Early Joiners and Startup Performance

Joonkyu Choi; Nathan Goldschlag; John Haltiwanger; J. Daniel Kim

doi:10.1162/rest_a_01386

Early Joiners and Startup Performance

Joonkyu Choi¹; Nathan Goldschlag²; John Haltiwanger³; J. Daniel Kim⁴

¹ Federal Reserve Board of Governors · ² Economic Innovation Group · ³ University of Maryland · ⁴ The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

The Review of Economics and Statistics 2025

We show that early joiners—nonfounder employees in the first year of a startup—play a critical role in shaping firm performance. We use administrative employer-employee matched data on U.S. startups and utilize premature death as a natural experiment that exogenously separates talent from startups. We find that losing an early joiner has large negative effects on employment and revenues that persist for at least ten years. In contrast, losing a later joiner yields only a small and temporary decline in firm performance. Our results imply that organization capital, an important driver of startup success, is embodied in early joiners.

DOI: 10.1162/rest_a_01386
Volume: 107 (6)
Pages: 1485-1500
Language: en
Export: BibTeX
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