Two's Company: Composition, Structure and Performance of Entrepreneurial Pairs

The goal of this paper is to study the relation between diversity and the
survival and growth of new ventures. In our opinion, existing studies on
this topic are too ambitious since they attempt to create an overall unidi-
rectional diversity measure for a team thereby ignoring the complexity of
dimensionality that exist with larger teams of dierent sizes. This study will
therefore focus on a sub sample of entrepreneurial teams, i.e. entrepreneurial
pairs, where we attempt to show that diversity has a strong directional fea-
ture, i.e. it matters who has which demographic characteristic rather it is a
unidirectional property. These entrepreneurial pairs and their demographic
characteristics will be identied by using the Danish Linked Employer Em-
ployee Database, which provides detailed rm and personal information.
Preliminary results of the analyses indicate that it indeed matters who has
which demographic characteristic in how the diversity aects performance.
Older founders generally have lower employment growth. Pairs of males
perform better than pairs of females. Education level has no clear eect
on either survival or growth. For education type, however, we observe that
businesses do well with STEM as primary founder and Business second, but
perform poorly when Business is the primary founder and STEM second.
Industry experience helps survival but not growth. Family rms have lower
employment growth (especially when founded with a mother or spouse).