Managing Together
Political alignment in entrepreneurial teams: Homophily in venture formation and associations with startup success
Balázs Kovács & Tim Sels
Strategic Management Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
We examine political affiliation's role in venture team formation and success. Using data from Crunchbase and L2 on 1125 US-based startups, we investigate political homophily in team assembly and its association with startup outcomes. Our analysis reveals strong political homogeneity in founding teams: teams with similar political views form more frequently than diverse teams, even after controlling for founders' gender, age, location, and industry. This political homophily relates to venture performance. Startups with politically heterogeneous founding teams are more likely to shut down. Across additional performance measures (capital funding, employee size, Crunchbase rankings), we observe directionally consistent associations with worse outcomes, though these secondary findings vary in robustness. These findings highlight the dual role of founders' political affiliations: their relationship with team composition and startup performance.
When Spouses Cofound: Evidence from a Field Experiment on Startup Hiring
Aleksandra Kacperczyk, Yiru (Susan) Wang & Tiantian Yang
University of Pennsylvania Working Paper, October 2025
Abstract:
Spousal cofounding teams are common, yet we know little about how they affect startups' ability to attract new hires. While prior work highlights internal advantages of spousal teams, such as trust, cohesion, and resilience, we propose that they may trigger concerns among external audiences by blurring professional and personal roles. Focusing on prospective employees, we predict that startups led by spousal cofounders face an "illegitimacy discount" in hiring, attracting fewer applicants, especially when the lead founder is male. We test these claims using a preregistered field experiment embedded in a live early-stage recruitment process. We find that candidates are less likely to apply to a startup cofounded by spouses and that this penalty is asymmetric: it is pronounced when the lead founder is male but weaker when the lead founder is female. Analysis of the Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics II (PSED II) corroborates external validity: spousal cofounding teams are prevalent but hire less than comparable nonspousal teams. Together, the results extend research on founding team composition and gender disparities in entrepreneurship by showing how spousal cofounding affects talent attraction and how gendered expectations condition perceptions of legitimacy in early startup hiring.
How do Barbarians Get to the Gates? Private Equity Careers, Styles, and Returns
Blake Jackson
University of Florida Working Paper, October 2025
Abstract:
Why do some fund managers outperform others? I construct a novel dataset to study this question in private equity (PE), tracking the careers and deals of PE professionals who have deployed 97% of capital for U.S. PE firms over the past three decades. I find that about 40% of a PE partner's investment performance can be explained by which PE firm they worked at as a junior associate. Moreover, 60% of this early-career effect is accounted for by the identity of their primary mentor. Comparing deals led by former associates from the same firm or the same mentor provides evidence that these effects are driven by distinct approaches to capital structure and portfolio company management learned early in their careers. Instrumental variable estimates at the PE firm level document additional short-run effects of associate experiences: the loss of junior associates decreases deal-making activity. Overall, my results show that fund managers' long-term investing success is significantly related to where their investment careers begin.
Should Human Capital Development Programs be Mandatory or Voluntary? Evidence from a Field Experiment on Mentorship
Jason Sandvik et al.
Management Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
In a field experiment, we find that a mandatory mentorship program raises worker productivity, whereas a voluntary version of the program does not. A significant reason why the mandatory program results in larger gains is that the lowest-productivity employees do not participate when the program is voluntary despite their having the greatest treatment benefits. A nationally representative survey of U.S. workers shows wide variation in human capital development program participation, suggesting that understanding self-selection is important for firms’ returns on these programs across a variety of settings. Our findings have implications for resource allocation, experimental design, productivity dispersion, and inequality.
AI as “Co-founder”: GenAI for Entrepreneurship
Junhui Jeff Cai et al.
