Three Essays on Early Stage Entrepreneurial Teams: Formation, Evolution and Configurations

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in early-stage entrepreneurial team formation.Despite the importance placed by scholars through scientific and anecdotal evidence on the importance of entrepreneurial team formation decisions, team formation decisions are often overlooked in favor of understanding and bettering decisions about business ideas.Moreover, such studies often treat idea and team formation decisions as silos, while in reality, they often interact and could potentially explain differences in startup outcomes.Given the importance of human capital on startup outcomes, it is crucial to understand how entrepreneurial teams are formed and how we could form better teams.The uncertainty inherent in the startup process adds complexity and dynamism to such decisions; the cost of decision errors could be fatal mainly due to the resource constraints that early-stage startups often face. By exploring how entrepreneurs could make better team formation decisions, how decisions about the idea affect team formation, and how the idea and team co-evolve, I aim to contribute to entrepreneurial team formation and, more broadly, to early-stage entrepreneurship literature.In the first paper, A Scientific Approach to Entrepreneurial Founding Team Formation, I conceptualize a process called ‘Team Validation’ by applying a structured decision-making framework called the entrepreneurs-as-scientists approach to entrepreneurial founding team formation.Through a conceptual model, I suggest that implementing this structured process will reduce decision errors in team formation decision-making through a better understanding of team requirements and improved skills-requirements fit, which could enhance the resource efficiency of the team and, thereby, the startup.In the second paper, Scientific Training and Entrepreneurial Team Formation: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Colombia, I investigate if and how scientific training given to make decisions about business ideas affects team formation decisions in early-stage startups.Through statistical modeling and graphical descriptive analyses, I theorize and test these secondary effects and explore the mechanisms and reasons for such ripple effects.In this paper, I find evidence that scientific training in making decisions about ideas affects team formation decisions.Specifically, I find that scientific training on decision-making about entrepreneurial ideas leads to a higher likelihood and a greater number of team changes.This effect is fully mediated by idea pivots by entrepreneurs. My findings are based on data from an RCT conducted in Bogota, Colombia, involving 207 startups.In the third paper, Configurations of Idea-Team Co-evolution in Early-Stage Startups Trained with the Theory-and-Evidence-Based Approach, I explore descriptively how entrepreneurs trained with the theory-and-evidence-based approach impact solo entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial teams differently based on the differences in configurations of idea and team changes.Preliminary evidence of descriptive analysis, based on data collected from an RCT conducted in Colombia, suggests that, while solo entrepreneurs more often engage in change to both teams and ideas at the same time than teams of entrepreneurs, entrepreneurial teams show a higher frequency of not changing either team or idea compared to solo entrepreneurs.These initial findings suggest that solo entrepreneurs make larger, resource-intensive changes than entrepreneurial teams, with all solo entrepreneurs making at least one change, which could mean earlier stabilization of the idea and team. But more entrepreneurial teams exhibit some level of “stickiness” of ideas and teams by making no changes within the entire observational window, which could mean they may miss out on a better idea because they were unwilling to search outside the boundaries of team capabilities or the new idea may be executed inefficiently with a mismatched team.