Through the Founder’s Lens: Paths, Partners, and Ownership in Early Venture Formation

This dissertation advances an individual perspective on early venture formation by examining how founder dispositions and role identities shape entrepreneurial intention formation, co-founder selection, and equity allocation. The dissertation consists of three empirical studies, each addressing one guiding question:

Chapter 2: Who is drawn to entrepreneurship? Chapter 3: How do founders select their co-founders? Chapter 4: How do founders allocate ownership to co-founders?

Chapter 2, titled “Dark Traits, Bright Ventures? Meta-Analytical Evidence on the Effects of the Dark Triad on (Social) Entrepreneurial Intentions,” examines entrepreneurial intention formation. Drawing on social exchange theory, the chapter distinguishes commercial and social entrepreneurial intentions as two distinct entrepreneurial pathways with different anticipated exchange expectations. Using meta-analytic evidence from 48 individual samples and 24,607 participants, the chapter shows that Machiavellianism and psychopathy are positively associated with commercial entrepreneurial intentions and negatively associated with social entrepreneurial intentions, whereas narcissism is positively associated with both. These findings suggest that dark triad traits do not uniformly increase or suppress entrepreneurial intentions, but shape which entrepreneurial pathway appears attractive.

Chapter 3, titled “Co-Founder Selection from a Marriage Market Perspective: How the Dark Triad Shapes Judgments of Interpersonal Attraction, Resources, and Equity Demand,” examines co-founder selection. Drawing on marriage market theory, the chapter conceptualizes co-founder selection as an individuated judgment process in which lead founders evaluate prospective co-founders based on affective, instrumental, and distributive considerations. Using a conjoint experiment with 206 entrepreneurs and 3,296 co-founder selection decisions, the chapter finds that interpersona lattractionand resource contribution increase willingness to select a candidate, whereas higher equity demand decreases it. The chapter further shows that founders higher in dark triad traits discount interpersonal attraction and display stronger aversion to equity dilution, suggesting that founder dispositions shape the cooperative logic of co-founder selection.

Chapter 4, titled “Through the Passionate Eye: How Entrepreneurial Passion Shapes Founders’ Equity Offers to Prospective Co-Founders,” examines equity allocation. Drawing on entrepreneurial passion and role identity theory, the chapter conceptualizes equity allocation as a role-identity-contingent ownership decision. Using a metric conjoint experiment with 198 U.S. entrepreneurs and 3,168 equity-offer decisions, the chapter finds that founders offer more equity to candidates who share their venture vision and personal values and to candidates with stronger domain expertise and larger networks. These effects depend on the founder’s passion domain: passion for inventing amplifies the equity value of interpersonal similarity and domain expertise, whereas passion for founding attenuates the equity value of interpersonal similarity. These findings show that ownership allocation depends not only on candidate attributes, but also on the founder role identities through which those attributes are interpreted.