文档介绍：Organizational Endowments and
the Performance of University Start-ups
Scott Shane • Toby Stuart
R. H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742
Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago, 1101 East 58th Street, Chicago, Illinois 60637
******@ • toby.******@
he question of how initial resource endowments—the stocks of resources that
Tentrepreneurs contribute to their new ventures at the time of founding—aniza-
tional life chances is one of significant interest anizational ecology, evolutionary theory,
and entrepreneurship research. Using data on the life histories of all 134 firms founded
to exploit MIT-assigned inventions during the 1980–1996 period, the study analyzes how
resource endowments affect the likelihood of three critical es: that new ventures
attract venture capital financing, experience initial public offerings, and fail. Our analysis
focuses on the role of founders’ social capital as a determinant of these es. Event his-
tory analyses show that new ventures with founders having direct and indirect relationships
with venture investors are most likely to receive venture funding and are less likely to fail.
In turn, receiving venture funding is the single most important determinant of the likelihood
of IPO. We conclude that the social capital pany founders represents an important
endowment for early-anizations.
(Entrepreneurship; Social Capital; Financing)
Introduction researchers have encountered in obtaining the infor-
At inception, founders endow anizations they mation needed to explore endowment effects. The
create with certain resources. In this article, we ask: most significant obstacle has been that the study of
How do initial resource endowments affect the perfor- initial endowments cannot proceed without detailed
mance of new ventures? A number anizational information on the earliest days of anization’s
theorists have posited that in