created at firm formation and is inalienable from the founding team itself. To test this hypothesis, we exploit premature … deaths to identify the causal impact of losing a founding team member on startup performance. We find that the exogenous … separation of a founding team member due to premature death has a persistently large, negative, and statistically significant …

diversity (i.e., within the team) as well as vertical diversity (i.e., team to faculty advisor) and their effect on performance … course was run in multiple cohorts in otherwise identical formats except for the team formation mechanism used. In several … exogenous to the gender make-up of the entrepreneurial team, the positive performance effects can be interpreted as causal …