Is Success Hereditary? Evidence on the Performance of Spawned Ventures

A common phenomenon in entrepreneurship is that employees turn away from employmentto found their own businesses. Prior literature discusses the former employers’characteristics that influence the creation of entrepreneurial ventures. An investigation ofwhether these characteristics also affect the success of the spawned ventures is missing so far. This paper contributes to the literature by showing that entrepreneurial ventures spawned by well performing firms are financially more successful than ventures stemming from bad performing firms. This suggests that spawned entrepreneurs are able to exploit valuable knowledge from their previous employers which impacts their ventures’ performance positively. The analysis is based on a linked employee-employer dataset for the Netherlands for the period 1999-2004.