Early Joiners and Startup Performance

Abstract We show that early joiners—non-founder employees in the first year of a startup—play a critical role in shaping firm performance. We use administrative employer-employee matched data on US startups and utilize premature death as a natural experiment that exogenously separates talent from startups. We find that losing an early joiner has large negative effects on employment and revenues that persist for at least ten years. In contrast, losing a later joiner yields only a small and temporary decline in firm performance. Our results imply that organization capital, an important driver of startup success, is embodied in early joiners.