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Exploring The Puzzle Of Functional Homophily In New Venture Founding Teams, Steven Michael Gray

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Despite the long-term benefits of establishing a founding team with diverse functional knowledge, many entrepreneurs assemble a team of cofounders who are homogenous with respect to functional background. I examine this phenomenon in two empirical settings. First, in a university incubator program that brings together faculty, students, and outside community members, I use survey and audio data to examine the team formation process. I found that entrepreneurs initiate contact with a range of potential cofounders: some of whom possess functional knowledge that is different from the entrepreneur and others who share the same functional background as the entrepreneur. However, conditional …