Research Agenda

My research focuses on human capital and resource mobilization strategies in entrepreneurial and innovation-driven organizations. In one research stream, I explore how the background and experience of founders and investors affect the survival and performance of early-stage startups. In another research stream, I investigate how firms can efficiently hire and manage entrepreneurial and innovative human capital.

I value collecting field-based data, through collaboration with organizations and designing field experiments, to advance theory and inform practice. Throughout my research, I seek to enhance our knowledge on (1) how entrepreneurs and innovators of diverse backgrounds and experiences can successfully navigate the labor market and capital markets and (2) how organizations can develop their human capital strategies to boost innovation and performance.

Publications

“Cascading Innovation: R&D Team Design and Performance Implications of Mobility”

Strategic Management Journal, 2022

Given the high cost of external hiring and uncertainty related to performance benefits, how can organizations foster an environment that maximizes the post-mobility performance of external hires and their collaborators? In this paper, I posit that R&D team design is an important factor that could shape the post-mobility performances of both groups. Building on the interfirm mobility, innovation, and teams literatures, I argue that technological knowledge diversity within teams and across teams could differently impact innovation performance. Analyzing 63,976 interfirm moves of engineers and scientists, I find that the post-mobility performances of external hires and teammates are conditioned by team design. A high level of within-team diversity improves the performances of both groups, while a high level of across-team diversity hurts their innovation outcomes.

“The Evaluation of Founder Failure and Success by Hiring Firms: A Field Experiment” (with Tristan L. Botelho)

Organization Science, 2022

Organizations tout the importance of innovation and entrepreneurship. Yet, when hiring it remains unclear how they evaluate entrepreneurial human capital—namely, job candidates with founder experience. How hiring firms evaluate this experience—and especially how this evaluation varies by entrepreneurial success and failure—reveals insights into the structures and processes within organizations. Organizations research points to two perspectives related to the evaluation of founder experience: Former founders may be advantaged, due to founder experience signaling high-quality capabilities and human capital, or disadvantaged, due to concerns related to fit and commitment. To identify the dominant class of mechanisms driving the evaluation of founder experience, it is important to consider how these evaluations differ, depending on whether the founder’s venture failed or succeeded. To isolate demand-side mechanisms and hold supply-side factors constant, we conducted a field experiment. We sent applications varying the candidate’s founder experience to 2,400 software engineering positions in the United States at random. We find that former founders received 43% fewer callbacks than nonfounders and that this difference is driven by older hiring firms. Further, this founder penalty is greatest for former successful founders, who received 33% fewer callbacks than former failed founders. Our results highlight that mechanisms related to concerns about fit and commitment, rather than information asymmetry about quality, are most influential when hiring firms evaluate former founders in our context.

Working Papers

“Equity Crowdfunding and Underrepresented Entrepreneurs ”

Under review

Policy Paper

“Women and Minority-Owned Businesses in Regulation Crowdfunding”

U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Small Business Capital Formation Reports, 2024

Research in Progress

“Founder Status and Job Interest”

“Startup Evaluation Project”

“The Role of Human Capital in Startup Evaluation”