University of Pennsylvania Working Paper, December 2025
Abstract:
This paper studies whether, how, and for whom generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) facilitates firm creation. Our identification strategy exploits the November 2022 release of ChatGPT as a global shock that lowered start-up costs and leverages variations across geocoded grids with differential pre-existing AI-specific human capital. Using high-resolution and universal data on Chinese firm registrations by the end of 2024, we find that grids with stronger AI-specific human capital experienced a sharp surge in new firm formation — driven entirely by small firms, contributing to 6.0% of overall national firm entry. Large-firm entry declines, consistent with a shift toward leaner ventures. New firms are smaller in capital, shareholder number, and founding team size, especially among small firms. The effects are strongest among firms with potential AI applications, weaker financing needs, and among first-time entrepreneurs. Overall, our results highlight that GenAI serves as a pro-competitive force by disproportionately boosting small-firm entry.
Comparing AI Agents to Cybersecurity Professionals in Real-World Penetration Testing
Justin Lin et al.
Stanford Working Paper, December 2025
Abstract:
We present the first comprehensive evaluation of AI agents against human cybersecurity professionals in a live enterprise environment. We evaluate ten cybersecurity professionals alongside six existing AI agents and ARTEMIS, our new agent scaffold, on a large university network consisting of ∼8,000 hosts across 12 subnets. ARTEMIS is a multi-agent framework featuring dynamic prompt generation, arbitrary sub-agents, and automatic vulnerability triaging. In our comparative study, ARTEMIS placed second overall, discovering 9 valid vulnerabilities with an 82% valid submission rate and outperforming 9 of 10 human participants. While existing scaffolds such as Codex and CyAgent underperformed relative to most human participants, ARTEMIS demonstrated technical sophistication and submission quality comparable to the strongest participants. We observe that AI agents offer advantages in systematic enumeration, parallel exploitation, and cost -- certain ARTEMIS variants cost $18/hour versus $60/hour for professional penetration testers. We also identify key capability gaps: AI agents exhibit higher false-positive rates and struggle with GUI-based tasks.
Effects of Task Switching on Depletion, Motivation, and Creativity: Examining the Nature of Tasks
Christina Nuhn & Sandra Ohly
Journal of Personnel Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Work interruptions are a frequent occurrence during the workday. This study sheds light on two crucial yet overlooked aspects of work interruptions: task switching and routinized tasks. We randomly assigned 152 knowledge workers to a task switching group or control group. The task switching group switched between a complex task (divergent thinking task) and a routine task (revising an email). The control group performed the tasks sequentially. Participants in the experimental group reported significantly less depletion, higher task focus, and higher motivation than the control group. The effects were pronounced for individuals with a high preference for multitasking. No significant differences were found for creative performance. By shedding light on task complexity and multitasking preferences, this study contributes to a more balanced examination of the positive and negative aspects of task switching.
Inventor Commingling and Innovation in Technology Start-up Acquisitions
Qingqing Chen, David Hsu & David Zvilichovsky
Organization Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
We explore a form of postacquisition integration by which inventors from the target and acquiring organizations share and integrate technological and organizational knowledge, performing joint research and development. We refer to this phenomenon as inventor commingling. Grounded in the knowledge-based view, we posit that commingling enhances the target firm’s innovation performance by enabling the transfer of the acquirer’s organizational knowledge, preserving the target’s existing knowledge base. We explore how commingling differs from structural integration and how the two forms of integration can be combined for postacquisition management. We posit that commingling diminishes the negative effects of structural integration, whereas structural integration may enhance the efficacy of commingling. Because organizational knowledge is firm-specific and cumulative, commingling efficacy should increase with acquirer commingling inventors’ tenure. To test these predictions, we assemble a large sample of acquisitions to study the effect of these forms of postacquisition integration on acquired entity innovation outcomes. Our results support a positive commingling innovation effect, which is more pronounced under structural integration. A high degree of commingling can mitigate the negative effects of postacquisition structural integration documented in the literature. We use direct flights between the acquisition party locations as an instrument to address the potentially endogenous process of inventor commingling. We find consistent results. Our study raises the possibility of inventor commingling as a distinct form of postacquisition integration, which holds the potential of effectively transferring organizational knowledge and supporting postacquisition innovation output, sidestepping the classic postacquisition integration–autonomy trade-off.