Novel startup companies often face not only risk, but also unforeseeable uncertainty (the inability to recognize and articulate all relevant variables affecting performance). The literature recognizes that established risk planning methods are very powerful when the nature of risks is well understood, but that they are insufficient for managing unforeseeable uncertainty. For this case, two fund...

With the high level of interest in patent monetization and its effects on US companies, data on the topic is increasingly important. This study examines one aspect of the topic, focusing on the effects of the rising patent monetization market on startup companies. The study provides one of the rare glimpses of monetization activity outside of lawsuits. It provides both quantitative and qualitat...

We study the impact of private ownership, incentive pay and local development objectives on university licensing performance. We develop and test a simple contracting model of technology licensing offices, using new survey information together with panel data on U.S. universities for 1995-99. We find that private universities are much more likely to adopt incentive pay than public ones, but own...

T word ‘merger’ often is associated with a big company buying a smaller one or two large companies coming together. But it is not only large companies that can succeed through acquisitions—even startups can use mergers as an effective way to grow their businesses. As a small team leading the startup Ocimum Biosolutions, based in Hyderabad, India, a decade ago, my colleagues and I could have opt...

The genesis of HomeAway, Inc. was startup by accretion – eight companies in the web-based vacation home rental market were acquired and merged. The technical solution during the merger and acquisition phase was to assimilate the software functionality of each of the eight companies into a one-size-fits-all application that could be configured with runtime settings to support the look-andfeel of...

The concept of Exploratory Capacity (EC)—the amount of slack resources an organization has (in the form of people, time and/or money), that can be devoted to simultaneous technical and market discovery—is introduced to describe how innovators can proceed under conditions of great uncertainty, specifically when technologies and markets are co-evolving. Drawing on a sample of 31 companies whose b...

Software startups are newly created companies with little operating history and oriented towards producing cutting-edge products. As their time and resources are extremely scarce, and one failed project can put them out of business, startups need effective practices to face with those unique challenges. However, only few scientific studies attempt to address characteristics of failure, especial...

Recently, The Wall Street Journal proclaimed the “War for Internet Talent” among companies in the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector. At the same time, talented employees become entrepreneurial and establish their own startups. We aim to provide evidence that startup performance is not based exclusively on access to talent, in the sense of individual human capital, but is als...

Honors and Awards • Yahoo! Graduate Teaching Award, 2013 • Runner-up at Cornell Startup Weekend, 2012 • SIGMOD 2011 Best Paper Award for “Entangled Queries: Enabling Declarative Datadriven Coordination” • Certificate of Achievement for outstanding contributions as a Teaching Assistant, Fall 2010 • Autodesk Fellowship, Cornell University, 2009-2010 • Bigyan Sinha Memorial Award, 2009 • O. P. Jin...