Founder teams and firm value in young public firms: An analysis of the moderating effect of founders' ownership power and team size
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Research Question/Issue Building on prior work on the relationship between founder ownership and firm value in young public firms, we test the moderating influence of the presence of cofounders, distinguishing between dyads and teams of three or more founders. Research Findings/Insights We test our hypotheses on a unique sample of 7162 observations from 959 US firms that have been public for less than 20 years and retained their founders. We show that the presence of one or more cofounders has distinct moderating effects on the relationship between main founder ownership and firm value, depending on the number and relative ownership power of the founders. Firm value benefits the most when there is ownership power symmetry in dyads of founders and ownership power asymmetry in teams of three or more founders. Theoretical/Academic Implications We make two contributions to the corporate governance literature. First, we take a more nuanced look at founders and their ownership power in young public firms and show that the presence of cofounders has an effect on firm value. Second, we show that this effect depends on the number of founders and on whether there is ownership power symmetry or asymmetry among founders. Overall, our study supports the view that founders continue to matter even after IPO. Practitioner/Policy Implications By shedding light on the effect of founders retaining ownership power on firm value after IPO, our findings may guide founders in their decisions to exit their business fully or partially and investors in their decisions whether to invest in public firms that retain their founders.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".