Trickle-Down Entrepreneurship: Prior Mentorship and the Formation of Academic Entrepreneurs

People select one another in professional relationships for a variety of reasons. We hypothesize that individuals match to their associates along a set of prominent dimensions, and in so doing, expose themselves to many unanticipated social influences. To examine the inter-generational transmission of traits in the context of scientific mentorship, we collect a novel dataset tracking the training and professional activities of elite young scientists. We show that scientists-in-training choose their mentors along scientific dimensions, but subsequently adopt their prior advisor’s commercial orientations. We draw upon qualitative evidence in the form of oral histories, as well as the implementation of inverse probability of treatment weights (IPTW) to estimate causal treatment effects. Taken together, we propose an atypical model of structural influence whereby career paths are opened through prior professional relationships, but the dimensions by which we assess influence are neither deliberately formed nor the outcomes of standard assortative matching. We propose that this model of structural influence may exemplify a common social dynamic.