Data. Models. Reject. Repeat.

The timing of talent acquisition is a central decision for new ventures. On one hand, hiring after demand is proven minimizes losses. On the other hand, hiring before demand is proven allows new ventures to start developing unique capabilities. We resolve this tension by proposing that the timing depends on human resource redeployability. We test our theory with the population of Finnish ventures, showing that portfolio entrepreneurs hire more employees early on because of higher redeployment potential and that they hire employees with more transferable skills in order to benefit from the redeployment option. To probe our mechanisms, we examine how talent acquisition strategies in portfolio and standalone ventures vary with external conditions that reduce or amplify the benefits of redeployment.

Paper · Forbes summary

Entrepreneurship research has traditionally emphasized the human capital of founders and founding teams. Yet as startups scale, their performance increasingly depends on how they attract, organize, develop, and retain talent. We argue that startup labor markets provide a unifying strategic lens for understanding how ventures build organizational capabilities under uncertainty. We organize this perspective around three structural features of startups: uncertainty about product-market fit, resource and reputational scarcity, and high failure risk. These structural features generate distinctive labor market frictions that shape hiring, compensation, job design, learning, and mobility for both startups and workers. We conclude by outlining a research agenda and showing how a labor market perspective advances strategic entrepreneurship by reframing venture scaling as the strategic organization of human capital under uncertainty.

Paper

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.

How do binding wage constraints reshape ownership allocation in startups, and what are the consequences for workforce outcomes? Using population-wide administrative data on Finnish startups (2006–2022), we study how mandated wage floors affect employee equity and worker mobility. We exploit staggered introductions and removals of collective bargaining agreement extensions that impose binding wage floors on previously uncovered firms, generating plausibly exogenous variation in wages and equity compensation. Extensions reduce individual employee equity stakes by 10–11%. Instrumental variables estimates show that a 10% increase in employee equity reduces one-year exit by 2.5–3% and increases internal advancement by 10–12%, with weaker effects in high-technology industries.

Paper

We use census data on all Finnish firms during the period from 1996 to 2020 to study the impact of within-family CEO transitions on firm productivity. More specifically, we investigate how successions by the previous CEO’s children and other relatives affect productivity compared to successions by nonfamily CEOs. We further explore how top management team human capital (excluding the CEO) interacts with within-family CEO transitions to affect productivity. In line with prior research, we find a negative effect of family succession on productivity. Extending prior literature, we find the productivity penalty is only significant in the first two years after the transition. We further find that management team work experience is a critical ingredient in successful within-family CEO transitions. Meanwhile, we find no effect of the CEO’s education or experience, or the management team’s education, on productivity following within-family CEO succession. Finally, we explore the mechanisms, specifically management practice changes, behind the family CEO succession penalty.

Paper

A rich literature underscores the behavioral theory of the firm. A core concept of this literature concerns performance feedback, the term linking managerial behavioral responses to the performance which guides subsequent firm action. We highlight an implicit feature of the literature, namely that empirical research typically observes performance feedback through the annual windows of archival reporting. We relax this assumption and document the aspiration-feedback relationship by estimating the same model at 1-, 3-, 7-, 30-, 90-, and 365-day windows. To that end, we take advantage of the context of Bitcoin miners, integrating detailed data for publicly traded miners with daily BTC inflows, market data, and blockchain network data. This is a setting where (i) mining for Bitcoin represents a highly uncertain action, and (ii) performance feedback does not require years or quarters to feed back, and often materializes instantaneously. We document substantial differences across windows. Social aspiration effects are negative at short windows and become weaker or positive at longer horizons. Historical aspiration effects are salient mostly at intermediate windows. The main contribution of our findings is to document that estimates of the aspiration-feedback relationship depend substantially on the temporal window over which feedback and response are observed. A secondary contribution is to our understanding of the Bitcoin setting: we discuss how annual estimates may confound operational adjustment, managerial attention, and capacity adaptation, and suggest how departure from annual to monthly-to-quarterly windows may be most aligned with the canonical assumptions of the behavioral theory of the firm.

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.

Although gender disparities in pay have been extensively studied in mature firms, less attention has been devoted to gender disparities in startups. We propose that startup employment amplifies gender disparities in pay relative to mature, established firms. More specifically, we argue that women earn lower returns to startup employment than men, primarily due to disparities in a less transparent form of compensation: equity pay. Using matched employer–employee Finnish registry data between 2006 and 2019, we find empirical support for our predictions. To probe the mechanisms, we exploit an exogenous shock: an increase in ownership transparency. Consistent with our predictions, we find that gender disparities in equity pay within startups decline following an increase in ownership transparency, lending support to opacity being the key mechanism driving gender disparities in equity pay. Finally, this effect of transparency is most pronounced for women (a) joining male-founded startups; (b) with no previous startup experience. Overall, our study offers novel evidence for gender differences in returns to startup employment and the underlying mechanisms driving these disparities.

Paper available upon request.

Prior research documents systematic earnings penalties among startup joiners relative to comparable workers in established firms. At the same time, startup employment is associated with rare but extraordinary wealth creation. We examine who captures this upside and through what organizational mechanism. Using linked Finnish employer–employee and ownership data from 2006 to 2022, we show that equity ownership is the primary channel through which startup employment generates long-run gains. Those gains are concentrated in mid-stage startups, where equity holders realize substantially higher long-run earnings than both non-equity joiners and observationally similar employees in incumbent firms. Non-equity joiners, by contrast, bear the wage penalty without the upside. The findings reframe the startup wage penalty as a question about the allocation of ownership rather than about wages, and identify the stage at which that allocation pays.

Paper available upon request.

Organizations are adopting AI tools faster than they can tell which of their people will actually use them. This project asks whether structured executive interviews, transcribed and coded, predict which employees go on to adopt AI in their work, and whether leadership experience with transformation, technology, and scaling, observable from career histories alone, bears on an organization’s capacity to direct that adoption. The setting is an AI assessment platform used by private equity firms, in which structured interview transcripts and career records are linked to the organizations those executives lead. The aim is a measurement approach that treats AI adoption as a predictable consequence of what an interview reveals about a person and a team, rather than as a matter of tools or training alone.

Paper available upon request.

When a dominant employer collapses, it releases experienced workers into the labor market all at once. We ask how the thickness of the entrepreneurial labor market for a worker’s own occupation shapes where those workers land and how well they fare afterwards. Using the collapse of Nokia’s handset business and population-wide Finnish employer–employee registers, we compare displaced workers with otherwise similar job switchers in the same occupation, local labor market, year, and age band. Where young firms account for a larger share of hiring in a worker’s occupation, displaced workers are markedly more likely to enter a startup. Their earnings fall sharply in the first year after displacement and rise substantially from the third. But the gain accrues almost entirely to those who joined established firms, not startups. A thick entrepreneurial labor market benefits displaced workers by raising their outside options generally, through competition among all local employers, rather than through the young firms themselves.

Paper available upon request.