Entrepreneurial Strategy and Scaling in a Global Digital Economy

The number of promising technology startups has increased worldwide, yet few outside the US manage to scale. What accounts for these international scaling disparities? This dissertation assesses the role of entrepreneurial and gatekeeper decisions in these scaling differences. From the perspective of entrepreneurs, the first chapter assesses the role of strategy, finding that strategy matters more in institutional contexts where mistakes are more costly, though it is harder to develop there because entrepreneurs learn from prior mistakes. The second chapter illuminates how such differences in entrepreneurial decisions may emerge from locally-embedded knowledge, showing how geographic exposure shapes entrepreneurs’ core experimentation and strategy. From the perspective of gatekeepers, the third chapter finds that judges in accelerator competitions discount startups foreign to them, driven not by a local information advantage, but rather by pure preference. The last chapter explores the role of open-source platforms—another type of gatekeeper for startups to access technical knowledge and coordination. It finds that such platforms increase entry into entrepreneurship overall, but more so for startups already in highly-endowed contexts, suggesting that the platform’s design decisions may contribute to entrepreneurial growth differences. Together, these papers reveal how decision-making interacts with institutional contexts to shape the growth trajectories of startups around the world.