"Ahead of the Curve? New Venture Scaling and the Influence of Early Joiners with Entrepreneurial Experience"
I examine the relationship between hiring early “joiners” with experience working in the entrepreneurial ecosystem and survival outcomes as ventures move towards “scaling up.” Building on the idea that tacit knowledge about early-stage entrepreneurial domains constitutes an important resource for new ventures, I propose that a channel by which ventures can develop this resource is through their early joiners. However, I also propose that there are diminishing and even negative returns to further developing this resource in teams where there is already a large extant stock of such experience present. For growth-oriented ventures, overweighting on entrepreneurial experience in early hiring risks imprinting the organization with routines, assumptions, and practices that become outmoded as the venture transitions towards more structure as it grows. I test these predictions using a novel dataset on the internal organizations of 1,470 U.S.-based, venture-capital-financed ventures founded during the time period of 2005-2012. I supplement these data with 44 semi-structured interviews. My findings reveal that “founding” and “growth” stages are not as discrete as sometimes conceptualized in organizational scholarship and suggest that ventures that aspire to growth need to anticipate more structured environments to come even when composing their early teams.
LOCATION:Chao 300 STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20180927T163000Z DTEND:20180927T180000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR