Start-ups being the glamorous things they are achieve a lot of attention in both the popular and academic press. Rightly, much of that attention focuses on the crucial role the founders play in driving the start-up forward.
A recent paper, published in Science, focuses instead on the people that join the founding team, and the crucial role they play in the success of the venture.
The study reveals that this second wave of recruits often share the risk taking spirit of the founders but they come with some crucial differences.
For instance, they tend to focus much more on operational roles, such as R&D, rather than management.
“Sometimes you can have a single founder who handles the full range of activities for a startup, but especially in technology you need additional people to research and develop the products,” the authors say. “There are many people who are interested in working for startups but who don’t want to be founders.”
The importance of joiners
The researchers surveyed several thousand PhD candidates in STEM related fields. Roughly half of them revealed an interest in joining a start-up, with around 10 percent saying they wanted to start their own venture.
Each participant was quizzed on their personal characteristics, including their acceptance of risk, desire for managerial responsibility and so on. The results revealed some interesting distinctions between founders and joiners.
“A key insight from our research is that many of the characteristics that we often think of as unique to founders, such as a tolerance for risk and the desire to bring new ideas to life, also generalize to the broader entrepreneurial workforce, including people who want to work in startups but don’t want to be founders themselves,” the authors say.
Training to join
The authors believe that their findings are crucial as many PhD students are turning to the start-up world upon graduation. It’s important therefore that they have the right skills to make a success of their next step.
“Most university programs designed to foster entrepreneurship—such as courses, workshops and incubators—focus on training people to be a founder,” they say. “But founders make up a small share of the entrepreneurial workforce, and we do very little to train the larger share of people who will work in startups as employees rather than founders. For example, many programs focus on how to write business plans and secure funding, while less attention is paid to how to work effectively in a small startup team.”
It’s interesting to note however the strong interest in the start-up world among STEM graduates, with a large number appearing to shun the seemingly safer path offered by established companies.
It would appear to suggest that there isn’t an issue with attracting people to such roles but rather in adequately preparing them for what they face, whether that’s starting their own venture or joining an existing start-up.
“An interest in being a founder is more closely associated with individual traits and preferences that predispose them to entrepreneurship,” the authors conclude. “At the same time, individuals who lack these traits are unlikely to become interested in being a founder even when exposed to entrepreneurial influences. One implication of this is that programs that hope to stimulate entrepreneurship may do more to increase the pool of entrepreneurial workers than to make people into founders.”
