level relationship but leaves the delayed incumbent relationship intact, suggesting that the cohort result partly reflects persistent founder-level heterogeneity while the incumbent result reflects a broader industry-level signal. Two further checks sharpen this reading: an expected-payoff version of the same entry inputs shows no comparable link to realized dispersion, and entry-implied dispersion shows no comparable link to average realized returns. Together, the results suggest that a founding decision carries information about how unevenly a competitive arena’s future outcomes will be spread, and how much of that spread traces to the founders themselves versus the arena they enter.

Paper available upon request.

Family ties may strengthen trust and coordination within entrepreneurial teams, but their consequences for external audiences remain less understood. We examine whether sibling cofounding affects startup hiring and whether this effect is moderated by lead-founder gender. We test these questions using a preregistered two-stage LinkedIn field experiment embedded in a real hiring process, complemented by a preregistered online experiment on Prolific. The field experiment provides causal evidence that sibling cofounding reduces applicant attraction, but only conditionally: the penalty is concentrated in male-leading sibling teams, whereas female-leading sibling teams in some comparisons are even weakly preferred to comparable non-family teams. Supplementary analyses further suggest that this pattern may extend to applicant sorting: among highly educated candidates, male-led sibling teams appear less attractive, whereas female-led sibling teams appear more attractive. The online experiment replicates the same asymmetric pattern and identifies startup attractiveness as the central moderated mediator: male-leading sibling teams are penalized because they are seen as less attractive employers, with this discount accompanied by stronger boundary-related concerns and weaker assessments of professionalism and fairness. An additional analysis of Finnish register data on the population of two-founder ventures shows the same asymmetry in realized employment: sibling ventures led by a brother employ fewer people in their first five years than comparable non-family ventures, whereas those led by a sister do not. Together, these findings show that sibling cofounding does not create a uniform hiring penalty. Instead, its labor-market consequences depend critically on who leads the venture.

Paper available upon request.