Entrepreneur Death and Startup Performance

Abstract How large is entrepreneurs’ personal importance to startups? We use the death of nearly 1,500 entrepreneurs as a source exogenous variation, and find sustained negative effects on growth profitability. For small startups, go mainly via firm survival, while for larger startups are growth. mean effect sales about 60%. The appear be driven by entrepreneur specialness rather than leadership transition; managers economically statistically stronger that not entrepreneurs.