Software startups often make assumptions about the problems and customers they are addressing as well as the market and the solutions they are developing. Testing the right assumptions early is a means to mitigate risks. Approaches such as Lean Startup foster this kind of testing by applying experimentation as part of a constant build-measure-learn feedback loop. The existing research on how so...

While much attention has been paid to company founders, very little is known regarding the first set of non-founder employees who join high-growth startups ("early employees"). This paper explores the wage differential between venture capital-backed startups and established firms given that the two firm types compete for talent. Using data on graduating college students from MIT, I find that VC...

As social media attract increasing attention from executives and find varied applications in different industries and fields of practice, research on the subject has been investigating the antecedents, moderators, mediators and outcomes of social media adoption, as well as impacts on the organizational and individual level. However, relatively little attention has been paid to the discussion of...

This position paper addresses the software engineering practices in startups. The focus of most software engineering research has been on established companies. However, startup technology companies have become important producers of innovative and software intensive products despite the fact that they are under severe time-to-market pressure. Given that software engineering is the core activit...

While business accelerators remain understudied in the academic literature, there is growing interest in understanding how accelerators work and where they provide value to entrepreneurs. In this paper, we focus exactly on this question – we examine how mentorship and investor ties, two key aspects observed across accelerators in general lead to positive accelerator outcomes and through them, t...

This paper is an attempt to answer whether we can utilize intellectual properties for the financing of startups and why that is so. In order to tackle these questions, we conducted a questionnaire survey for startups and fund providers in Japan. Based on the results of this survey, we will examine how intellectual properties are actually used for their financing and why they are used in such a ...

Team Heterogeneity in Startups and its Development over Time We investigate the workforce heterogeneity of startups with respect to education, age and wages. Our explorative study uses data on the population of 1,614 Danish firms founded in 1998. We track these firms until 2001 which enables us to analyze changes in workforce composition over time. Such a dynamic analysis constitutes a hitherto...

This paper examines the relationship between firm births and job creation in Great Britain. We use a new data set for 60 British regions, covering the whole of Great Britain, between 1980 and 1998. The central theme of the paper is that, with the exception of a recent paper by Audretsch and Fritsch for Germany, the relationship between new-firm startups and employment growth has previously been...

Software startups face with multiple technical and business challenges, which could make the startup journey longer, or even become a failure. Little is known about entrepreneurial decision making as a direct force to startup development outcome. In this study, we attempted to apply a behavior theory of entrepreneurial firms to understand the root-cause of some software startup’s challenges. Si...

This paper examines the relationship between firm births and job creation in Great Britain. We use a new data set for 60 British regions, covering the whole of Great Britain, between 1980 and 1998. The central theme of the paper is that, with the exception of a recent paper by Audretsch and Fritsch for Germany, the relationship between new-firm startups and employment growth has previously been...